In order to market your company effectively, you need to find out where your target audience is. In this post I’ll show you how you can do this. I like using examples, so in this case, I’ll assume you sell Star Wars merchandise.

How to Find Blogs

  1. Google “Star Wars blog”
  2. Filter out all the blogs that don’t have any traffic. There are basically three ways you can do this:
  • See how many comments each post has. Very few or no comments usually means not many people read the blog.
  • Look for the TweetMeme button. Just a few re-tweets for each post usually means that the blog doesn’t have a lot of traffic.
  • Check their estimated traffic on Compete.com.

How to Find Forums
Use these Google queries:

  • Star Wars discussion boards
  • Star Wars message boards
  • Star Wars “powered by phpBB”
  • Star Wars “powered by vbulletin”

Then filter out forums with little or no activity. See when the last thread was started and how many views/replies each thread has.

How to Find Niche Communities

  1. Go to Ning and search for your keyword.
  2. Use this Google query: [your kewyord] allintitle:join
  3. Use this Google query: [your kewyord] allintitle:”Sign Up”
  4. Do a search on Facebook and filter the results by clicking on “Groups”.
  5. Search for LinkedIn groups by choosing “Groups” from the drop-down list and then entering your keyword in the search box.
  6. Use these Google queries:
  • [your keyword] social network
  • [your keyword] online community