Backwards List Building - How to find out what the common problem of your audience is so you can give away a lead magnet to solve this problem
Scenario:
I already have a website, it's getting a ton of traffic, and now I want to get collect their emails to monetize them even more I want to give away a lead magnet, aka a free eBook to with tips on how they can solve their problem.
My site is about celebrity gossip.
How would you go about finding out what the common problems of your audience is, so you can create a lead magnet that is broad interest (everyone will want it that comes to your site!)
You can use a search function on your website and track what your readers are searching for on your website.
In case your website runs on WordPress here is a plugin that does the job:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/search-meter/
If you get a lot of traffic it shouldn't take to long to get useful data.
Hope this helps!
My usual approach would be to find similar sites to the one I'm running that has a forum, and then read everything I possibly can. If you're looking for problems you can solve in an entertainment-based community, I'd particularly recommend looking at the off-topic forum - that's where people will gripe about their woes.
Adding a forum to your own site is also a good, albeit rather high-effort, way to accomplish your aims.
You could also simply run a survey. If you run a "getting to know our users" survey with a few focused questions and a lot of general ones, you're likely to get quite a few responses - people like the idea that someone, particularly someone they respect, wants to get to know them better as people. You can also then mine the general demographic data to get a better idea of likely problems they might face - 40 - 55 divorced women are likely to have a fairly broad set of common life problems, for example, if that turned out to be your primary demo.
Thanks guys, my audience is 45% women, 55% male suprisingly based on our Google Analytics, and they are mostly interested in sport/fitness, then other stuff according to GA.
Now I did the following already
1) Looked celeb magazines, see what kind of stuff they put on the cover
2) Looked at other celeb sites see what they advertise
From my research on celeb magazines, fashion, and also diet/eating healthy/etc are huge topics (they are always promoted on the cover of the magazines) -- so that kind of overlaps what I see in the google analytics.
What are your competitors doing?