Stepping Outside Your Niche: How to Reach New Readers and Potential Customers

One surefire way to attract new customers and readers is to go outside of your existing niche boundaries. While some individuals are exclusively interested in one or two topics, there are many who have broad interests and will be receptive to your content.

Your website will probably appeal to more visitors than you imagine. Avoid falling into the trap of over-focusing on your niche audience.

For example, if you run a Yoga blog you want to target every imaginable demographic and not just people with a visible or expressed interest (This includes people who use search engines and Yoga forums to access your site.)

How do you do this? By strategically creating content and connecting your niche topic or product (Yoga) to multiple audience profiles. For instance, the people possibly interested in a Yoga blog include spiritualists, corporate executives, dancers, actors and fitness enthusiasts, among many others.

Here’s a simple equation you can use: Niche Topic + Profile + Benefit

1. Yoga for Singers: Breathing Exercises to Improve Your Vocal Ability




2. Yoga for College Students: Increase Your Learning Ability With These Exercises




3. Yoga for CEOs: 100 Easy Ways to Reduce Stress and Improve Clarity




4. Yoga for Power Lifters: Techniques to Drastically Improve Your Squat Routine




5. Yoga for Actors: Tricks to Improve Your Body Language




6. Advanced Yoga: How to Develop an Effective Long Term Yoga Routine

Image Credit: Ganymedes Costagravas

When people are introduced to something new that is outside of their established interests, they will usually assess it to determine if they should invest time or expenses by purchasing the product or learning more about the niche topic.

An outright focus on benefits is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to connect with audiences outside your niche, because it instantly suggests that the new topic or product is relevant or necessary to the user’s goals or needs.

On the other hand, the use of profiling (singers/CEOs) increases the likelihood of adoption, because many individuals identify themselves as participants of a certain profession, some to the extent that it epitomizes them as a person.

Explicit audience profiles also allow you to breach online communities overtly because relevance is generated from the onset. You don’t have to explain why your yoga blog is relevant to a group of power lifters: your articles speak for themselves. This allows you to easily reach a new audience and pull them into your site.

While already well known in the search marketing industry, Aaron Wall’s website reached even more readers when he created a Blogger’s Guide to SEO, because he deliberately created a profile (bloggers) and pushed his topic through it. The end result was lots of incoming links and possibly new readers, customers or affiliates.

What You Can Do With Your Own Website

Image Credit: Ganymedes Costagravas

This strategy of appealing to multiple audiences is of course not something new to the world of publishing. You see it often on cheap trade publications: Penguins’s Complete Idiots Guide is a good example, although they emphasize less on profiles and more on using a fixed content type to explore multiple topics.

Here’s what you can do on your own:

1. Set aside some time and apply the equation to your own website.




2. Come up with a few ideas and then include them in your editorial calendar.




3. Publish/launch each article or project and promote them in the right channels.




4. Repeat the cycle by focusing on the same profiles/benefits or pick new ones.

Over time you should amass a collection of articles which will pull in some interested visitors from a variety of places such as social networks, forums and other blogs. This repeated emphasis on your core keywords and a wide variety of terms also helps you to build an sizable amount of relevant search engine traffic.

How do you attract new readers/customers for your websites?


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