Target market / niche market confusion

You target the skill level and mindset of a "Specific Person" in a specific niche - always starts by researching and finding ...

• Their untapped needs. (that other products and services ignore).

• Their under-served needs. ( that other products or services fall short of meeting).

• Their unresolved problems. (that no one has found a solution to).

• What worries them most, makes them boil (or even keeps them up at night).

• Routine problems they'd like to reduce, eliminate or avoid.

... and finding or creating ways to solve or resolve them with information, products or services they're willing to pay you for ... or sign-up to your list for.

Don't make it anymore complicated than that. Unfortunately, most people do - or they underestimate or ignore them

Sure - lots of ways:

1. Get on Twitter, use twitter search to find discussions going on around your niche - start specific and move out generally until you work your way into conversations and then you can start sharing your survey/opt-in with the community once you get engaged

2. Facebook - have you searched FB groups? Same thing with Amazon discussion groups.

3. Create some YouTube videos around some of the top questions this market has - share some work, etc... and begin building followers that way.

4. I would cross-post all of this content to your own blog so you can begin to build your own following and convert from your blog

5. Paid ads - FB allows you to refine your niche target market - at least they should have photography if not nature photography.

6. Look for authority blogs and discussion forums around your topic (simple google search) and then a) join and contribute b) email owners about an offer where you can share profits from certain offers

Jeff

Hi flyingSquirrel

Oh dear - this is a long post - so sorry

I love getting very targeted traffic to niche markets. It's actually much easier that everyone thinks.

All you need to do is forget all about what you want from it, and think about what your target wants. Get in to their heads. But you can't do that if you are constantly thinking about how to make money and monetarise everything. People will know very quickly if you are selling to them.

So. What would I do if I was wanting to create a niche following? I would think about what they are looking for and where they hang out. So the first place I would look is at forums. I have a couple of clever techniques I was shown, and I use these methods to find active and current forums in any niche I want within about 5 minutes, I can find more targeted traffic than I can handle.

Where else would you find people people in to nature photography? I can think of about a few while I am writing this. That market is huge.

But before I even thought about traffic, I would want to define very clearly what I am going to do with this traffic when I have it. I could find you targeted traffic today, but what are you going to do with it when it arrives?

If you don't have anything ready to offer them they will leave and never come back. So get your sales funnel in place first before you send any traffic anywhere.

Having a website will not make money. Getting traffic will not earn you a bean. Only selling stuff will make money.

You will want a subscription product in the funnel somewhere which will provide you with your Residual Income - month after month with very little further effort on your part. You will also want a high ticket product at the pinnacle of your funnel which costs in excess of $1000.

In your niche this could be a three-day field course in Nature Photography, staying in a beautiful place and giving them one-to-one tuition.

So many marketers seem to get everything the wrong way round right from the start. It's like opening a shop in the high street before you have any stock on the shelves. You will go bankrupt fast, and your reputation will be over before you start.

If you are internet marketing, you have to have a high value free front end product to get people interested. Then you have to understand sales funnel dynamics, and how to create a sequence of great offers that increase in value, and are congruent - ie they build on each other. You need to engage with your target audience and TALK to them. Build Know Like and Trust relationships with them, and become THE authority in your field.

The best way to do this is to blog and share your posts regularly and give great content in your posts. Ask questions as your list grows to further engage the, "What would you think about this or that idea, if I created a video about wide-angle lenses or Light levels or whatever. You can do reviews of the latest gear, and get a great reputation with camera manufacturers etc... They will end up GIVING you equipment to review when you have authority...

I'm sorry to sound so patronising in this post, but it's just something I have learned the hard way, and I am keen to stop others from going down the same route if I can

PM me if you want to talk about this more? I won't be pitching you anything if you do so don't panic. I just need more info before I can give you any helpful suggestions.

Take care and good luck
Richard

First, I apologize for this huge message but I feel it is necessary to direct this thread in the right direction. Hopefully a few people will still read this and help...

I appreciate all of your responses and the time you took to reply.

I am one who typically types waaay too much and then nobody wants to read my initial post, so I was trying out the "go simple" method of posting a question. Now I wish I'd given more info from the start.

Let me summarize what I know, and what I don't know.

Do Know: Basically the tactics and information that you've all stated (but it is certainly good to get the reminders and unique viewpoints on it, so what you've typed HAS been helpful and worthwhile). I listen to podcasts and follow some great internet marketers, so I have the basic idea which I am working on, to create a website, a lead magnet, I will get some free content up, run surveys, find people's pains etc etc. I even know what type of product line I want to offer. And I'm lucky because I am a nature photographer, so I know what the difficulties are when learning this field.

Don't know:

Hopefully I can clarify this...when I said a "skill level" and "mindset" I was actually referring to wanting to target nature photographers that have a "skill level" of "intermediate" and a "mindset" of being "very serious and committed" to what they are doing. I don't want beginners (I have no passion or interest in teaching the basics, despite probably more customers there), nor do I want masters (not much to teach them). The specific reason for targeting the "serious and committed" mindset is because the type of images that I create, and the way in which I create them, are different from how most people do it. I have a particular mindset, goal, and approach that I have when I create images, and I want to utilize that as my USP, my brand, identity, etc. It's who I am. So I need to find photographers that would actually benefit from my teachings because they are serious enough to follow through with everything, and willing to spend the money on the proper equipment to do it. Also, my pricing will be premium (in comparison to the rest of the market).

So I guess what I need to know is how to actually find those specific people with that intermediate skill level and that serious mindset. I don't understand how it would be possible to really find those people easily...sure, I can find tons and tons of people interested in nature photography, I know where they are, but only about 0.5% will be valid customers for me.

This is really difficult to explain, but hopefully I've clarified it to some extent. I think my only option is to just get as big of an email list as I can, survey them, and keep trying different targeted ads on different sites, and see what those folks say in the survey so I can gauge which ads on which sites are driving the most relevant audience to me. I would then hope that over time the ideal audience will naturally emerge.

Probably a lot of people will think I'm insane for looking for such a tiny subset of this niche market and having such "stringent" specifications for potential customers...but other people have pulled off things like this before, so I know it's possible somehow. And I have to, because it's who I am...I have to teach people that want to learn my ways, otherwise I have nothing to offer.

Clarity is always a GOOD thing...the more the better :-)

Keep in mind that, in the end, you target your market based on a problem, transformation, desire that appeals to that group.

So, by making sure you choose the TOP desire for a solution or information toward advanced nature photographers - you will attract them even if they are only .5% within a larger pool.

Couple of directions you can go...

1. Find other sites, blogs, social networkers (users on Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest, FB) who are obviously targeting the same audience you do and leverage their market penetration to deliver your content and offer to the market (likely offering them a cut of the profit)

2. You can begin posting relevant content to FB, Instagram, Pintrest and test, over a period of a few weeks, the response you get to that content - this will take being proactive in reaching out to other FB groups, pages, etc... in order to draw people to you

3. You can then, based on what you see happening with organic content, run a few paid Like campaigns designed to target photographers with your key messages to see which combination of message and landing page works best for you in getting the more advanced photographers you want.

I would find as many photography sites you can and simply look to see if they have surveys or polls on their website.

Maybe you can get your answers just by looking at their responses?