Defining your target, or niche, market is very important to the success of your business.

If you know what you do, the next step is to know who you do it for. Even better is knowing what problems they face that you can help them solve through your products and services.

But what if your blog audience isn’t your target market

This is exactly what Liz asked me in our latest one2one conversation:

What advice would you give to a friend whose audience wasn’t his niche market group?

Boy, there are a lot of ways to go with this one.

First thing, celebrate that you have audience to begin with. Many web-based business struggle to get people to visit their site in the first place – let alone having an interested audience that interacts with you.

Next, take a look at your blog, website and marketing message. If you’ve been trying to reach your niche market and have ended up with a different audience, there’s a number of things to consider:

1. Perhaps you’ve not been found by your niche yet. It is possible, especially in the blogosphere, that you have a large audience of bloggers who just like you, your writing, your perspectives on things but that don’t need your services. The easy answer to this is you have to hang out where your niche market is hanging out.
2. Perhaps you’re a little off on who your niche is. It’s easy to go off track. As a business owner, you should periodically review your marketing message with who your targeting versus who’s responding. Often, it’s just a few tweaks that can get you back on track.
3. Perhaps you want to write for your niche, but are influenced by your traffic reports. It’s so easy to redirect your blog’s focus a bit because of traffic. It may feel great to write about off-niche topics that get you Dugg, that get large volumes of traffic or that generate lots of comments (I love it too) – just be sure to ask if your business needs are getting met.
4. Perhaps you don’t know your real niche yet. One big advantage to blogging is that you’ll be writing often on topics related to your business. This gives you ample opportunity to explore who it is you want to work with. You may find that what you thought was your niche market really isn’t.
5. Perhaps your niche isn’t your passion. When you blog daily on a topic, it can get old quickly. So watch yourself. See what you really have love for writing about. You may find that your niche market isn’t your true passion. If so, I’d suggest re-evaluating your niche market.
6. You could, simply, be in the wrong business. It does happen. You set out to start a business in a certain area only to find that the it doesn’t fit. Or maybe what you thought you could provide your niche, you really can’t do. Don’t dismay, simply take a look at whether you’re in the right business or not. You can always change what you’re doing.

These are some of the things I’d want to discuss if a friend – or if you – contacted me for help.

There are many facets that go into having a successful business. One is the way your feet are facing when you begin the journey. That’s why it’s often good to stop, pull out the map and take a look around before you end up lost.

So Liz, what would you suggest my friend do if they looked around and found themselves lost with their business?

Of course, the answer I give and the question I pose is not just for Liz.

Let’s face it, people do business with people – not with businesses. A business owner may like, want and need something that a marketing coach, for instance, offers. But the single biggest reason they hire the firm is because of the people they meet, talk to and build relationships with.

Why?

Well, people want to be in relationships. They want to feel connected to the people they work with. In some way, at least, the business owner wants to trust that the marketing coach really cares about them, their business and helping them solve their problems.

Sure there are other things business owners look for before they sign a check – like competence, professionalism, knowledge, previous results, etc. But ultimately, the relationship will be one of trust.

The New Oxford American Dictionary lists trust as: firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone.

Think about it…aren’t these the qualities you want in your business relationships? So do your clients. So how can you build greater trust with your target audience?

• David Airey’s 5 Easy Steps to Building Trust Online
• Naive by Design’s How to Build Trust Online
• Susan West’s Building Trust is Key to Business Success
• Greg Balanko-Dickson’s Business Blogging Strategy: Build Trust and Rapport
• Marius Wlassak’s Earning Customer Trust Online
• Paul Sarvadi’s Building Profitability by Building Trust
• Shonnie Lavender’s Building Trust With Your Business Blog
• Beautify’s Building Trust in Your Business Relationships – 10 Steps
• Michelle Howe’s Earning Customer Trust Online

Here’s some examples of how others are building greater trust with their audience. How do you?

I’ve had this conversation going about how best to write for both new and non bloggers while still writing for my blog-based target audience.

One of the most intriguing posts that came out of this was John Wesley’s ‘Blog’ is a Hideous Word. He writes:

Blog is a hideous word. I cringe every time I read it. And I’m a blogger. No wonder regular people don’t take blogs seriously.

Blah, blah, blog.

Blog = irrelevant nonsense to the layman. Why? Because thats what it sounds like.

The worst part — this miserable word diminishes the power of the platform. Weblogs enable individuals to reach a global audience at minimal cost. We haven’t even scratched the surface of this.

I agree with John, but maybe for different reasons. I think that the word blog, for better or worse, has a stigma attached to it of personal diaries and political pandering. Many people outside the blogosphere don’t take blogging serious. Yet, I agree with John that blogs have enourmous potential that we haven’t fully tapped yet.

What do you think? What if we stopped using the word ‘blog?’ What then? And what would we use?

Recently, Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users wrote an interesting post on what she calls the secret of Loveocracy. You should read it, if you haven’t. It’s a great post that highlights what’s good for your target audience is what’s good for your business.

The secret is simply this: you have a much better chance for success when your business model makes what’s good for the users match what’s good for the business, and vice-versa.

I couldn’t agree more.

Just poke around the web and you’ll find a huge number of small businesses and service professionals who are focused on themselves. When you read their website you’ll find out all kinds of information about them. From bios and mission statements to what services they offer and why they’re better than the competition.

But where is their target audience? And more importantly, if I’m their target audience, where am I? Where are they speaking to me and my problems?

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Of anyone, I know that building a small, service-oriented business is hard work. I’ve had three businesses, including two very different approaches to web development, in the past nine years. All three have been service focused. Each has been successful. And all have required quite a bit of effort to plan, build and grow.

Of course, currently, I help small and independent professional businesses plan, develop, build and grow their business through the internet. I help my clients refocus their business objectives and marketing strategies to incorporate the web. Ideally, their websites and blogs become a hub for meeting and converting their target audience.

But here, many make a critical mistake. They think of their target audience (or target market) simply as a name for the group of people they’re trying to serve. In other words, they think of target audience as being a noun. If you remember your Schoolhouse Rock, “is a person, place or thing.” It simply names.

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I’ve been blogging for almost five weeks. So what have I learned? Well, I’ve been thinking about that for the past few days. The list, not surprisingly, is rather long.

Sure, I had watched many blogs over the last year, learning what I could from the links in my feed reader. That education certainly helped me hit the ground running when I finally launched my blog. But it wasn’t until I was actually writing posts, commenting and building relationships that I really began to grok what blogging is all about.

Nowhere have I learned more about blogging than in how I write my posts.

I knew from my marketing background that writing should be interesting. It should speak directly to my target audience, engaging them in what they want to know. I knew that the best writing would add real value to my audience’s life by helping them solve a problem they face. And I knew that the most effective writing establishes me as an expert in my niche.
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