#117 - How to Find Your Audience of Readers

As an author, how do you find your audience? Hi, my name is Shelli Hitz and I help published authors reach more readers with your message by using our five step marketing plan so you can consistently market your books without feeling pushy or salesy. In each of my Ask Shelley episodes, I promise to share at least one thing that will help you write, self publish and market your books so that the message of your books can impact lives. So the question that I received is how do you find your audience? And this is a great question. I mean, it's a question that all business own and authors and nonprofits and anyone who is trying to reach somebody, even a church, right? Like, how do you find your audience? How do you connect with them? And how do you do it in a way that's God honoring that feels good to you, that doesn't feel sleazy or slimy. And the first thing I want to say is that relationships is the foundation of marketing. So if you feel like you have that used car salesman in your mind and that's the way you have to be, buy my book. Buy my book. Erase that from your mind and know that this can feel really good to you. You're helping people, Selling is helping. And I had a coach tell me that years ago. And I actually even have a sticky note here on my desk. I can grab it. Selling is helping because I need that reminder all the time too, because sometimes you just don't feel like doing it right. It's like, ugh. And yet a lot of times it's also a spiritual battle. The enemy doesn't want us to connect with our audience and, and be able to impact those lives as well. So when you're finding your audience, the first thing is to know, like, who is your audience? Who is it that you're trying to reach and have a brainstorming session of who that is. Maybe there are people that you've already talked to in real life that you can think about those people that you've helped or, you know, certain readers have read your novel and you know, like the feedback that you're getting from different types of readers. And obviously anyone can buy and read your book, but if you market to everyone, you're actually going to market to no one. Early on in my career with online business, I had a coach that told me, you know, Shelly, you're like a magnet and there's going to be some people that are just attracted to what you're doing, and then there's other people that are going to be repelled. And sometimes we don't want to narrow our audience because we just, we want to attract everyone, right? But when we do that, actually not speaking to anyone and it's just, it doesn't do anything. Whereas we want to be that magnet where we're attracting really strongly a certain audience and repelling another one. But you know, where does your audience hang out? Online. So once you've identified, like who is your audience? You know, is it young Christian mothers? You know, is it retirees that are looking for additional income? Is it, you know, someone who is a young adult that wants to read a novel? I mean, you have to just think through like who is your target audience? And that's something that we can brainstorm with you. In Christian Book Academy every month I have a next steps coaching call where you can get some one on one help from me. Also we have voxer office hours currently and you can ask me one specific question every month and I'll answer that privately. But we can, on the Next steps coaching call, we can brainstorm and we can talk through this. And on the last call I recently had, I was able to really help one of our longtime members. She'd been with us since the beginning, eight and a half years ago, but to really have a breakthrough with her audience and who she's writing for and her next book series and all of the things. And so if you're stuck on this, get some help. We would love to help you. You can join us@christianbookacademy.com so who is your audience? Where do they hang out online? So are there certain Facebook groups? Are they spending more time on Pinterest? If your specific niche is very visually oriented, graphic oriented, it could be that are they watching YouTube videos? Like where are they hanging out online? And then what kind of groups or in person events.

Contains your audience? So there could be like a different, like, you know, women's ministries at churches. A lot of times we'll purchase my book Broken crayons still color for their book studies or Bible studies. And so, you know, where are there already established groups? You know, maybe there's gardening clubs that you can connect with. It doesn't mean you have to go and speak to them in front of them or anything, but you're connecting with them, you're maybe finding ways to, to, to help them or maybe sending a review copy of your book to them. Maybe it's prison ministry, maybe it's grief groups, maybe it's a, you know, divorce ministries and churches. Maybe it's, you know, grandparents that, you know, want to help their children, their grandchildren. I mean, it could go on and on. And so first, know who your audience is. Second, where do they hang out online? And then third, third, are there some already established groups, especially if they're meeting in person, Are there some established groups that has your audience or that would be interested. And this is where it may take some creativity to really think through this. And we encourage you to have business meetings with God so that you can really ask God and partner with him and say, what is this? But we can also help you brainstorm some of these things in Christian Book Academy. I have almost 20 years of online experience. Experience. And I'm not going to always have the exact right answer for you. But sometimes just brainstorming and speaking it out loud and just going back and forth a little bit can bring so much clarity. But ultimately, whatever kind of business you have, there's three main ways right now to attract a new audience. So for you, it'd be new readers. And one of those is ads. Paid ads are ways to get in front of your audience. For authors, I recommend Amazon ads. It takes time and it does take. You know, it's a learning curve. But right now, currently we're making most of our book royalties through Amazon ads. You know, these ads are going up on Amazon to readers, people who are searching for what you have. And so they can be very powerful. They don't always work, you know, I mean, it takes trial and error. So it's not a get rich quick scheme, but it definitely can work. And then SEO, search engine optimization. So whether or not you have a blog that you're optimizing for keyword phrases people are searching for. So if I go onto Google and I enter something like a recipe for a taco salad, taco salad recipe, and all these sites come up, the ones that are optimized for that phrase are going to come near the top. And there's a lot of things that go into SEO and we teach SEO in Christian Book Academy as well, if you want to get some training on that. But you can begin to attract people who are already looking for you. They're searching for what you have, they need what you're talking about. And if you take some time to optimize your content on your blog, you can begin attracting those people. It's a long term strategy. Again, it's not a quick like, okay, I'm just going to do this and this is going to work overnight, but it does work. And that was the very first way that I built our business. And some of you have found me years and years ago, 10 years ago, through my websites and those articles that were optimized for SEO. SEO can also be through Pinterest. People searching, they use Pinterest as a search engine. People can use YouTube as a search engine, so they're searching for things on YouTube. Some people even use Amazon as a search engine. So you might consider publishing a short Kindle ebook that's optimized for phrases that people are searching for. And then if they find your book on Amazon, if It's like a 99 cent Kindle ebook, it's a impulse buy and they buy it and then they're like, at the end you talk about your other books and how to connect with you and you know you can grow your platform and your email list through that. So there's ways to even use SEO on Amazon so you can use ads, you can use SEO and then collaborations. So this collaborations can be one of the fastest ways without having to spend a ton of money to get in front of new audiences. You can do this through blogging, like guest blogging, through podcast interviews, through speaking on summits, or participating in bundles or doing a multi author book.

Participating in an anthology like that. I mean there's so many ways that you can do this, but I hope that this has given you some ideas. We have a lot of training in Christian Book Academy on how to do these different collaborations. We have training on SEO, we have training on ads, Amazon ads, but also other paid ads. And so those are some things that might be helpful for you as resources down the road. But I hope that this has been helpful. How do you find your audience one person at a time? We all start with one person in our audience. I highly, highly suggest, suggest that you build your platform on your own on your, on your, on, on your own website like, or your own email list. If you're only building your platform on free sites, on social media, things like that, that's rented.

Areas and they can shut you down at any time. So you know, definitely consider that as well. You're just building your audience one person at a time. I'm cheering you on. I know it's not easy. There's no easy button. I wish there was. I could have clickbait on this and say the easy way to find your audience in three steps.

But it's not easy. I mean there is work involved, there is time involved. Typically unless you do collaborations or unless you have money for ads and you really get those going right away. But it's possible. I mean we have sold a lot of books over the years, doing a lot of different things. And so we want to help you. Come join us in ChristianBookAcademy.com and reach more readers with your book.