June 10, 2005

Know Your Audience

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 11:08 pm

From: D. Keith Robinson

The second step (and biggest key) to a successful blog (or any content driven Web site) is knowing your audience. It’s not a simple step and it’s one that you’ll be taking throughout the life of your blog.

In order to truly know your audience you need experience with them, so it’s not something you can really be on top of when your just starting out, unless your blog is an adjunct to an established Web presence, for example, in which case you can easily gather information about your audience. Either way, getting to know your audience is an ongoing process that can have a great effect on your blog.

Getting to know your audience with a brand new blog

When you are sitting down thinking about your goals you can also be thinking about the people who will read your site. Chances are if you know your subject matter you’ll be able to conjure up a pretty good description of who your target audiences are.

For example, when deciding to start Successful Blog, I had an idea in my head that my audience would be bloggers (of course) with newer and unexperienced bloggers being the core audience. As you can guess, this helps me think about my writing style and the type of topics I’m going to cover.

Had my audience been Web designers (most with blogs) like it is over at Asterisk I may have kept the same writing style, but the topics would be totally different.

So, aside from an educated guess, what are some other ways a new blogger can help define their audience starting out:

  • Look at, and read, sites that have similar goals and subject matter, read the comments.
  • Post comments yourself on similar sites, ask questions and get involved. Often you’ll see that you are actually much like your reader.
  • Get writing and solicit feedback. Allowing comments is a great way to slowly build up a picture of your readership. While not preferable, if you have no way to know your audience in the beginning, just write and you’ll get to know them as they get to know you.
  • Talk to your readers. Answer their questions, respond to e-mail, engage them in your comments.
  • If you don’t have comments, track incoming links. See who is linking to you and what they are saying about your work.

Getting to know your audience with a blog added to an established site

If you are adding a blog for and established Web site, your business, for example, there is a good chance you already have some idea who your audience is. You’ve got a good basis on which to build if nothing else.

I work for a graphic design and branding firm and we recently added a blog to our Web site. We knew our main audience would be our existing and potential clients and we knew quite a bit about them. This, coupled with our goals, really helped us define what kinds of things we’d say on the blog, and how we’d say them.

You can imagine that with business blogging not knowing your audience can be a real risk. If you’ve got some idea of who your audience might be, use that to help shape your blog.

Getting to really know your audience

As you write you’ll naturally begin to get a clearer picture of your readers and hopefully you’ll start to develop an relationship with them. However, it’s an ongoing process and the more you know and understand about your audience the better job you’ll do at giving them what they’re looking for. As well, there are other benefits; your writing will come easier, you’ll better communicate your ideas, you’ll stress less and you’ll enjoy it more.

Here are a few things you can do as your blog evolves to continue to get to know your readers:

  • Ask them questions. If you are curious about something, as them.
  • Respond to feedback. Even if it’s negative. Chances are you’ll learn something about them and yourself.
  • Develop a “reader persona.” One thing I do is write up a “character sketch” of my typical readers. Then when I’m writing I pretend as if I’m writing to that persona. This sometimes help me say things in a better way and helps me keep my conversational tone, which I feel is important.
  • Engage in discussion. If people are commenting on your site, join in the discussion. Talk to them, learn your regular readers names and their own styles. All of this helps.

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Filed under Audience, Content, Guest Writer, Productivity, Writing |



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1 Comment to “Know Your Audience”

  1. October 30th, 2006 at 9:34 am
    Free beer inside! | Marketing Pilgrim said

    [...] Know your readers, don't give them anything they won’t like. (and please: don’t play music!) [...]

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