Hungry Buyers Are The Best Buyers

I thought I would write this post to enlighten you that you need to go to where your market is actually hanging out!!! In this post I will be using the gaming niche as an example because it is something I am familiar with. Ok, every newbie under the sun will go out and do keyword research on a niche and assume that it is a viable niche if the numbers look right. That is fine, keyword research and the search engines can be a part of your business but it doesn't stop there, you need to go further!!

If you want to actually make some serious dollar you need to find the people who are willing to spend money. This is why I picked the games market, serious gamers are always looking to get one up on their competition. They will spend massive amounts of hours on a game to get better at it! Any advantage you can give them, be it hardware, software, tactics, videos etc... They crave it! Actually, they need it!! These are hungry people who can't get enough. If they are a top level gamers they will enter competitions where the prize for winning is in its millions!! Millions for a game, I think it's insane but hey, the market is there. There is one important question which you need to ask yourself though, how committed are you? If you want to make traction in any market then you have to know your stuff. You can't write a review and be done with it, those get weeded out all day long and laughed at by people who know the market. You have to immerse yourself in the market, if some major news happens, you need to be all over it! By being all over it you will find out what they want and where they are!

So lets take it back to the game market, other then Google where do most of the people hang out? There are three places, there is video streaming while they play their games, sites like twitch.tv etc... There are forums and we will get to these in a minuet because there are different variations of forums! And there are chat rooms like raid call and the likes.

What does all gamers want? This will be the same in most markets to... They want attention, I was talking to a friend the other day and he was telling me how his video stream only gets like 15 views max. I found it interesting because he was asking me how he could improve this, it was astonishing the lengths he would go to increase his streaming views, it was almost devout like. It is people like this that you want to target, the people who will do anything to gain traction, to better their notoriety, you just need to show them how they can. All he wanted was more people to watch him play his game (He is fairly good) to try get recognised as a serious gamer. This little conversation with him re-enforced the importance of going to where the market hangs out because it is filled with hungry, enthusiastic people.

Now forums, we all know forums because we are here but there are a few different types of forums... There are big forums, places like this for example (official game forums in my market), there are forums which focus on one aspect of the game, and then there is forums which belong to the best teams in the world. Most people on the big forum would of never heard of the team forums but may of heard of the niched ones. Most of the niched ones would of heard about the team forums but only a few would of visited them and finally there are the people who visit the teams forums which know about everything...

You could pretty much class these forums into three different categories, broad, niched, hungry... You tell me which forums you are going to want to target and the visitors you are going to want to attract? Here is the dilemma! Before you know where the real people are hanging out, you need to find them. Once you have found them, you need to be knowledgeful enough to be able to provide them with the things they need. If you can find them, offer them the things they need then you will be raking in some serious profit because they will literally eat it out of your hands! How do you get them eating out of the palms of your hands? Build a relationship. Before you go out flogging the latests and greatest technique on how to do something (Or product for that matter) you need to prove to them that you know what your on about. That you are willing to provide them with something which is going to be helpful, it's all about the pre-sell! Don't jump straight in, treat them, show them that your not there to waste their time and your actually there to make their skills better!

Then there are the niche forums, these are also fairly targeted but slightly broader then the people who play games all day long. These are the semi casual players, ok at the game, want to get better but don't really care to much. These guys are a lot harder to sell to because they are not putting the time and effort into learning something. This doesn't mean that they can't be sold to but they require a different approach. You need to show them how they can maximise their game time which allows them to get better at the quickest rate. If you want to put this in the example of another market, lets say, weight loss... This would be the forum where people go to the gym 2-3 times a week, loose a lb a week but are interested in how to get maximum efficiency in the gym for the time they spend there.

Finally there are the masses, the forum filled with all, this is even harder to sell to because there are so many casual people there not really interested on the subject. These forums will give you eye balls but will be less targeted then your other forums.

Finally, there are chat rooms, these are different from forums and generally the marketing techniques used here isn't to exactly drive sales but to make people aware of what you do (In a non-spammy way). It is to move them from the chat room to your site by contributing to the discussion and if the time arises where your site can be plugged in a good way, then put it in there, just don't go in there spamming your site on every message you send! Be subtle about it. Why are these chat rooms great? It is like a news feed ticking over 24/7 filled with information about the game, links to videos etc which could be used in your marketing efforts. They are effectively doing all the work for you because they actually care about the game! (These chat rooms are fairly niche specific but other niches do have them).

Now I have told you about where the audience hangs out, how do you get them to listen to you? This is where building your reputation up comes into play. If you contribute in a helpful way to the communities it is only a matter of time before you are looked upon as an authority. Once you start building a reputation, a good following then you can start approaching the experts (In my case, professional gamers) to do interviews, podcasts and the likes... It's all about positioning yourself correctly and building a reputation which games come to know and trust.

Here I have given you an example of the type of places where a gamer would hang out, this is not true for all niches. Other niches will have different places where they hang out like Facebook groups for an example, or yahoo groups, it is down to you to find them.

So if you are to take anything from this fairly long post, take this... Find the people which are hungry for information. Don't just go anywhere for your traffic because it is a waste of time, having a 1000 people who are looking for information, who want to be the best and will most likely be more profitable then 10000 maybes.

Don't be lazy, there is no time for being lazy people, pull your finger out your ass and make sure you put the time and dedication in to supplying your readers with what they want! Time to step up ☺ or don't and waste you time.