7 Tips For More Website Income - 2. Profitable Target Groups
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7 Tips For More Website Income - 2. Profitable Target Groups - The right audiences play an important role in increasing your website revenue.
In this article, you will learn what effects the target groups have on individual sources of income and how to analyze your target groups.
There are a few tooltips for doing this.
Parts of the article series:
The Role Of The Target Audience
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| 7 Tips For More Website Income - 2. Profitable Target Groups |
There are always website owners, affiliates, or bloggers who ask me why they earn so little. You have 100,000 page views (as an example) a month. And still, hardly anything comes around.
One reason for this can lie in the wrong target group or in the fact that you have not optimized your content and sources of income for the existing target group.
In the offline economy, you don't try to sell household appliances to children or tickets for a metal festival to a pensioner.
This may work in individual cases, but overall it will not be very successful.
The crowd, the target group, and their needs play an important role and I would like to go into this in a little more detail below.
What Is A Valuable/Profitable Target Group?
Unfortunately, there are no precise metrics here with which one could specifically say that a target group is profitable or not.
First of all, we should clarify what a target group is. A target group is characterized by a relatively large number of similarities in purchasing behavior.
For our website, this means that we are looking for a specific target group that has certain characteristics. That sounds a bit theoretical and nobody sits there and defines target groups for days. Instead, we define certain properties that our visitors should have and derive, for example, content planning and the use of revenue streams.
Important characteristics of profitable target groups can be:
- Interests
Of course, our target group should have a common interest. Homogeneous target groups can be reached very well with relatively little content that is precisely tailored to their interests. When visitors all have different interests, it becomes difficult to present them with the right and appropriate sources of income. - Purchase Intent
For some sources of income, the target groups must have an intention to buy. I will hardly sell lawnmowers if the target group is interested in lawnmowers but just wants to know how to fix them. As already described in the last article, you can find out this purchase intention very well using certain search terms. - Purchasing Power
Of course, it is helpful if the intended target group also has the purchasing power to buy the products and services. A fan page about Ferrari can have so many people with the interest and the intention to buy when in the end hardly anyone can afford it. - Problems
A profitable audience ideally has a problem or need. Then we don't have to sell or sell anything to these visitors, but simply present a solution that solves the problem or satisfies the need.
Influence Of The Target Group On The Sources Of Income
Let's take a look at how the target group can affect the individual sources of income and which of the above characteristics are most important in each case. The weighting can of course differ in individual cases.
- AdSense
The target group has an indirect, but quite important, influence on AdSense. Of course, the income is not calculated according to a somehow defined target group but based on their interests. And this in the form of the search terms. Therefore, once you have determined the interests and needs of the target group, you should check the keywords tool from Google presented in the last article and look at the average click prices. - Paid Posts
In the case of paid posts, the target group has a medium influence. By specifying the topics of your blog, e.g. at Trigami, potential customers can decide whether they want to place a paid post with you or not. The target group also plays a role in the case of direct orders from companies, as the company wants its target group and the target group of the website to be as identical as possible. - Paid Content
The target group also affects here, of course. Both the interest, the intention to buy, and the purchasing power are important because the target group has to spend money here. The target group doesn't have to be particularly large to be profitable. - Affiliate Marketing
This also depends on the orientation of the partner program. If there are sale payments, then of course the purchase intention must be strong. If there is lead compensation, it might work well with a target audience that has a great need for information and a problem. - Direct Marketing
If companies want to advertise on a website, then the target group has to fit very well. Because similar to paid posts, you want to reach your target group as precisely as possible and not only 10% of the banners hit the right target group with the watering can principle. - Banner Networks
Of course, the basic target group is also important here, but the traffic, in general, is also more important here. And, as with direct marketing, purchasing intent and purchasing power play a somewhat subordinate role. Of course, that also depends on the goals of the advertising partner. - Direct Sales
If you sell products on your side, then ideally all 4 properties should fit, above all, of course, purchase intention and strength
As you can see from the explanations, the target group, search terms, content, etc. naturally overlap. You can't look at this in isolation on the website, but rather it meshes with one another.
Analyze Existing Target Group
One case is that you already have a website and now want to find out who is actually on your pages.
Manually
On the one hand, you can and should analyze it manually.
- Search Terms
The search terms within your website can provide information about purchase intent and interests. Especially from content that may still be missing. The WordPress plugin Search Meter, for example, shows separately the search terms that did not bring any results.
But your website statistics (e.g. Google Analytics) also show the search terms and you can see there whether there are purchase views or not. - Content Analysis
What are the top articles on your website? What do visitors read most often? Do these articles show an interest in buying or other financial aspects? Or is it just the free information that most visitors get? - Survey
What speaks against just doing a larger survey and asking for general demographic data. E.g. age groups, gender, income group, etc.
Alternatively, you can also carry out many small surveys, each containing only one question, but then also asking specific questions, for example, whether there is an intention to purchase product XY.
Tools
Some tools can help analyze your target audience. But one has to warm up before considering these results as the only true information. The following evaluations are mostly approximations and estimates. Or it is not entirely clear how the results come about.
- Alexa
For one thing, we have Alexa site info. In addition to the statistical data, which at least in my case is not correct, you can also display the “Audience” tab.
Demographic data is output there, such as the age focus of your site or whether men or women are on your site. If you log in and install the Alexa toolbar, you also get e.g. the evaluation for the income of your visitors.
Overall not uninteresting, but of course the reliability of the data is one of those things. - Google AdPlaner
The second free tool is the Google AdPlaner. Among other things, this shows income, age, and gender for a website.
There is also an analysis of interests (bottom right in the screenshot).
This tool ensures that you get a good feeling for your target group. - Microsoft Tool
The third tool in the group is a Microsoft tool. It's called “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” for a URL that shows how strong the commercial intentions of the visitors to a website are.
I find such tools exciting, but you shouldn't overestimate them, because these tools don't collect demographic data, but try to find out the demographic data based on other factors (keywords, content, etc.).
Select A New Target Group
When you start a new website, it looks a little different from the target group.
You approach it in such a way that you define a target group. So a certain interest, purchase intention yes or no, specific problems, etc.
And then you tailor the content to this target group and of course, make sure in advance that there are suitable sources of income.
The focus on a profitable target group also applies to marketing measures such as AdWords. So you should only book keywords there that suggest, for example, a specific interest in buying.
The next article in this series of articles is about the content and of course, I will also refer to the findings of this article and the previous one.
Traffic Quality
One more word about the traffic quality.
So there are some things that you shouldn't do for traffic, as already explained in detail on blog.hanifmr.com.
And it doesn't do anything. Bringing as many visitors as possible to your website at random.
As already explained above, most sources of income benefit from certain target groups and their characteristics.
Therefore, one should make sure that one primarily addresses those target groups that belong to a profitable target group and do not just look at quantity.
Then you will achieve a very good income with relatively few visitors.
Conclusion
Knowing your target group as well as possible or focusing on the right target group for a new site is an essential prerequisite for financial success.
Part 3 "Content Optimization"
The third part is about content optimization and how to control and optimize your content so that the right target groups come and the income is as high as possible.
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