Home | Publishing | Self Publishing
It's probably safe to assume that if you are writing a book, you have an affinity for the topic and audience. Whoever your target audience is, you must ask yourself: * Where are they most likely to be when they are online? * What web sites do they visit? * What discussion boards do they frequent? * What support/social groups do they belong to? Asking each of these questions will be useful when developing your marketing plan. Finding your target audience can be as simple as searching for keywords and phrases on the Internet or as detailed as doing research offline at the library. Either way, here are a few ways to make the process easier for you to determine if a market exists for your book idea. Finding Your Audience Online The Internet has become THE place go for information on any and everything. If your target audience exists, you'll find them there. The best place to locate your target audience is on bulletin boards, forums, and newsgroups. This is where groups of people come together to share ideas and stories, or to ask questions on a particular topic. To quickly find your target audience online go to any search engine like Google and type in the keyword your target audience is most likely to use and add the word forum to the end. For example type "web design forum" and you will get a listing of web sites that have some type of forum that discusses web site design. For better search results put quotes around the keywords you're searching for and the results that come. Here are a few combinations you can use (replace keyword with terms used by your target audience). Visit these places and find out what people are talking about. You will surely determine what to write about when you walk in the footsteps of your target audience. "keyword message board" "keyword bulletin board" "keyword forum" "keyword community" Finding Your Audience Offline An association is made up of groups of people who share a passion, interest, hobby or common characteristics and can be reached through the means that the association uses to communicate with its members such as newsletters, mass email, meetings and conferences. There are hundreds of thousands of associations in the United States alone, and when you factor in the International associations the research shows that there is an organized group for just about every special interest you can imagine. The Gale Encyclopedia of Associations can be found in the reference section of most libraries and contains a vast amount of information on just about every association that exists. It is a great resource that few authors take advantage of when planning their marketing and promotional campaigns. Used consistently, this resource could help you to regularly identify new audiences to target with your book. Another great resource is the Oxbridge Dictionary of Newsletters this resource not only confirms that a viable market exists but also offers a marketing outlet to share information about your book. Plan a time when you can visit your local library, you will have full access to these and many more resources that usually sell for hundreds of dollars per volume and are updated often. The library is not only a no-cost way to find your audience, but it will also give you access to a librarian who can help you find the information that is best suited for your needs. As an ongoing way to connect with the audience that you want to write for you can plan to attend live events that are sponsored by social groups and associations. Your local Chamber of Commerce generally has a list of events that it hosts as well as a calendar of events promoting other organizations events and meetings. If your target audience is Moms, you might want to see if churches in your area have local Mothers of Pre Schoolers (MOPS) groups or maybe Missionettes meetings for adolescent girls and Royal Rangers meetings for young boys.
Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com
Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.
A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points.
