Carrie Dils makes finding your target audience in an ocean of potential clients seem like just another day at sea. Carrie Dils is very well known to the WordPress crowd. She’s a leading authority on the Genesis platform, creating custom themes for clients as well as premium themes for developers. When whispers of her presence at WordCamps reaches the attendees, mass hysteria breaks out (ok, maybe not quite).
Finding Your Target Audience in the World of WordPress
But for all her WordPress fame, these developers aren’t necessarily her paying clients—how does she navigate between the WordPress crowd and her target audience? Or is the WordPress crowd itself her target audience? How does she find time to be such an authority and be so active in the community and still bring home the day’s catch? Is finding your target audience a simple task?
So how does Carrie make boatloads of cash while spending so much time helping people in the WordPress community? That’s a fine kettle of fish for you! Finding your target audience is difficult in the best of times—how does she do it? We aim to find out in this week’s Brown Bag Business Chat—Finding Your Target Audiences While Navigating Between Different Online Crowds.
Click the video to watch it above, or read the summary below!
Are the people in the WordPress Community the people who purchase your services?
I’m gonna go with a 70/30 split, 70 people in my network referring me, 30 from referrals from previous clients. Most organic leads from my website don’t seem to help at all with finding your target audience.
As much as giving back makes you feel great, how do you find time to actually market yourself as a developer?
I struggled quite a bit with that to be frank, because I did not intend to have multiple audiences. I was just living and going and seeing where the business took me—Finding your target audience was not in my head at all. I wondered at the time if I should consider serving this audience of peers because I knew they’d never need my services. I’ve realized that a lot of my “marketing” (I do terrible self marketing) is actually just me being in the field and serving my peers. I’ve discovered there’s value in doing what I’m doing there, and that comes back in the form of referrals.
When you’re working on finding your target audience, Are there other groups or circles that you use?
Not online. For the past 5 years, I’ve been a member of an association of locally owned retailers (I was actually trying to sell them greeting cards, ha!), but I’ve gotten to know these independent shop owners and their pain points and I saw I had a skill with web development that could help them. However, that’s the only outside circle I’m in. Is that a good way of finding your target audience? Probably not. I’ve not had to go out and actively market myself; I’ve been very fortunate in that respect. I’ve been doing this almost 20 years and I’ve just built up a considerable network that way.
Do You Have a good way to manage your time?
I am a poor time manager. My strategy before was “work all the time,” and I like working, but that led to a bad work/life balance, so I’ve started to block out time for certain things on certain days. I’ve got tasks throughout the week that fall on certain days, for example. I also try to be strategic with client meetings at the beginning or end of the day to have big blocks in the middle to work. My best friend lately has been tomato-timer.com. It’s a little timer that you set for 25 minutes and go, so I shut down everything and go to task for 25 minutes, get up, take a 5 minute break… I get 4-5 of these cycles and and man I knock some stuff out!
What About Blogging?
I have to make special time for blogging. My traffic is literally cut in half when I stop putting out content. It doesn’t matter if the whole “finding your target audience” thing is happening or not if you’re not putting out content! I have affiliate revenue that’s directly tied to traffic, so when I’m not blogging, I’m in essence shooting myself in the foot. It’s generating affiliate clicks and keeping the Googles happy with me.
When You’re planning your content, are you thinking about how to reach both audiences, or are you just writing about what you want to write?
Yeah, it has nothing to do with finding your target audience. Generally, something is coming out of a project I just finished working on, and I wanted to make a tutorial about it later. Or, I’m writing about things that are on my mind or that the community is talking about. I’m not writing for my customers and they’re not coming to be educated.
Will you change this strategy in the future to focus on finding your target audience?
No. I’ve found that this is where I have the most to offer. I feel like I can share better information with people who are on the same journey as me. I frankly don’t feel the same sense of authority when it comes to clients. I’ve always been a one-man-show, so in terms of client onboarding and marketing strategies, agency things, the things people like you are so good at like finding your target audience, those aren’t things that I have enough experience at to feel like I have good things to offer content-wise. True confessions!
Did you ever think you’d be making any actual income as an affiliate?
No! I really didn’t. When I first started doing it, my goal was to recoup the cost of domains, hosting, and email. That’s a few hundred bucks a year; ill break even; that’s awesome. I had no idea you could make affiliate revenue a source of income without finding your target audience. So, i’m not getting my yacht completed by doing this—I’m not even in the realm of some of these other guys—but it’s interesting to see that, if done strategically, you can do more than pay for your hosting! You don’t have to worry much about finding your target audience then!
Does that give you the freedom to give back more to the wordpress community or focus on finding your target audience?
Well, it’s freed me up anyway. Usually I’m 100% funded by client work, and frankly I’m weary of that being 100% of my time. So I looked at affiliate revenue and passive income as a way to free me up from that much less client work, which lets me invest in personal projects like making a premium theme and making my podcasts.
Did you always want to develop premium themes?
Yeah, it was always sort of on my bucket list. Going back to the bigger picture of finding your target audience and bringing in affiliate income, I did it so I could do what I wanted, I did it to see if I could. It will be a long, long time before I can break even, if I ever break even, on utility pro, but hopefully in the future it will turn into something one day. I just started an affiliate program for the theme, so basically it’s free income; I’m really curious to see if it has an impact on sales.
If you could go back in time and start all over, would you spend more time finding your target audience?
Interesting question; I think that I would still focus on creating an audience of WordPress developers because I didn’t start with a strategy in mind, I just wanted to learn the craft, and it was a comfortable, easy group of people to be around. I’ve enjoyed building relationships in the community, and that’s paramount to success regardless of whether you’re finding your target audience or not.
Any Parting advice about staying afloat in this crazy social media world?
I think my best advice would be to shut down the frickin twitter or hootsuite or whatever and be intentional about when you’re opening it up because wasting time on it is NOT helping you with finding your target audience! I check 3 times a day, or maybe if I have something I’m dying to say, I’ll get on there, but I don’t leave it up and running. I have 9 slack groups I’m in, and I could watch that all day long, but leaving these windows up when you’re working is incredibly distracting. SHUT ER DOWN!
How can people find you?
@cdils
@officehoursfm
carriedils.com
Come say hi!
