[Affiliate Marketing Niche Blog Series] Step Two: Getting In The Customers’ Heads

May 26, 2008 by Jon
Filed under Niche Blog Series

Today I’m going to continue the Niche Blog Series with Step #2: Getting inside your customers’ heads. Or put another way, understanding the people in your niche.

Since I’m dealing with the cordless drills niche, the goal will be to understand the types of people who buy cordless drills. Why is this important? Well if I understand the people who buy the cordless drills, then I can do a better job giving them the information they need to make the purchase.

Of in the case of affiliate marketing, give them the information to click over to the merchant’s site with the intention of buying.

So, how do we proceed?

The first thing I’m going to do is guess about the people in my niche. Let’s just get my preconceived notions out of the way!

People who buy cordless drills are mostly male.
People who buy cordless drills own a home.
People who buy cordless drills are not looking for the absolute cheapest drill, they’re looking for the best value (price + quality + features).
Average homeowners are looking for a consumer grade cordless drill for small home improvement projects. These are the types of people mostly likely to search online for a drill.
Professional contractors, carpenters, and hardcore woodworking hobbyists, etc. are more likely to have a local shop they deal with for tools and parts, and are therefore less likely to shop online. If they do, they’ll be looking for professional grade drills.

Okay, so that’s my quick list of preconceived notions about cordless drill customers. So now let’s find out if I’m right.

A great way to find out about a niche is to do a Google search for your main keyword phrase along with the term “forum.” In this case, I would do a Google search for “cordless drill forum.”

That search brings up several forums where cordless drills are discussed. Here are some of the top results:

There were more results, but those give us a great start. What I need to do is take a few hours visiting each forum. I’d search the forum for terms like “cordless drill” or just “drill” and then read what people have to say. If I have specific questions about what people think based on what I read, it would be a great idea to join the forums and actually post my questions! There’s certainly nothing wrong or underhanded about that either. If I have cordless drill questions, then that’s what the forums are for.

The second way to gain valuable insight into a product-based niche is to read the customer reviews for the best selling products at Amazon. If you read between the lines, you can start to pickup on the patterns of what features people like, and what flaws people find in the products. For example, maybe a lot of the reviews mention that a drill is great because it’s lightweight, or bad because it’s too heavy. Maybe you’ll see people talk a lot about batter life, etc.

I’m actually not going to get this step done at this time. Rather I’m explaining the step to you, and then I’m going to take a few days to go out and actually do the research I mentioned, taking careful notes along the way. Then I’ll post the second half of step #2 where I list out my findings.

I do want to say one thing here… please don’t skip this step! I know a lot of affiliates (myself included) that often fail to properly research the niche, and don’t succeed as a result. Remember that keywords don’t equal niche research.

What good is it if I have a good keyword and put up a page about XYZ cordless drill, listing out all the specs, etc., if I don’t tell the people what they really want to know? Let’s say somebody is looking for a cordless drill to hang pictures in their house. They could probably care less about torque or anything too technical. They probably want to know if the drill is light, has good battery life, and is durable.

I’m guessing of course because I haven’t actually done the research yet, but you hopefully get my point.

If you want to dominate in a niche, you need to tailor your content to the people in that niche. That’s what this step is all about.

Okay, well I’m off to do the research. Stay tuned later in the week for the results!