Prepare Your Author Website for the New Year: Day 6
As a writer, it’s crucial to spend time learning about your audience. The more you know about your potential readers, the better you can serve their needs. Knowing more will enable you to increase your web traffic and sell more books.
How can you learn more about your potential readers?
One way is to examine your ideal audience and to separate the individuals into a few large groups.
Create profiles (personas) for each.
You can group individuals by the challenges they face, their demographics, what they want, or what they need. If you are already part of your demographic of readers, this is easy, but if you aren’t, you have some research to do. You want to know who they are and what they care about.
If you want a full run-down on creating a reader persona, check out this webinar from our Book Marketing Coach, Sue Campbell.
Ideally, you would interview your demographic groups in person or on Skype. You’d get to know them and could ask direct questions. But this isn’t always possible.
So what do you do?
Look for demographics that you can find quickly, are associated with your writing, and can be found for a wide variety of audiences.
You can learn about these groups by reading their comments and reviews on blogs or books similar to yours.
You could do a Quora search or scan related Facebook groups.
If you have Alexa, you can get all kinds of information in just a few seconds. All you need is the blog URL of an author doing similar work to yours (do a quick Google search) to key into Alexa. Then, scroll to the bottom of the page where it reads “audience demographics.” At a minimum, you’ll gain an understanding of their gender, education level, and browsing location.
You can search on Reddit. You’ll find communities for almost every topic. On Reddit, search for the most popular posts on your book topic and find the common language or keywords. Or save yourself a lot of time and use this handy tool for searching for keywords on Reddit.
Another way to learn more about potential readers is to send a survey to the readers you already have. An author I know recently sent a survey to those who signed up for her email list. She simply asked them what types of content they wanted her to produce in the future. “Well, that was easy,” she said.
So now you have your data, but what good is it to you as an author?
To make use of your new data, you’ll need to organize it.
Look at your keyword results from above. What are the patterns, which words are the most repeated, what topics can these be categorized into?
Want to make this as easy as possible? Check out this tool that creates buyer personas for you.
Once you have your primary reader persona, don’t forget to use it each time you create new content for your author website. Use it to remind yourself what your readers value, want to see, and what form they want to see it in.
THAT’S IT FOR DAY 6!
Next up in this series, we’ll focus on lead magnets and how to create a landing page for them so you can increase your email list and sell more books.
Author marketing is confusing as hell! Too many writers are focused on the latest tactics and lack a sensible strategy. They don’t know how to integrate what actually works into their already busy schedule. And they don’t know who to turn to for help.
Enter: the Happily Ever Author Club. It's an online membership community led by book marketing coach Sue Campbell. It's for authors who want to actually make an impact and sell books.