One of the most common mistakes people make when starting an online business is that they don't have a crystal clear idea of who their customers are. There are several reasons why it's important to know your audience as early as possible in your course creation journey.

1. You need to know exactly what their pain points and goals are. You need to create a course that is a no-brainer for your audience. To do that, it needs to solve a real problem or help them fulfill a desire, and you need to know exactly what those problems and desires are.
2. You need to know where to find your audience. When you know who you're talking to, it's easier to find them and talk to them. Do they hang out on Facebook? At yoga retreats in the mountains? To sell to your audience you need to be able to find them.
3. You need to know what will attract them. To really speak to your audience in a way that resonates with them, you need to know who they are and what language appeals to them.

I'm going to show you how you can easily identify your target audience. The first step is the easiest, because you don't need to look beyond yourself. Just like when you chose your course topic, you want to find your target audience by thinking about the things you love and care about deeply.

Which group of people do you want to help? Who do you know and understand better than anyone else? Who are you uniquely positioned to serve? Are there any causes you care about deeply? An underrepresented group of people close to your heart? A community that could benefit from your course? A group you're a part of, that you deeply understand?

You want to be genuinely invested in your audience, so it's easier to support them and help them. As a next step, you want to do some research. Luckily, if you have done the work to validate your course topic, you have an enormous head start.

First, Google your course topic and related words and phrases. On what sites do you see information cropping up? Were there any similarities between the people who were talking about your topic? Did you notice a certain group of people interested in your topic? If not, is there a group of people that isn't being reached right now, that could hugely benefit from your course? Don't worry about doing a little digging. On Quora, investigate the people asking questions relevant to your course. Can you tell what their jobs are from their profiles?

Now that you have some anecdotal evidence, get more specific. Here are a few questions to answer about your audience. You don't need to answer all of them or have super accurate data. Answer based on what you've learned through your researching, and do your best to find the information you don't have yet.

1. Is your audience mostly located in a specific country? 2. What language does your audience speak? 3. Are they mostly male, female, or evenly represented? 4. What's the level of education? 5. What age range are most of them?

6. Are there any other identifying characteristic or similarities in the group?

For example, let's say that Samuel is a course creator who moved to the U.S. for school and work. He lives in NYC and moved there when he was 25. Samuel wants to create a course to help others relocate to a new city. Here's how his audience targeting brainstorm might go:

Samuel will target people from outside the U.S. who are moving to the U.S. for work or school. He'll assume his audience speaks English as a second language. They are evenly distributed between male and female. And since Samuel is designing this course for people who were like him when he moved to the U.S., he'll say they are largely 18–27.

Note that this still leaves him with a broad, generalized audience. That's okay, because we're going to narrow it down by identifying subsegments. You'll notice at this stage that there are still clearly defined groups of people with similar characteristics within Samuel's target demographic. To narrow it down, we'll make a list of who those people are and pick the one Samuel can help the most with his course.

To go back to the course on moving to the U.S., let's identify some subsegments:

1. Undergraduate students who are coming to the U.S. to finish their studies or study abroad.
2. People with undergraduate degrees who want to pursue a graduate-level degree in the U.S.
3. People who are coming to the U.S. for work or business.

There are definitely more groups, but these are the ones Sam feels he can serve best. Let's say Sam currently works in the U.S. and has recent experience getting hired in the States and making a big move. He'll go with group 3, since they can benefit the most from his expertise. They are probably at the higher end of the age range.Samuel can still narrow it down even more. How about people coming just to New York City, where you live now. It will attract lots of students, since NYC is a popular place to move to, and he's an expert on that.

Now it's time to introduce psychographics. We're going to get into the specifics of how this group of people behaves and why. Let's answer these questions about Sam's audience:

• What are their goals?
• What are they interested in?
• What do they fear?
• What are their challenges?
• What do they believe in?
• What culture are they a part of?

It's easy to make the mistake of answering these questions within the boundaries of the topic of a course. Instead, we'll try to go deeper and find more general answers that relate to people as individuals. If it's tough to answer these questions as you work through your own audience, imagine answering them yourself or as someone you know who fits into your segment.

Let's put a little more of a personal element into the segment we've been focusing on for Samuel—people in their early to mid-twenties moving to NYC for work. They probably want to be successful in the new environment, and may be excited to experience the local culture, but also find some places that are similar to home. They might feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done to make the move. They don't know many people in NYC, and may come from a culture with different traditions. It's a lot to adjust to.

With all this information, let's try to define our audience more clearly. "Young adults who are moving to the United States, particularly New York City, from another country because of a new job. They're excited, but also stressed about changing their entire lives by moving to a new city."

Now, this is a very specific audience. And Samuel might be worried about how specific it is. But this is actually a good thing, and as a course creator, you don't need to worry about limiting yourself by choosing a niche audience. It's a big misconception that you should make your product appealing to as many people as possible. In fact, unless you're Amazon or Coca-Cola, that's probably not the case. It's way better to have a product so perfectly designed for your target audience that it's an absolute no-brainer. Appealing to the masses dilutes your message and makes it less appealing to the people it can really help.

Now it's time to apply these steps to your own audience. Remember, if you're ever stumped, model your audience off of yourself, or real people you know. You'll know you've found your audience when you can easily describe them in one sentence, like we did here.