Blogging Tips - Blog Tips - 5 Definite Techniques to Determine Who Your Audience is

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One of the first things to do, before starting a blog, is to determine your targeted audience. In fact, the more targeted it is, the more your chances are to attract a wide readership.

Determining your audience is critical because it will highly influence the topics, the content, the wording, the distribution, the marketing plan, and so on! To summarize, your audience defines your blog identity. Why? Simply because every plan, every strategy and every tactic will have to take one common thing into consideration: your audience!

For example, targeting beginners in your niche won’t be the same as targeting experts. The topics shall not be the same. The working and the language level shall not be the same either. Your blog promotion will also differ, because beginners won’t be found at the same places as experts. This is also the case for the distribution; you won’t reach beginners and experts the same way!

Your audience will always be a target; it will never be black or white. This being said, you will never be able to reach the perfect audience target. Thus, you will need to find a way to confirm that your average audience is still on the target. To do so, I would recommend you 5 techniques.

1. Ask.

This is a simple technique, but it may help to get some feedback. If you don’t ask, you won’t know! Concretely, you may just ask it directly by writing a post in which you will ask the readers about their opinion on your blog. As your audience to comment on the design, the content, the topics vs their interests. Ask about what they like and what they don’t. Stay opened to receive suggestions; this is priceless and this is the best source of information to improve your blog smartly! Doing this kind of post may help to put a dialogue in place. This is a great opportunity to build additional relationships with some readers.

2. Create a Poll.

The beauty of polls is that it is 100% accurate and, most of the time, very quick to answer. However, in the other side, it is less flexible than free discussion and it require building it with the right questions! It’s quite frustrating to publish a poll, receive tons of answer and finally have no conclusion at all! The questions and the wording are crucial! In fact, it makes all the difference between priceless information and useless information. Polls are extremely interesting to collect information. For example, some of your readers may want to give their opinion anonymously. Of course, they won’t tend to leave you a comment on the post you did to apply technique #1. However, they may leave you very useful information by answering to a poll you can fill anonymously!

3. Look at Site Statistics.

Gathering information on your blog is essential! Most likely, you are using an analytic system just like Google Analytic or something similar. If this is not the case, open a Google Analytic account immediately after you finish reading this article. This is imperative! Of course, there are tons of information gathered by these systems, and there are a lot of time to spend analyzing all this stuff, but let’s focus on 2 parameters: the referrers and the most popular pages. The referrers will let you know where you visitors are coming from. Take the time to visit those web spaces. Analyze them and take the time to make some conclusions. On their side, the most popular pages will let you know about the most interesting stuff on your blog. Generally, those pages define pretty well the identity of your average reader. This may help you to give a direction to take with your content. The most important word here is direction. Don’t write exclusively on your most popular topics; just take the right direction. Don’t forget that variety is also an important rule to follow.

4. Follow the Commentator’s links.

Comments are priceless. In fact, they are the concrete sign that somebody read what you write. There is nothing more frustrating than the sound of silence. Writing and having no feedback is hard. This is precisely one of the most common reasons why many blogger just give up. They get discouraged and see no reason to continue. So if you have comments, take the time to read it and to answer! And moreover, take the time to visit your commentator’s blogs. Most commentators leave their link to their blog; just follow it! This will give you tons of very valuable information: the niche of your commentator, the topics, the web design, the interests, and so on. Take the time to visit the about page and the contact page. You may found some treasure out there!

5. Follow the Social Media links.

You may also find some profile links from technique #4. Follow these links and look at the profile and the content submitted by your readers. Having access to this information is very valuable because it’s having access to your readers’ bookmarks. This is more than enough to have a good idea about his/her interests! Another useful information that may be available there is links to other social media profiles. In fact, most social media sites actually allow their users to publish links to other social media profiles. For example, the MyBlogLog service gives access to several other ways to connect with the user. Take advantage of it and just follow the links… you may found a great reader, a business partner and even a friend!

I personally don’t think that one technique is better than the other. In fact, I think they are all complementing each other. A smart mix of all 5 techniques will result on something quite relevant and accurate. Always stay connected to you audience; they are what makes your blog alive! Building a community is something hard, but if you stay connected with your readers, you’ll notice that they’ll always be near you when you’ll need it the most!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Audience, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.