Get to Know Your Niche: How to Research and Connect with Them
In order to talk to your niche, you first need to get to know the people in your market. The more you can know their hearts and souls, their problems and desires, the more you’ll be able to connect with them.
How do you connect with a new market quickly? These are three effective methods that’ll get you up to speed on just about any market, fast.
=> Search Yahoo! Answers
Search Yahoo! Answers for questions related to your market. For example, if you’re teaching online marketing, you might search for phrases like:
“Make money online”
“Internet income”
“Online money”
“Make money from home”
And so on and so forth.
Read through dozens of questions to figure out what people commonly ask. What are questions the crop up again and again?
What kind of answers are people getting? Are there questions that are consistently going unanswered? What are some of the frustrations of people asking questions?
=> Look for the Most Replied Posts in Forums
Go to the internet forums that are most popular in your niche. Scroll to the bottom of the forums and set the forum to search by “Most Replied” threads. Set the date range to as far back as it can go.
This will give you a list of topics that people have found most interesting to discuss. These threads will often give you incredible insights into how people view current topics, what was hot in the past and what’s hot now, what kind of creative solutions others have come up with and so on.
Rinse and repeat for each category in the forum, as well as for different forums to really get a feel for where your market’s at.
=> Subscribe to Popular RSS Feeds
Find some of the most popular blogs in your industry and subscribe to their RSS feeds.
Being subscribed to these RSS feeds will allow you to stay on top of new discoveries, new techniques, new questions and other relevant news.
It’ll also give you a wide range of different perspectives, assuming you’ve subscribed to a range of different RSS feeds.
How do you find these RSS feeds?
First start by looking on the forums for blogs that are often mentioned. On those blogs, look at their blogrolls to see what other blogs they’re recommending.
You can also do a search on Technorati, the most popular blog directory online, for your market’s topic. You’ll be able to sort by popularity to find the influential blogs.
If you combine these three techniques, you’ll gain a deep understanding of your market very quickly. You’ll know what drives the people and what problems they face overall, as well as what the important topics are in the market right now.
