[Affiliate Marketing Niche Blog Series] Step Two: Getting In The Customers’ Heads - Part 2

June 22, 2008 by Jon
Filed under Niche Blog Series

This is the long overdue follow-up to Step Two - Part 1: Getting in the Customers’ Heads. In part 1 we discussed the process for understanding the customer, and hopefully why that’s important. Then I left you hanging with the promise that I would research the cordless drill niche and get back to you with the results. Well here they are…

Before I get into the results, I do want to take just a moment to apologize for how extremely overdue this post is. I promised you I’d get back with the research “later in the week,” when it’s actually nearly a month later. Life can get awful busy sometimes, and while I’d like to claim this blog is the most important thing in my life, it isn’t. My wife and daughter wouldn’t go for that.

So, back to the results…

Well I read through the forums and did searches for cordless drills. I did find a greater majority of males in the forums, but I really couldn’t pin anything down beyond that. However I did uncover something noteworthy. People asked a lot of questions similar to the following:

I need a new drill because I’m putting up a fence in my backyard. Which drill would work the best for me?

My last two drills burned out, and they were homeowner grade drills. I guess I need to move up to a contractor grade drill. Any suggestions?

I just need a cheap cordless drill to hang pictures and do odd-jobs from time to time around the house. Would the Black & Decker ABCD model work well for me?

Basically, people were looking for recommendations based on their unique needs and situations. So that’s something to note. When I write about a drill on the blog, it’s going to be important to list some recommended uses for that drill. Even if the uses I list don’t exactly match the customer’s needs, they can at least see examples of similar uses. This should give them a sense of comfort when deciding which drill to buy.

After discovering what I could from the forums, I had to think a bit about the niche. This is a product-based niche, so reviewing various cordless drills is going to be important. However I can’t possibly purchase, use, and review every drill I’m going to blog about. How will I know what to write about?

Well, I went back to Amazon.com and looked at some of the best-selling drills. They all tended to have dozens if not hundreds of customer reviews on each product page. I then checked out Sears.com and HomeDepot.com, and it was the same story there as well. In fact, I thought back to when I purchased my last lawn mower from Home Depot. Before I made the purchase, I checked out the mower on their web site and especially made sure to read through the customer reviews.

There’s a lot of great information shared in the customer reviews. Customers tend to be honest too. Was it worth the price? How well does it work? What do they use it for? What’s the one thing they don’t like about it?

By reading the customer reviews, it would be fairly simple to write a blog post listing the pros, cons, and recommended uses for any particular cordless drill. In fact, it would probably be a good idea to occasionally blog about a drill that has poor customer reviews, and warn your blog’s visitors not to buy it. That will lend some credibility to the blog as you’ll be highlighting both good and bad drills. (Of course on the blog posts about bad drills, you’ll recommend better alternatives that you’ve previously blogged about.)

Based on all of this, it appears I’m well on my way to understanding the customers and have already begun to develop a strategy for researching the individual cordless drills. This part of the work isn’t that hard when you’re promoting products, however it will still take time to properly research each drill and write a quality blog post. This isn’t something where I can spend 10 minutes and come up with a great blog post for each product. Nope, it’s still going to take time and effort (a.k.a. “work”).

Okay, so we’re all finished with niche research. Next stop: keyword research. Stay tuned…