The Power of Getting Crystal Clear on WHO Your Ideal Reader Is and Tips on Finding Your Audience Online

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to day two of the challenge. Today I'm going to talk about the power of getting crystal clear on who your target audience is, your target reader, and tips, but also a couple tools that you can use to find your audience online. Hi, my name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the best selling author of over 40 books. The list keeps growing. Yay. I am the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. One of the best ways you can reach more people with your message is through an online platform. So, so excited for today's training. I'm going to dive deep into finding your target audience. I spent hours last night updating and revising. I have tons of notes that I'm going to be sharing with you and practical tips as well as tools that you can use immediately to get more clear on your target audience.

This is key. One of the missing ingredients that I see with many authors I work with, one on one or in my academy, author audience Academy, is they're just not clear on who their audience is. They know they have a valuable message. They know they have an impactful message. They know that they want to reach more people and impact more lives with the message that God has given them, with the expertise that they have, with the knowledge and experience they have. But when I ask them, like, well, who is your target audience?

I kind of get the deer in the headlights look. What's interesting? Because when I ask authors, many times, they're just kind of like, I'm not really sure now. When I published my very first book, it was very clear who my target audience was. It was for Christian teen girls. You can't get much clearer than that, right? It was very clear. But when I'm publishing books and products for authors, it wasn't as clear. It's taken me years. I first started my website and started coaching authors in 2010, and it wasn't until the beginning, like January of 2015, that I really got clear. So if you're not really clear right now, no worries. Take a deep breath.

And repeat after me. It's a process, right? Building an author platform. You can do tons of things to get really some instant results, some instant feedback, but it really is a lifelong process. It's going to be ongoing and it will continue to grow and evolve as you go but when you're thinking about your target audience, I want you to think about it being wide enough that there's demand for what you're offering. So it's wide enough that it's not such a teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny little niche, that there's not really any demand for people to buy your books and your products. And yet I want you to think of it as being as narrow as you can get. So you want there to still be a demand for what you have because otherwise you won't sell books. Right? But I want you to think narrow. I want you to think, how can I narrow this down? And I just want you to give yourself permission.

To realize you don't have to do everything. Right now, this is a five day challenge, but I just had someone tell me in my Author Audience Academy private group, she's like, I joined your five day challenge. And you know, she's jumping into this too, but she's like, I'm not going to get it done in five days. And the goal is not to have your entire author platform perfected in five days. The idea is to get you on the right path. Does that make sense? Like, to get you in the right direction. So I want you to think, when you're thinking about your target audience, I want you to think of it like a magnet. Somebody gave me, it was Jocelyn Sams from Fliplifestyle.com last year. She gave me this advice, and it was some of the best advice that I was given. She said, shelly, when you have your brand and when you have your target audience, it should be like a magnet, where one part of you is just attracting your target audience and they're just like, ooh, I resonate with her. Ooh, I really need what she has. Or, oh, I like that. And then there's going to be another part that are going to be repelled, because that's what a magnet does, right? One side attracts and the other side.

When you're thinking about your target audience, I want you to think about it in those terms. You should have it so clearly defined and your brand and your target audience that you're just attracting your tribe. Last year when I heard that, that's when I started to really change my focus into helping Christian nonfiction authors. Now, you don't have to be a Christian to be listening to my trainings and to be in my program, but I pray before my webinars. I share scriptures on my podcast. And my target audience is like, I love that. Some people are like, I've never been on a webinar where someone has prayed and that just really blessed me. And so there are things that you can do and ways that you can define your target audience, but also define your brand that can just draw people so strongly to you. They know they want to learn more from you. They want to buy more books from you. That's a good thing, right? They want to be a lifer or a lifelong fan. If you're a Christ follower, I encourage you to ask God for wisdom. James 1:5 says, if we ask him, he will give us wisdom. There is a different path, a different process for every one of us. Not everyone is called to do what I do and to niche down the way I niched down. That's who God has called me to do. You need to figure out what's best for you, what's best for your target audience, what's best for your brand. Don't try to be like me. Don't try to be like someone else. Don't try to be like another author in your niche. Be like you and let that shine. One other little tip I want to give you before I dive into the case study is your customers are going to buy aspirin faster than then they will buy vitamins. This is just basic marketing, basic sales. And I'm sure you've heard this before. What pain point are you solving? So if I have extreme back pain, I'm going to go to the store and look for things to solve that problem. I need to get out of that back pain so I can walk, so I can just do my job and get out and be active. And yet, many times we know that certain vitamins or certain things will help us with our health. We keep putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. So I want to ask you, are you giving your target audience vitamins or are you giving them aspirin? That's going to solve a pain point that they desperately need you to help them solve. My target audience often comes to me and they're like, Shelley, I need to sell more books or I need to get my book published. I need to finish writing that first draft. So there's our immediate page. Pain points for that author audience. What is the pain point that you're solving? You may want to set a timer for five minutes and just brainstorm and dig deeper than what you're doing. You're inspiring them, you're motivating them. You're helping them grow in their relationship with Christ. You are teaching them a new skill. You're helping them to save Time, save money. Anything that saves time, saves money or gives them health. That's a big pain point. Then, when you think about your target audience, I want you to think about who do you want to serve? Who is your ideal customer that you want to serve? You want to help, you want to teach, you want to train, you want to have buying your books again and again. If you could just pick, if that was possible, who would you choose? Because when I started thinking about that last year, I was realizing my best customers, my most loyal customers, were my Christian authors. And even if they don't write Christian books, they are Christian, they are Christ followers. And I was like, those are the people I really long to serve. And I really want to help get the gospel to more people and help get these books out there. But who are you passionate about serving? That will help you too to narrow your target audience, what are you most passionate about? And where do you have expertise or experience that's more topic narrowing your topic. But I just want you to think about a few things. I have some very practical tips and this is probably going to go longer than my broadcasts normally go because I was preparing last night and I have all these notes for you guys. I probably won't get to everything, but I want to give you as much value as I can in this session because once you become clear on who your target audience is, it's going to make your marketing so much easier. You're going to know how to write your emails to just connect with your target audience. You're going to know how to write posts on Facebook or tweets. You're going to know how to write a book description that just draws that ideal customer in. And it's just going to become so much easier. A case study. Ron came to me as a one on one client and we worked together.

On Skype. That's how I do it. We were on Skype and he's like, Shelly, I asked him, I said, what is it that I can help you with? He said, I want to start a podcast. I said, awesome. I know a lot about podcasts. I have a lot of experience with that. I've had two podcasts now. Who is your target audience? Right away we got into this question, who is your target audience? He was like, well, I write self help books and my target audience is pretty much everyone. I get that quite a bit. I said, well, if you could narrow it down, how would you narrow it down? He said, well, maybe people who are nominal fringe Christians, they have some faith, but they're not really active churchgoers. He kind of was talking about writing it for veterans. Just really confused on who was his target audience. This is a big mistake. I see a lot of authors making. They say, okay, I'm going to do a podcast, or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. And yet they really have no idea who they're targeting in those messages. If he would just go out and launch a podcast, it could be great material, great thing, but if he's not marketing it to a specific niche, to a specific target audience, it will just get lost in all the other podcasts. Does that make sense? You have to know what your purpose is in doing that marketing, or else it's just going to be.

Not completely, but it could be a waste of your time. We were talking about that, then we just kept kind of getting deeper and deeper. And I said, okay, so what else? He said, well, direct salespeople that would relate to the self help topic. And we kind of kept digging into this. Then I was like, okay, now tell me what I mentioned to you just recently. I said, who is the person you want to serve? Who are you passionate about serving? Is it a certain age? Is it a certain gender? Let's define this a little bit more. And all of a sudden it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The light bulb came on and within 45 minutes, we had narrowed down his niche. It's something he had struggled with for months. He literally was silent for a while. He was like, oh, my goodness, that's.

Was interesting. I had to dig it out of him. But what I found out is he has this website for seniors who want to still have purpose in their life past retirement, and they still want to have fun, they still want to learn, they still want to have adventure. He has his website, he has this passion. He is a senior himself in his 70s. And I was like, yes, that is your target audience.

See what happens if he has that target audience? Then I can say, okay, are seniors listening to podcasts? Because if they're not listening to podcasts, don't waste your time doing a podcast. Where are they hanging out? What are they doing online? Because if he was going to market to millennials, his podcast would be completely different than if he's marketing to seniors. Right.

It's really important to kind of narrow down and to really decide. Like I said, make it big enough that there's a demand for it, but make it narrow enough that you're able to really speak their language. Now he'll be able to completely speak their language. And his books will fit a multitude of audiences. And sure, there will be other people that will buy his books that won't be in that audience, but if he really serves that audience, those seniors that want purpose, that want to continue to learn, that are just not wanting to sit at home and vegetate, he can speak, speak their language. He can target them on Facebook ads if he wants. He can join certain Facebook groups. He can target certain places to get interviewed online. See what I mean? Like, he can find those tribes of where that group of people and he can speak their exact language. So here are some demographics I want you to brainstorm when it comes to your target audience. I want you to think about what your ideal target audience, your ideal customer, what he or she would look like. Now, I'm not saying you're eliminating the rest of the world, but I'm saying that this is the person that you're going to speak to in your marketing copy. This is the person you're going to speak to in your book description. This is the person you're going to speak to in your emails. Other people will join your tribe, but I want you to really be thinking about one specific type of person. And so many people are afraid to narrow their niche. But it really makes a huge, huge difference when you can, especially when you're marketing and you're building your platform, because then you can attract that type of person right to you. These are the demographics. What is your ideal customer's age? Now, I ask this of a lot of people and they're just like, I don't know. I understand some of these questions. You may have to think about or you may have to do a little bit more research. I'm going to give you two tools at the end of this training that you can use to research your target audience. But if you had to narrow it down, if somebody had a knife to your throat and said, what is the age of your target audience? What would it be? Try to narrow it down. Try not to just say, oh, 18 to 70. Try to narrow it down as much as you can. The narrower you can be, the easier it's going to be to speak to them. Okay, number two, gender. Is it male, female or both? And let me give you an example. Everyone may say, oh, it's both, it's both. Or unless you write specifically for women or teen girls or something like that. But for example, with my author audience brand, I attract both men and women. In fact, most recently, I had a majority, 66% of my most recent members were men. So I attract both men and women. But my ideal customer is a woman. So I'm not saying you have to eliminate everyone and that you're not going to get sales from the other gender. But if you had to pick, is there an ideal gender? It's just something to be thinking about. And even if it's both, once you get to the point of really identifying your target ideal customer, I want you to think of it either as a man or a woman. Okay, here's the third thing to write down. What is their average income level? Some of these things were just brainstorming. It's about progress, not perfection. Can you repeat after me? It's about progress, not perfection. Because you might be thinking, oh, I need to get everything exactly right. It's not about that. It's about progress. And the more you work on this and the longer you keep thinking about it, the more it's going to come to you. All right, so that's number three. Number four, where are they located? So is there a geographic location? Is your audience mostly in a certain country or countries, or is it a certain even demographic in the United States? Or where is your target audience located? That's number four. Number five, what type of education do they have? Is that relevant to your topic and to your niche? Have they graduated? College for some people. They really attract people that have had higher education. Is there something in that that makes a difference? Okay, the next question. What type of family do they have? So do they have kids? No kids. Are they empty nesters? Are they single? Are they still in college? That would kind of fit back with the age group. But what kind of family organization do they have? The next question to write down is what are their hobbies or interests? And this is really, really important. You might not think that this is important, but this is something that can really give you good insight on your target audience. Their hobbies, their interests, the things that they're doing just outside of work. And what kind of things might your target audience have in common? Where do they shop? Here's another question. Where do they shop? And what magazines do they read? These are all things that we're going to use in a tool that I'm going to talk to you about at the end here. Just a little bit. All right, here is the first one. Values. What are their top values? You can just Google values and get lists of values that you can look at. But what are some of the top values like? For my audience, it's faith, family, you know, those types of Things are some of the top values for my audience. What are some of the top values? Okay, here's another one. What are their main goals? What are the main goals that they want to achieve, that they want out of life? Here's another one. What are the main problems or pain points you can solve? Remember the aspirin versus vitamin illustration I shared earlier? What are the main pain points? Not talking about the things that, you know they need, but what are the things that they really want? What are the things that keep them up at night? What are the things that when they can't sleep at night, they're thinking about, like, oh, I just want to get this book done. I just want to get it finished, you know, or I'm overwhelmed, I just don't have enough time. Or what is it? What is their pain point? What is keeping them up at night? All right, here's another one to write down. What are the themes in your book and what type of people gravitate towards those themes? That's a good one to think about.

Here's another one. What other books are similar to yours? And then look at the profiles of those books. Core readers are they teens, women, men? A combination, because that's most likely your audience as well. So you can find that out like on Goodreads or even on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. You can look and see who is following that person and see what kind of things you're noticing about that audience. Then what other authors are similar to you? What do you notice about the people who are their fans? And that's kind of similar to the last question, but how does that author market? Who are they targeting? What kind of messages are they sending out, and what kind of messages are resonating? So you want to look at what posts are getting the most likes on their page or the most comments. What kind of things are just resonating? Because if they have a similar target audience as yours, it's going to give you a lot of insight of what your target audience is resonating with. Make sense? All right, so this is your assignment. After you fill that out, I want you to write out in narrative form your ideal customer. Based upon the details you wrote above, I want you to write out a general description of someone who might like your book and or products, because I always recommend you have products on the back end. And that's a whole other lesson. But include age, gender, some things they like or dislike, and what they do during the day, if possible. Are they at school? Are they working? Give them a Name. So actually name your ideal client and create a structure story around them. One of the trainings that I just love, and I've already listened to it several times, is a podcast from Amy Porterfield and it's podcast episode number 106. You can go to amyporterfield.com and search for episode 106. It's all about your target audience. Her guest on that show actually created a profile of her target audience and named her ideal customer. And it's just a really cool thing. So if you're having a hard time wrapping your mind around it, go listen to that podcast and I think it will give you even more clarity than what you've had already. All right, so now we're going to get into a little bit of research. I'm going to share with you two tools you can use today to start narrowing down your target audience and seeing how it is. All right, let's get into the tools. Some of the research you can do is first I want you to make a list. I want you to write out that later you will research up to five different authors that are similar to you. You will find their Facebook page and you want to try to find authors that have a big following. Hopefully they have at least 50,000 fans or more. If not, still put their Facebook URL down. But I want you to research some other really popular best selling authors in your niche and find their Facebook page because we're going to then take that information and use the Facebook Insights research. Facebook provides us a ton, a ton of amazing information for free. You don't have to use their ad platform to use this information, but you can go into the Facebook Ads manager and under Audience Insights you can get a ton, a ton of information. One of the things that you've already gotten clear about some of your target audience. But let's just check it out. Let's test it against some of the popular authors in your niche to see what is really your target audience. One of the things you can do is you can put in that page's name in Facebook. Then what Facebook will do is it will give you all of this information. It will give you the, the ages of the fans of that page. So you can kind of see, okay, is my age group right or correct. And you know, check a few different pages and don't become frustrated if a page doesn't pull up in Facebook Audience Insights. Some pages won't even if they're popular for whatever reason. But just use the pages that you can get information and see what are the ages you can figure out like the gender will tell you what the gender is of those fans from that fan page. It will give you the occupation, the hobbies, like the other pages that they've liked. That gives you a lot of information. It will tell you the magazines they read. It will give you a ton of information. I encourage you to do that. Try to do that for at least five other authors and maybe they're not exactly like what you do. Because I had a really hard time finding someone that does exactly what I do in the author niche. But I was able to take people that are similar and find that information. If you have questions about this, there are videos on YouTube and all kinds of trainings and I have a video in authoraudienceacademy.com that I take you step by step on how to research in Facebook but use the free tools that Facebook has. It's kind of scary in a way that they know so much about us, right? But Facebook has paid big, big bucks to get this information. They've paid companies to get this information. And so you can get information on what kind of family your target audience has. You can get so much information. It is a little bit scary, but it's also, it can be very beneficial for you to know like who is your target audience. If your page is big enough. You could even put your page in there. Mine, it doesn't come up when I put it in there. Different pages will and will not. But Facebook has that amazing tool for us to do that research. So that's the first page tool is just the Facebook insights. The second tool is similarweb.com you're writing this down, right? Similarweb.com I actually have a video tutorial on my YouTube channel. It's YouTube.com shellyhitstv you can just search for similar web but you could actually go onto similar web. You can take some of the popular best selling authors in your niche or product owners or whatever niche you're in and put their information in and it will tell you where they are getting the majority of their traffic.

It's amazing.

In my video tutorial of this, I show that I put Kim Garst in there. She's a social media expert and it shows her top two pages are Twitter and Facebook. She is practicing what she preaches and getting a ton, a ton of traffic from social. Another one I put in there was Chalene Johnson. She's also a social media expert. Majority like 90 some percent of her traffic was coming from Facebook. So if you find out stuff like that and you find out the majority of their traffic, someone, an author that is similar to you. The majority of their traffic is coming from Facebook. Guess where you should be targeting your target audience? You should be spending time on Facebook.

Now, I put in my site training authors, and it showed that I get just a little bit of my traffic from social. I get a lot of traffic on that site from Google searches. But you can look at your own site. You can look at other people's sites and, and say, where are they getting their traffic? It will give you so much information. Have you guys gotten a ton of value out of today? Has this been helpful? If you guys found this helpful, your gift to me could be just to share about this challenge. You can either share this video or you can share the URL of shellyhits.com platformchallenge. I love giving to you. I love helping you find clarity, focus. I love giving you the strategy to really help you sell more books. You guys, this is the foundation, okay? If you have a target and you know what that target is, and you're in archery and you're aiming for that specific bullseye and you're aiming for that target and you know what you're aiming for, you're going to have a better chance of hitting it, right? But if you're just like doing the shotgun approach, like the case study I talked about Ron, he's like, I want to do a podcast.

Okay, what is your purpose? Who is your audience? What message are you going to share? What will be even the topic of your. When you get this stuff clear and you know, like, this is my target. This is my bullseye. This is who I am targeting. This is who I'm talking to. This is who I'm writing to in my emails. This is who I am picturing. Every time I'm on a live video, I'm picturing this person. Every time I do a podcast, I'm picturing this person. This is the person I want to help. This is the person I want to serve. And it gets you a little more fired up, right? But it also gets you clear so that all your other marketing efforts are so much more effective. You miss this and you probably will feel discouraged, you probably will feel disappointed. You probably will come up short on your promotions and your book marketing efforts. If you are just shooting all in the dark and just saying, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try this. So it's probably some of those Same places. That's where doing some research and go to SimilarWeb.com, put in some of these similar authors of yours and see where they're getting their traffic from. When you're targeting a younger age group, it's also going to be targeting the parents because the younger ones may have money to spend, but the parents may also be making spending decisions as well. I hope that was helpful sometimes also serving your audience. So one of the best things you can do is talk to people that are in your target audience, either in person or get on the phone with them or on Skype and just ask them some questions and figure out what is their pain point. Where are they hanging out online? Where are the places that you can reach them? What blogs are they reading? Because if you figure out even what blogs they're reading, then you can try to connect with that blog owner and do a guest blog post there to your target audience. There's already a, you know, if it's a popular blog already a ton of people, you know, tuning into that blog. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me today. I just couldn't give you a couple little things. I wanted to dive deep, wanted to give you the practical steps, the practical tools of how to do this. Now it's time to take action. Now I want you to get out your calendar and I want you to find an hour somewhere in your schedule this next week and put it on that. It's going to be target audience research and clarity. You know, just figuring out this target audience thing, this ideal customer, and so put it on your calendar. You're not going to just take this in, take it in and never implement. That is an issue I see with authors all the time. You're in information overload. And so if you get information without implementation, it's only going to lead to maybe depression or just feeling overwhelmed. It's going to lead to overwhelm is what it is. Information without implementation leads to overwhelm. That is a tweetable, but it's just going to lead to overwhelm if you don't put it to action. I want you to do this. I want you to put it to action. I don't want you to be overwhelmed. I want you to get clear. I want you to get clarity. Awesome. Taking action, doing it. Implementation. This is great training, but if you never sit down and give yourself the space, because what I find is I need the space. Life is busy. It's like, brrr. My week, this week has been hectic. I got back from a speaking engagement last week. And it's just hit the ground running. We have social media and email and notifications and this and that and family and church, and there's just so much going on that it is so easy to just not do it. All right, well, you guys, this is a training also for my book launch, Build and Grow youw Author platform. All the details are in the members area. If you've signed up for the photo contest. If you are interested in getting my $47 training website workout week, I mean, people have increased their traffic to their websites, increased email subscribers. Just crazy, amazing testimonials in just one week. It was so amazing. I want you guys to have this training. It's only available right now inside Author Audience Academy, but you can get it by simply buying the print version of my book. It is $6.95 on the US site, not very expensive. And if you have prime, it's free shipping, but $6.95 and then you go to shellyhits.com photochallenge. Once you post a picture of the book, it doesn't have to be a selfie. It can just be a picture of the book on your bookshelf or something. Fill out the form and I will send you the training. It does have to be the print book because this is a launch for the print book. I already had the Kindle book out for a while, but if you still want to get the kindle version, it's 99 cents. No brainer, right? So definitely check that out. I can't wait to see your pictures coming through. I love creativity. I may even have a separate contest for the most creative picture. So think of something creative. You could do the website again for the photo. It's shellyhits.com photocontest and I'm pretty sure it's also in the member area. All the information. Well, thank you guys for spending this time with me and I will see you tomorrow. So tomorrow, day number three is how to grow your online following. And the number one way I've used to sell more books. And we're going to be talking about the exact secrets I've used to grow my following consistently and by far the number one way I've used to sell more books. All right, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.