Knowing who your readers really are is one of the most important things an author can understand.
Now, I don’t just mean generalities like young adults, adults or even things like fans of fantasy. I’m talking about specific data, like their location, age, spending habits, and more.
If you as an author can understand these intricate details about your readers, you’ll be able to speak their language and even market better as well.
This may seem like an impossible task, but luckily there are some simple and free tools out there that will give you the necessary insight to understanding your readers and how to reach them better.
1. Alexa Demographics
Alexa is free service that that gives you demographics of another websites. Just take another website’s URL, place it in Alexa’s search box, and presto, you have some key data on that website.
However, to use this tool properly, you’ll need to know where your target market goes on the internet. This could be a competitors website, or a niche blog/forum.
In any case, once you know where your readers hang out on the internet, just take that website’s URL and place it in Alexa’s URL box.
Then, after hitting enter, you’ll have access to that website’s demographics and be able to understand things like:
- Age
- Location
- What platforms they use
- Income
- General Interests
As you can see, that can be some powerful stuff and can help you to setup better marketing campaigns as well as do things like choose an appropriate pen name so as to better speak to your potential readers.
But again, to best use this tool, you’ll need to know where your readers already are.
2. Google Analytics
If you have a website, using Google analytics on it can help you find out a whole lot more about the people who actually visit your website.
Let’s be frank, those that read your material and decide to go to your website are your target market. Wouldn’t it be nice to get to know them a little better?
To setup analytics on your WordPress website, gohere and follow their simple steps.
Once you have Analytics setup, then you then can understand things like:
- More detailed age breakdowns
- Specific locations
- What they were interested in when they came to your site
- Where they exited your site – as in, what made them disinterested
- How much time they spent on your site
- and more…
As you can see, Google Analytics can be a powerful tool in discovering exactly who your already acquired readers are.
3. Amazon Associates
This tool is a personal favorite of mine. Amazon Associates is an affiliate program. For any product you want to promote that is on Amazon, you get a special link and if someone clicks on that link and buys anything within 24 hours, you’ll get a percentage of that money.
But that’s not the important part. The best part of the Amazon Associate program is that you’ll get to see what else your readers are buying.
Now, be advised that Amazon will not allow you to place affiliate links in your books. However, they do allow for you to use the Amazon Associate link to point to your own book from other sources like your email list, website, social media accounts, etc.
Imagine the juicy information you could acquire by knowing what your readers are buying and are interested in. To learn more about how to effectively employ this strategy and how to setup it up, check this out.
So, what now?
Now that you have these three tools, you’ll need to get started. The more information you can glean from your target market, the more you can learn about what they do, where they go, and how they spend.
Dave Chesson is the founder of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book marketing tactics to authors. No costs, no fees, just pure marketing information to help you sell more books.