Finding The Need Of Your Audience

In every business it is about finding a need within your audience and filling that need with a product. In this case your product is most likely going to be the information you provide on your site.

How Do You Do So?

Simply, by some research. There are a couple of sites you could take into account when researching your market and audience:

• Google
• Google Trends
• Twitter HashTags
• Quora
• eHow & Yahoo Answers
• Competing Sites
• Forums, Facebook Groups & Reddit
• eCommerce Sites
• Surveys
• Keyword Tools

Google
Google is pretty straight forward, you search what your niche is about or related to and you will find many articles written by others. Another thing you can do is start creating question search terms about your niche. This will then find all the questions that have been searched related to what you wrote. For example you can search on the niche itself or questions regarding What, Where, How, Why etc.

Google Trends
I would say this tool is under-utilized. Google Trends gives you a great view of what is going on in the world, what is popular and what is not. Search your niche their or any related terms to your niche and see what comes up.

The great thing of this tool, is that you can specify your demographics. You can even change the country you want to show results for.

Twitter HashTags
On Twitter is something similar going on as on Google Trends, they got HashTags. HashTags are keywords that start with a '#'. They are used my the twitter (and facebook, g+ etc) community amass and shows you a bit what is playing and being popular at the time. You can sometimes find a good keyword that way and play in on the new need.

Quora
Quora is an excellent way to find things to write about. Quora shows what people have been asking - it is a questions & answers website. Within your niche (a topic on Quora), you will find many questions that you will be able to answer within your content. And since the questions have been asked by your audience, it is a very accurate source of what your audience is asking for. The second good thing of Quora is that you can use the same place to add your answer to their questions and then promote your recent post about the same subject as an addition to your reply on the question..

eHow & Yahoo
eHow and Yahoo Answers are two related systems filled withwill questions and answers, similar to Quora. You can use the opportunity to figure out what your audience wants and fill the need with writing content to answer this need. Similarly to Quora, you can also straight away use the opportunity to promote your newly created content within your answer on the same questions.

Competing Sites
Alternatively you can google for competing sites (for as far as you don't already know the common competing websites). You can then look around on the competing websites and look at what sort of menu structure they got and what sort of articles they write about. Which questions are they answering? Base your content on what you discover.

Don't forget to check out their comments section for any questions asked by their audience.

Forums, Facebook Groups & Reddit
Check out the forums and facebook groups that are available for your niche. Look at what people ask the most and answer these questions in your articles.

eCommerce Sites
A lot of products that have to do with your niche are available through sites such as eBay and Amazon. Not only will you learn what products you could write a review upon, but you will also be able to see all the questions asked and answered and the reviews of products written by customers. You can use this information to play in on their 'needs'.

Surveys
Apart from holding your own surveys on your audience base or social media following, you can also look for surveys performed by others in your niche. See what they are answering and whether you can use it.

If you already got a well-running site or a social account with a lot of followers, you could run a survey and ask your audience directly what they want to see on websites.

NOTE: It is however very important that you don't copy other people's answers or your opponent websites, but rather write your very own articles from scratch.

Next up: How To Write For Your Audience.