This article is a part of my FREE Fan Focused Blogging Course. If you want to discover how to grow your blog while serving your fans, then my course is exactly what you're looking for.
Welcome to lesson 2 of my free Fan Focused Blogging course! Today we are going to be talking about how you actually go about finding the problems your fans have.
You know, what makes your Fans look like this?
And this doesn't mean "huge problems", just finding any problem people in your niche have.
And as I said, the smaller and more discrete the better. "Needs Recipes" isn't nearly as good as "Needs to feed her 2 children after working 10-hour days" or "Can't stop the red velvet cake frosting from clumping". Those are very specific problems that you can figure out solutions to.
Or if you are looking to work with external companies it may be things like "Can't take good product photographs" or "Needs more reach for their new product".
I always tell people to write everything down, and really dive in, because too many people start the process, find a problem that sounds good, and then focus exclusively on it. This often prevents them from finding better problems to solve later.
So where do you go to find problems?
If you have been blogging for more than a few months, you should have a little idea from reading your emails and the comments on your blog posts.
What specific problems do the people in your niche have? What issues do they struggle with, what questions do they ask you, and what challenges do they run into time and time again?
Because we know a lot of this just from blogging.
That said, it's also important to go to Facebook groups where your fans hang out, message boards, or reddit and see the types of things they are talking about there as well.
You'll see the same issues come up again and again.
Beyond just doing research, you can also be proactive about this and simply ask your fans. This can be accomplished with polls but I really prefer to ask them more directly.
The easiest way is simply to have your next newsletter be "Hey, I need some help from you. Hit reply and let me know what your biggest challenge with XX is right now?".
For deeper dives I also like to create a Google form that asks "What is currently your biggest challenge with X", as well as some more direct questions that I want my audience's thoughts on. I'll promote the form in my newsletter, my Facebook group, everywhere I make contact with my Fans.
If you do this, pretty quickly you will start to see the same problems mentioned again and again and again. These are the pain points you will want to address.
I also got a great tip from Ryan Levesque in his book Ask, which is to take all of those responses you get, and order them by the length of the response.
Someone that says "I struggle to get my cake to turn out right" isn't feeling the pain, or willing to pay you to the solve the problem, nearly as much as someone who writes you 3 full paragraphs on the struggles they've been going through with their cakes, how they've tried to fix them and why they are still coming up short.
The people who take the time to truly explain it in detail are the people who will be more than happy to pay you if you can solve their problem.
These fans are also great sources of further information. Follow up with them via email, or better yet hop on the phone with them! Really mine them for information about their struggles, and what some potential solutions could be for them.
To launch her first service, my friend Lennis Perez got on the phone with 50 members of her target audience and had conversations with them. No amount of online research can provide that kind of insight and understanding into her clients.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is SEO keyword research. SEO seems to be the classic research technique for a lot of food bloggers, and can often shape the direction of their blogs. Now, there's nothing wrong with using keyword research to find problems, it's great for uncovering some, especially easy-to-solve ones that are commonly searched for, but it's usually not as valuable as reaching out to your fans directly, especially when you are trying to move beyond just getting some simple Google traffic.
So your homework tonight is to go through your recent emails and comments on your blog, writing down all the problems that came up. Go browse some Facebook groups and reddit threads to see what people are struggling with in your niche.
Write down any specific problems you see, the issues they are struggling with, the questions they keep asking and what challenges they run in to time and time again.
Send your mailing list a note asking them to email you back with what their biggest challenges are in your niche and write them all down.
Let me know in the Makin Bacon Facebook Group or the comments below. I want to hear about how it went, what the most common problems are that you found, and what are the weirdest problems!
In tomorrow's lesson we will dive into how to find solutions to the problems you just found.
This article is a part of my FREE Fan Focused Blogging Course. If you want to discover how to grow your blog while serving your fans, then my course is exactly what you're looking for.
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Hi, I'm Jason Logsdon! I'm an adventurous home cook and the head writer and photographer for Amazing Food Made Easy. I grew my income to 6-figures by focusing on serving my Fans by providing massive value, and I want to help you do the same.
