In my last article, How Does Your Objective Shape Your Pathway?, we explored how different pathways for sharing your expertise support different goals (for example, staying engaged, building influence, or earning income) as well as the idea that not every journey to authority needs to follow the pathway through all three stages of relationship-building (expertise-, personality-, and authority-based relationships).

But there’s another factor to consider when deciding where to invest your time, energy, and money: the audience you want to reach. You could write brilliant articles, engage in compelling podcast conversations, and deliver riveting talks and still fail to build authority if you’re not reaching the right audience.

The Two Questions for Identifying Your Audience

You can identify the right audience for your expertise by asking two questions: can you benefit them, and can they benefit you?

Can you benefit them?

Addressing this question helps to avoid two pitfalls that experts can fall into: the idea that your expertise will be valuable to everyone, and the idea that your expertise is for people like you. To avoid these pitfalls, consider five dimensions:

1. Topic — Will your area of expertise be of interest to them?

2. Context — What professional or personal context are they operating in?

3. Aptitude — What’s their comfort level with the mechanics of the area?

4. Goals — What are their goals, and how do they overlap with yours (even if priorities differ)?

5. Experience — Where are they in their journey with this topic, and how does their level of experience compare with yours?

Can they benefit you?

This question examines the extent to which your audience can support your pursuit of your own goals and primarily relates to their resources and authority. If your goal is to stay relevant within your field of expertise, then an audience’s willingness to invest their time to read one of your articles or to spend their money to purchase a book might be sufficient to meet that goal. However, if your goal is income-earning, you need to cultivate an audience that has more far-reaching resources and authority: for example, the ability to book you as a speaker or to hire you as a consultant.

Applying the Questions: My Podcasting Book Example

Let’s use an example from my own career about how to approach these questions.

In 2020, after four years of hosting The Indy Author Podcast, I felt ready to tap into the expertise I had developed to move into a position of authority on the topic of podcasting.

Can I benefit them?

Topic

It wasn’t hard for me to get past the misconception that my topic was for everyone. There are plenty of people for whom podcasts are just not compelling content, and I firmly believe that it’s difficult to create compelling content for a platform if you’re not first an enthusiastic consumer of that type of content. There are also plenty of people who might enjoy listening to podcasts, but who would prefer a trip to the dentist over a spell behind the mic.

Context

Even within the world of people interested in hosting a podcast, not everyone would be my audience. My content wouldn’t be of great value to someone who wanted to produce a limited series podcast featuring lightly edited interviews with relatives in order to make them easily accessible to friends and family. It also wouldn’t be of great value to someone who had hosted a podcast for a decade and wanted to parlay that experience into a position as a national or global influencer. I was neither of those people, and the audience I wanted to reach was more like me—someone who was using podcasting to build a community among people interested in my primary topic: the writing craft and the publishing voyage.

The topic area meant my audience would be fellow authors, meaning that in my book, I could explore the specific goals that this audience might have for a podcast, goals that might not be shared with sports commentator podcasters or academic podcasters or entertainment / pop culture podcasters.

And I wasn’t secretive about this context targeting—I reflected it in the title of the book: The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors.

Aptitude

By aptitude, I mean how comfortable someone will be with the mechanics of implementing your advice. In the case of the podcasting book, I was writing primarily for an audience who, like me, felt comfortable doing basic audio and video editing, loading content to distribution platforms, optimizing metadata, and so on. I wasn’t writing primarily for someone who just wanted to hit record on a device and then turn the audio or video file over to someone else to take it from there. I also wasn’t writing primarily for someone who planned to spend hours on each episode adjusting audio levels, compression ratios, or equalizer settings. My aptitude generally matched the aptitude I expected from my target audience.

Goals

I stated the reader goals that The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors would address right in the book’s subtitle: Creating Connections, Community, and Income. If a reader wasn’t interested in one of these things, then the book wasn’t for them.

However, the priority of the reader’s goals didn’t have to match mine. Income might be a tertiary goal for me, but the book would still offer value for someone for whom it was a primary goal.

Experience

So far, I was a pretty close avatar of the audience I wanted to reach, but experience is the area where most of us will be looking for someone unlike ourselves—someone not as far along in the development of an area of expertise. After all, if a reader had the same podcasting experience I had, they probably wouldn’t need to tap into my expertise.

Can they benefit you?

How could my target audience help me reach my own goals for the book and, more generally, for establishing myself as an authority? Of the three overarching goals most professionals have for building their authority—staying connected and relevant, building influence, and generating income—my goal for Podcasting for Authors was primarily building influence. That goal was met when an individual read the book, and as a result, I wrote with the solopreneur author in mind.

But if my primary goal had been income-earning, then I would have targeted the content to an audience that had the resources to hire me to consult with them about their own podcasting venture or had the authority to book me as a speaker on the topic. In this case, I might have adjusted the content to cater to publishing companies who wanted to launch branded podcasts.

Validating Your Audience Choice

Once you’ve identified a potential audience using these two questions, you can validate your assumption based on three simple tests:

The conversation test: Can you have three conversations with people in this audience where they express genuine interest in your expertise? Not polite interest—genuine engagement with the problems you solve. If you can’t find three people who care deeply, your audience definition might be off.

The search test: Are people in this audience already searching for solutions? Look for active LinkedIn groups, popular podcasts, well-attended conferences, frequent questions in professional forums. If there’s existing activity, there’s existing need.

The payment test: Are people in this audience already paying for similar expertise? Look for existing consultant or advisory services, paid courses, or speaking engagements. If no one within or serving this audience is paying for this expertise, question whether the need is real. (This test matters most if your objective is earning income; less so for influence or staying engaged.)

Run these tests to ensure that you don’t spend months creating content for an audience that doesn’t actually exist.

Your Starting Point

You can refine your audience as you learn more. Many professionals start with one audience in mind and then discover a more responsive segment along the way. I started my Indy Author consulting services thinking they would be most appealing to authors early in their indie publishing careers but began to niche down on experienced professionals preparing for a second act career or sideline as that became an emerging theme among my clients.

So here’s your action step—answer these questions about your target audience:

Can you benefit them?

1. Topic: Will your area of expertise interest them?

2. Context: What professional or personal context are they operating in?

3. Aptitude: What’s their comfort level with implementing your guidance?

4. Goals: What are their objectives, and how do they overlap with yours?

5. Experience: Where are they in their journey compared to you?

Can they benefit you?

Do they have the resources and authority needed to support your objective (whether that’s engaging with your content, amplifying your influence, or investing in your services)?

Does that audience stand up to the analysis? If not, what would you need to tweak to make the match fit?

Starting with intentional focus—understanding both how you can benefit your audience and how they can help you achieve your goals—beats starting with “everyone interested in my topic” or simply “people like me.”

Matty Dalrymple guides professionals in building their presence through her workshop “From Expertise to Authority: Building Your Professional Presence for a Sideline or Second Act.” Learn more at https://www.theindyauthor.com/authority.

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