Selling from Your Blog 3 – Finding the Market in Your Audience and Avoiding the Biggest Mistake Ever

Your blog’s readers are also your customers if you sell any products or services. We tend to think of an audience as one thing, and a market as another, but they are the same people at different stages in the buying process. Your market is “hiding” in your audience. To bring the market out of hiding, you have to know how to listen, and you have to know what to ask.

Listening to Your Market

Pay careful attention to what your audience is telling you in comments, emails, and in social media. If you know how to listen, you will hear them making their needs known so that you can create attractive blog content and create products & services they will be willing to buy. Turn on your internal “needs radar” to pick up the signals your audience gives you.

Look for words and phrases like:

• “I hate it when…”
• “Why doesn’t somebody…”
• “I wish…”
• “If only…”
• “What we need is…”

Ask and You Shall Receive

For best results, you need to do more than just listen passively. You need to initiate direct action by asking your audience questions to determine how to best meet their needs. This can be done several ways from formal to informal.

Methods for asking your audience directly:

• Polls and surveys
• Pointed question designed to get comments on a post
• “Ask a Question” forms on your blog (coming to next redesign of Remarkablogger)

How to Avoid Making the Biggest Mistake Ever

The biggest mistake people make is they assume their idea for a product or service will sell, but they’ve done no research to find out if this is true. Their idea is based on their own whims of what they think people want with no basis in reality. You can’t sell what nobody will buy.

By listening and asking, you will not make this mistake. Every successful seminar and information product I’ve sold or given away was a success because of listening to my audience and asking people what they needed.

You can always write blog posts about a topic to test it out. If you get a lot of comments, trackbacks, and social media buzz, then you’re on to something. You could likely pursue it profitably as a paid product or service.