Audience Dilemma

[Robin Andrews]

My mailing list has been stuck at a very low number for a while now, and in some ways I'm not surprised.. There seems to be a problem with my niche and I can't yet see how to resolve it.

My niche is "GCSE and A Level Computer Science," which are UK exams taken at 16 and 18 respectively. Both involve a significant amount of programming for students, usually in Python. Apart from tutoring, which I consider my day-job, I want to create products (probably mainly video courses, but also lesson plans, eBooks etc.) to support students and/or teachers working in this space.

There seem to be 3 categories of potential audience members in my niche:

Teachers
Students
Parents

In my blog posts I've been focusing on coding in Python. However, I can't see that many parents are going to give two hoots about that kind of content. As for students, I don't think they are likely to do much blog reading on academic subjects (if my daughter's approach to exams is anything to go by...) Then there are teachers, who are I think are currently my sole readers.

I guess I'm not sure what I would write about to interest the other two audiences. (Or whether there realistically is likely to be an audience of students?) The ideas don't flow nearly as easily as they do for the things I'm currently writing about.

My website has definitely helped me to land some tutoring work and opened up some other opportunities, but I keep coming back to the question of whether creating products in my niche is really likely to be profitable. I don't know whether I've been tricked into focusing on that by the sunk costs fallacy (that fact that I'm already a qualified teacher of Computer Science), or if perhaps there would be a much larger audience/market for Computer Science courses and resources outside of the UK education system.

I know about the pond size/fish size analogy - but I'm curious to hear any insights into my particular situation. And if you think I should stick with my current focus, do you have any ideas for getting more students and parents to subscribe? At this stage, paid traffic is not an option.

I've currently got a banner offering a quiz with email capture on every page, and a pop-up sign up form. I can develop a better lead magnet, but at the moment, the issue seems to be getting people to visit my site. Most of my current visitors come from links shared on Facebook teacher groups.

As usual, any help much appreciated.

 

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[Rabby]

I would try to get the teachers and parents interested in helping the kids through your services. Especially the parents, since they're the ones who will likely be paying you.

For them, you probably don't need the technical content as much. What you need is a convincing pitch that makes them think, "wow, this will help my little Johnny score higher on that test-thingy he was talking about from school." Something that makes them believe that students coming to your site will score better.

You mentioned your own daughter's study habits. Now what if someone came along and gave you a plan? "Here's a schedule you can follow with your child. Their score on the <exam thingy> should increase by 20 percentile points if they follow this and study at least a bit each day." Give them the downloadable schedule, free. On the schedule are normal study times, as well as time slots for visiting your paid site and working through lessons/exercises.

I find that people like to be given a plan, so that could be worth a try.

 

[Robin Andrews]

Thanks for the ideas.