Solve Problems and Pain Points
Episode #2 of the course How to rapidly grow your email list by Jessica Festa
In today’s lesson, we’ll continue fleshing out our content strategy.
As stated in the previous lesson, it’s vital to know who you can help so you can attract them with tailored blog content. You want to continuously make your readers feel like your posts were written just for them, as you consistently relieve them of their problems and pain points.
But how do you figure out these problems and pain points?
Step 1: Start with Google Analytics
If you’ve had a website for a while, you can learn a lot about your audience through Google Analytics, from basic demographic info to how they arrived onto your website. Note: If you don’t have Google Analytics set up yet, here’s a guide on that.
Step 2: Consider your ideal customer
What are their struggles? Where are they currently getting information (and where is it falling short, so you can fill that gap)? What drives and disappoints them during the day? Once you have a clear idea, you can target them through content made with them in mind.
Step 3: Find niche subforums
Reddit, Quora, and Facebook are great places to start your research. Write down questions you see people asking.
Step 4: Research your niche further
Head over to BuzzSumo and search your niche topic. Write down the questions answered by the popular posts that pop up.
Step 5: Dig deeper
Once you have your questions written out, dig deeper to see what underlying pain points there are. Consider the feelings and emotions surrounding each question.
If someone asks, “How do you cook vegan for your family while not spending a fortune?” The problem is money, but the pain point might be a fear of having to sacrifice nutrition and family health due to finances. Tapping into your audience’s pain points is key for really resonating with them.
Step 6: Create categories
Once you’ve determined a narrowly-defined niche, break it up into two to four categories. So, if you’re a personal stylist whose mission is to help savvy female entrepreneurs launch online businesses without being overwhelmed, your categories might be “blogging + business tips,” “social media hacking,” and “personal development.” Having these categories helps keep your content on track and will be necessary for the list-building strategies you’ll be implementing later on in this course (so stay tuned!).
Your Turn
Go through the above steps, writing your answers onto a piece of paper. Make sure that with each piece of content you craft—whether on your blog, on social media, or in a newsletter—you’re staying within your themes, solving a problem for your reader, and trying to assuage their pain points.
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