If you’re looking to grow your Shopify business, build your online presence, and get more traffic, it takes two ingredients.

• Presence — Building awareness in the minds of a specific + niche target market.
• Evergreen Content — Writing content that is continually relevant to your target market and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time

Building presence with a target market

You need to get specific about:

• Who your target market is
• The problems your target market is experiencing
• How your products help your target market solve those problems

Clearly defining your target market + their problem, + how your products help will help you reach people in your audience. Then, when they read about you, they’ll feel a sense of, ‘oh, you’re the site/store for people like me!’

This is similar to the concept of positioning. You want to know who you’re for + how you help them. I’m rewatching Better Call Saul, so you get to suffer through one of my lawyer/law firm examples:

If you own a law firm, you might decide you want to reach a small + specific part of your overall total market. Instead of being a lawyer for everyone, you decide to be a lawyer for a small part of your market. You might decide, ‘I’m the lawyer for real estate developers who are looking to negotiate back taxes owed to the IRS.’ That specificity helps you define who your ideal client is, position your business for that client, and know where you’re working on building presence and awareness.

It’s the same with a Shopify business. You want to get specific about your target market. That specificity lets you know who to reach. My article from 2018 on ‘becoming a Shopify Niche Celebrity’ (https://doubleyourecommerce.com/niche-celebrity/) resonates strongly with this concept of presence and gives a sense of the actions to take to build presence with your audience in a niche.

Writing evergreen content to generate traffic

You need to create the content your audience is looking for as part of their journey in finding + buying your products. ****

To switch examples, if you’ve already picked your target market, you might have decided that you sell CBD medication for pet owners of elderly cats with anxiety. To build traffic with content, you might write articles:

• answering questions like ‘is CBD safe for cats?’
• about the conditions that CBD helps cats with
• sharing tips on managing pet anxiety or giving cats CBD
• featuring customer reviews and case studies for your products

The challenge for Shopify businesses

The unfortunate truth is that the above two ingredients can be challenging for Shopify businesses, especially businesses selling a wide range of different products, like boutiques.

• If you don’t have a specific target market, it’s hard to know who to focus on.
• If you sell a wide range of products, it’s hard to get specific about the problem(s) your customers are experiencing that relate to your products.
• It’s challenging to create good + relevant content for your target market if you don’t know who your target market is or the problems your target market is experiencing that drive them to seek products like yours.

The best way for a Shopify business to build presence + get traffic? Niche down to a small audience/target market.

Pick a small + defined sub-market of customers who all share an interest or affiliation in common. Then, nudge your business to serve that audience. (Avoid niching based on demographics like age or education.)

As an example, maybe you’re a boutique selling women’s clothing. You decide to nudge your business and focus on a smaller + more specific target market of potential customers. You decide to become a boutique specializing in courtroom attire for women lawyers. That small nudge lets you get very specific about your target market and how to build a presence with them. You can better understand:

• The problems they’re experiencing (e.g., they want to look fashionable + professional + be comfortable)
• How your products help them solve their relevant problems
• What content you can create to reach your target market and help them in their journey to find + buy products like your products (e.g., seasonal guides to courtroom attire for women lawyers)

By getting very specific about who you’re trying to reach and making it a smaller part of your total potential audience, you get very clear about what to do and where to show up to build a presence with that audience. That then helps you understand what evergreen content to create to reach that audience and grow your traffic.