Ideas for finding my target audience

I had a weight gain program that I sold YEARS ago... so things might have changed a bit since then, in regards to traffic.

I used Adwords to get the bulk of my traffic, by far. However, this was back in 2006 or so, long before the repeated "slaps" that took a lot of people off adwords.

Honestly, Adwords is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room, if there's any way you can find out how to get on there, I would because it's a game changer.

I used to use every single source of traffic... because i was pulling in a ton of money each day where I could afford to test.

I tried direct mail, ads in magazines like Men's Health, Muscle and Fitness, and others... I used every PPC search engine... and yet Google Adwords blew all of them away.

Again, I know a lot has changed, but if you can, try to work with them and see how you can get on there, it can make a huge difference in terms of traffic and profits.

Also, I did very well with article marketing... putting out a new article or so every few days, and then using something like Submit Your Article to automate sending it to the article directories. You probably won't get much in terms of traffic from the actual articles, but the links will help with SEO.

But one thing I used to do, and it worked well for me, was to Google the keywords that I thought my prospects would use to find me.

I'd check out the top 10 sites that came up and find the most trafficked ones by using Alexa or other traffic tools.

Then, I'd send them a personal email asking them if I could buy some ad space on their site, like a banner at the top. Instead of using a site like
BuySellAds.com, I just found the sites myself and sent them an email asking if I could buy some ad space.

Sure, out of 10 emails I'd only get 5 responses, but out of those 5... at least 2 to 3 would turn into long term partnerships.

So, those were 3 of the things I used to do, with pretty good luck, when I sold my "7 things you must do to gain weight" program years ago!

Is your weight gain program suitable to less obvious but easy to target niches?

Example there are a ton of medical conditions that cause weight loss and those groups of people are anxious to try to gain weight. Best part is that they are not been inundated with weight gain solutions like body builders yet are very emotionally invested in wanting to maintain a healthy weight.