What You Need To Know About Monetizing Your Platform and Niching Down TikTok Traffic Secrets Podcast

There is a really important intersection between virality and the way the algorithm works that I think a lot of content creators, when they first start creating content don’t fully understand. Now, I’ve been reading a book by YouTube expert Derral Eves called The YouTube Formula

I highly recommend it, it’s really good. I heard Darral speak last year at Funnel Hacking Live, and I learned some really important things about the psychology of why people buy and how to monetize your platform. And in the book, he mentions a concept that blew my mind. And if you are a business owner who is trying to use TikTok to reach a broader audience and generate sales, then this is going to be a really valuable framework to understand. So in the book, Derral talks about your two avatars. You have your audience avatar who will love consuming your content, and you have your customer avatar who will potentially purchase from you. And the key to growing your business with TikTok is to think of your customer avatar as a subset of your audience avatar. A lot of business owners, when they get started with publishing on TikTok,

They want to just start talking to their audience as if they are warm traffic.

Now obviously this makes sense because publishing content takes a lot of work, right?

And so if you are going to publish content to a platform, ideally you want it to lead to customers and sales. The problem is that platforms like TikTok do NOT care about growing your business.

They want to keep people on their platform as long as possible so that they can serve more ads and be profitable. That is their whole business model, right? And so when you get started on TikTok or any platform for that matter, you want to create content specifically for your audience avatar, content that has broader appeal. Because, if you focus on creating content for your audience avatar and create content that has broader appeal, then you are aligning with the platform’s goals of keeping people engaged and on the platform.  And so you are allowing TikTok to scale your customer base for you. So if you are a business owner, it is extremely important to create content that has a broader appeal than just your customer avatar. And then once you establish yourself on the platform and gain an audience, then you can talk to the subset of your audience that is your potential customers. Now, you hear a lot of talk on TikTok these days about how ‘you are the niche’ and ‘become the niche’ and to get rid of this idea of niching down and make your platform more about you. And this idea has merit in the sense that you want to create content that has broader appeal. But if you are a business owner, don’t throw the concept of having a niche out the window. It’s all about branding. Branding is about making it easy for people to understand what value you provide in the marketplace. And so while it’s important to create content that has broader appeal, it's also extremely important to brand yourself in a way that your potential customers understand what value and transformation you provide and who you provide it to, and that means understanding what niche you are in.