How To Identify and Write For Your Target Market

by Bill Platt

More Advertising Articles

Published on this site: April 30th, 2009 - See more articles from this month

Many people question as to what topic they should choose to write their articles... Fortunately, the short answer is simple... Write articles that appeal to your target market. But what does that mean exactly?

I always pose this set of three questions, when I am talking to clients about what they should write about:

1. What do you sell?
   
   
2. Who is most likely to buy what you are selling?
   
   
3. How can you "answer a question" or "solve a problem" to help those people who are likely to buy what you are selling?
   

What Do You Sell?

Maybe you sell widgets, cell phones, car parts, or marketing services... It does not matter what you sell... There will always be a topic that you can write your articles about.

Do keep in mind that the point of article marketing is not to directly sell your products, but rather to educate, inform, or entertain your reading audience. So long as you stick to the idea of educating, informing, or entertaining your readers, you will never have a shortage of people who want to read the articles you write.

However, if you keep your focus on trying to overtly sell your products or services in your "article" copy, then it will be difficult to find publishers who WANT to publish what you have written.

This is important to note, in that publishers NEED content, but publishers tend to be very picky about the content that they want to share with their readers. In order for a publisher to become or remain profitable, he or she must always serve the desires of his or her readers. And readers do not want to be sold to, preached to, or criticized. Instead, readers want to improve their lot in this life and solve the problems that they face.

If you keep the needs of the publisher foremost in your mind, and the wants of the reader, then article marketing is a great tool that can help you to earn thousands of dollars.

If you lose focus of what publishers and readers want, then all you can hope for is a few links from your articles, from a few websites that very few people visit or read.

Who Is Most Likely To Buy What You Are Selling?

Just because you sell cars does not mean that anyone who has a drivers' license is in your target market. Let us put this statement in perspective.

• If you sell $2000 cars, most of the people in your target market are the poor - including those in poverty and students.
  
  
• If you sell $10,000 cars, your market is mostly families in middle-class America. Occasionally, you will find the college kid coming to your store to buy a car for college, and sometimes you will see a bunch of tire kickers who can only pray to get financed.
  
  
• If you sell brand new cars, your target market will again differ by what kinds of vehicles you sell. A Cadillac-buyer is different from the SUV-buyer and the economy-car buyer.

There is not a car dealership anywhere in the world that tries to target its advertising to everybody with a pulse and a drivers' license. It just does not happen. Either the dealership talks about its available cars and the benefits of owning a specific car, or the dealership points out that they can finance anyone.

Once you understand who is most likely to buy what you are selling, then figuring out what to write about has been made much easier.

Help Your Readers Solve A Problem:

Before you start writing your article, you should try to get into the heads of the people most likely to buy what are selling. Those people as a general rule have common problems for which they seek solutions.

One way to get a handle on what those problems might be is to review the email correspondence and phone calls you have taken from your clients. If you read that email all at the same time, certain questions will be asked over and again. In fact, you might even have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website that you can reference at this point in the brainstorming session.

Your email and phone correspondence and the FAQ page on your website can lead you to a better understanding of the kinds of questions your customers are always needing to be answered for them.

Once you have achieved the understanding of what problems your customers seek to have solved for them, then you have to come to the magic formula for writing articles that find wide publication and a large readership.

In your article, present your readers with the questions that people have, and then present answers to the questions and show people how to solve their problems.

In doing so, publishers who have heard the same questions you have heard will be strongly inclined to publish your articles. And when publishers agree to publish your articles, you will be able to reach the publishers' readers and a huge network of already targeted people who are very likely to buy what you are selling.

Understanding The Mechanics Of Article Marketing:

When you write your articles, it is important to remember a few key points while writing the articles. Those key points are:

• The title serves to get your article opened, so it needs to be good.
  
  
• The body of the article answers questions and sells readers on your credibility in the marketplace.
  
  
• The article should be easy to read, and it should easily carry the reader to your About The Author information at the end of the article.
  
  
• Once at your Resource Box (About the Author information), the role of the Resource Box is not to sell your products or services, but to get the reader to visit your website, where the real selling will take place.

Using the formula that I have outlined here, you are sure to find success with your article marketing endeavors.

Sure, I know some people might be thinking that the only reason for article marketing is building links, so all this extra effort would be unnecessary. But let me tell you something that I learn from time-to-time...

Did you know that if you write an article that gets published in a large newsletter that you can in fact earn $10,000 plus in sales from that single article? This is a lesson that I have learned more times than I can count. And to be honest, it is a lesson I like to learn.

Consider this... You can spend a few dollars and very little time to create an article that will generate a few back links, hopefully helping you to rank in the search engines for your target keywords. Or, you can spend a few more dollars and a little more time and create an article that could generate back links for the search engines AND find a wider audience for your article in newsletters - newsletters that could potentially deliver thousands of visitors to your website and generate thousands of dollars in sales in the next couple weeks. Which strategy makes more sense to you?

If you are wondering if I practice what I preach, then read this article again and then see my resource box below. I provide article distribution services to my customers, and my customers frequently ask me what they should write about in their articles and how to best construct those articles to reach a wider audience, and more specifically, their target audience. If I have answered these questions to your satisfaction, then visit my website and let me help you to promote your articles too.

Bill Platt has been writing about article marketing and SEO for a number of years. If you have written an article that you feel is good enough to get publication in a major newsletter or website, then you owe it to yourself to use Bill's article distribution service at http://www.thephantomwriters.com/. If you are interested in learning about coop article marketing, then visit Bill's newest website: http://www.sponsorarticles.com/.