Who Is Your Main Audience?
Our particular websites all appeal to various market segments. They are all in the group of poker players, or at least are interested in playing poker, but beyond this they may have several defining characteristics. We aren’t generally privy to getting much feedback here, but it’s still important that we do our best to know our audience, or at least project what they might be like, in order to make a bigger impact on them.
Pay attention to who is likely going to be sitting in the seats listening to you
The starting point though is to look at what poker players online generally are like, and may be interested in, and then look to further refine and drill down here to get a more accurate picture of the kind of people we’re likely to attract with our particular sites.
This just won’t define what we present to them, but perhaps even more importantly, it will define how we present it to them. This is a game of effectiveness, effective communication to be exact, and we cannot communicate effectively without knowing at least a little something about who we are communicating with, and what makes them tick.
There’s Lots Of Variation Here
There is as much variation in the people that come to our sites as there are different topics for our sites. This does limit things somewhat, as there are only so many themes that you can build a poker site around, and some are going to be more general than others.
Broad categories like poker news or strategy is going to leave things fairly open, and if we’re catering to something much more specific like the best bonus deal at a particular poker site then things will be narrowed down much more.
Within each general category though there may be several sub categories. So with a site on poker strategy we may be focusing on appealing to new players, intermediate players, or even expert players, or of course we may be appealing to all three categories, or at least attempting to.
So if your site is offering more advanced instruction, we can assume our players are going to be more sophisticated and experienced than one directed at newer or less experienced players. So the poker lessons will of course be different in these cases but the whole approach needs to be as well, in particular the poker reviews, the business end of things for us.
In fact, in my mind, the way we approach our poker reviews is the most important criterion to distinguish from all of this, as we particularly want to make sure that they match our audience as best we can. This tweaking can influence our success quite a bit, as we can take more liberties with newer players, be more salesy in other words, and can’t afford to take as many with more experienced ones.
So if we fail to hype things enough if it’s a newer player site, or if we overdo it and lose credibility with more experienced players if that’s our main audience, we will miss the mark by a degree, and maybe a large degree.
Pay Attention To The Big Picture As Well
A lot of affiliates don’t pay enough attention to the makeup of the majority of their audience when they design their web sites. This is unfortunate and is always a mistake. This goes back to what I was talking about in the last session, about honing in on their interests enough to keep their attention, but you’ll never do that very well if you don’t keep their interests in the forefront of your mind throughout. You can lead them away from those interests to a degree but you’ll never do that very well unless you pay attention to their interests in the first place.
So it’s fine to use the approach of, while you’re here, here’s something else you may be interested in, but you don’t want this to be the main thrust of your site or they will simply think that they are in the wrong place entirely. So make sure you convince them that they came to the right place first, and then, you might be interested in these other things, but these other things can’t dominate the picture.
This is even true when it comes to our poker room offers, even though for us that’s the only thing that really matters. It is very likely that this isn’t the only thing that really matters to them though, unless they came here specifically for that, which is very often not the case at all.
The key to all of this though is thinking things through enough to come up with as good of a picture as you can of what your audience consists of, and then taking that and allowing this valuable information to be used in your site design and content. When you pull both of these feats off well you’ll be taking some real steps toward your success.