Understanding your audience is key to creating successful and engaging content on your blog. In this article, we’ll explore the importance of knowing your audience and how it can help you attract and retain loyal readers. You’ll learn how to identify your target audience, analyze their interests and preferences, and tailor your content to their needs. Whether you’re a new blogger or a seasoned pro, this guide will help you unlock the secrets of blogging success by building a strong connection with your audience.
IE 342: Unlocking Blogging Success: Knowing Your Audience
How do I conduct audience research for my blog?
The way in which we’re going to start, and this goes for across the board, if you are a new blogger or if you already have an established blog, you have to be doing audience research.
You have to understand who it is that you are ideally trying to attract to your content.
If you have an avatar, which is something that you absolutely should create, and if you haven’t, definitely make sure to build your avatar so that you know exactly who you’re talking to.
You want to think about that person and then check once you’re established to see if that person is part of your audience and who is continually interacting with you and engaging with you.
How do I identify my target audience for my blog?
In order to do this, you have to create that avatar and identify your target audience.
You do not want your target audience to be 20 to 60 that is too wide of a range.
You need to niche down and think who would be your ideal target audience, because if you have an audience range where everyone can buy your product, then what’s going to happen is you are not going to attract anyone because they’re not going know who you’re actually talking to because the way in which you talk to a 20 year old is very different than the way in which you would talk to a 60 year old.
It’s also very different on the social media platforms that you would use in order to do that. So really start to think about that avatar and who you are talking to is going to help. You establish that target audience for your blog.
What information should I know about my audience in order to write effectively for them?
Now when we’re looking at our audience, there’s things that we need to know.
I brought up the fact of age. You want to have an age range. And I would say if you can kind of pick a generation that is your target audience that you’re trying to attract, that is what I would recommend.
Think about the following questions:
- What is their family makeup?
- Do they have children?
- Are they still single?
- Are they married?
- What part of life are they in?
- Are they in retirement where they have more time for themselves to kind of do what it is that they want to be able to do?
- Or are they in a place right now where they’re building their family, they’re building their life to try to get to that point.
- Do they not have a lot of time because there’s lots of littles around toddlers, babies, or are they at an age where they have college kids that are off kind of doing their own and maybe have that empty nest kind of syndrome?
You want to identify what it is about your audience that you are going to be able to connect with.
How can I use analytics tools to better understand my audience?
You want to make sure that you are looking at your Google Analytics
Within analytics you’re looking at your audience and what content they are coming to and where they are coming from.
You also want to make sure that you have Google Search Console set up so that you can see what Google is already determining the keywords that you are going to rank for, because they are already sending people to you for that type of content.
Now, if you don’t have your blog’s analytics set up yet, and you’re just starting to think about this then these are two things that I want you to get set up so that right out of the gate, you’ll have your information set up to give you the analytics that you need to better understand and analyze whether or not your target audience is who you are actually reaching.
How do I use social media to connect with my audience?
Earlier in this episode, I talked a little bit about the idea of social media.
You need to understand that you can’t have this wide range of 20 to 60 because let’s be honest, they use different social media platforms.
You will always hear me say that with social media, you should not build your business on rented property.
That is why I talk often about a blog and your email list and how important they are both to grow so that once you have someone come to you, they can be return readers.
We want them to routinely come back to you and with social media this is difficult.
With social media you are looking to give them an opportunity to engage with you, to get to know more about them and to have conversations with them.
Social media is not necessarily meant to drive traffic to your content.
It is more meant for the people that are already following you to continue to engage with you so that you can get to know more about them and continue to solve the problems that they have.
Therefore, when you’re looking at your analytics on social media, make sure that you take that into consideration.
If you’ve noticed that all of a sudden you have a different audience over on Instagram than you do on your blog, what is the benefit?
How is that going to help you?
That tells me that you probably did some sort of trend and attracted an audience that isn’t who you really are trying to attract.
At that time the trending video got a lot of views, probably with reels, but now you have this audience on Instagram that isn’t your ideal customer, that isn’t your person that’s going to buy and come back to you as a routine user.
So now you have these inflated numbers that don’t actually have any engagement.
You want to look at social media as the content that you’re going to put out is to continue to engage the readers that you already have for the content that you’re already creating.
How do I engage with my audience to build a community around my blog?
Social media gives you the opportunity to repurpose your blog content in order to give them a more personalized opportunity to ask you questions, to get into your comments or to get into your dms.
That is the purpose of social media. So that as you look at how can I continue to grow my audience and build a community around my blog, you can use your social media.
You also need to be growing your email list because again, that is something that you own that you can send them routinely back to.
You should be emailing them a minimum of once a week when you have new content come out.
As well as to send them to old content.
Remember, just because you published something six months ago does not mean that you can’t email them about that and let them get over to that content and read it.
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