In blogging, similar to copywriting, it’s important to know what’s important to your reader.
It’s a mistake to consider blogging as a personal journal. Quite in contrary, blogging is a conversation between you and your reader. If you want to write a diary for your own personal use- do it offline. As long as you’re writing in public-it’s a dialog.
As you start to write a post for you blog, picture your audience in your mind and write for them. Babbling or writing about stuff that only you find interesting will not attract more readers and you will quickly lose the ones you have. Think about the type of people who are reading your blog and write for them. Focusing on your audience will always help you to have a successful blog. Street Directory.
I’ve started this blog when Twitter has just begun evolving as a marketing mechanism. I quickly realized that Twitter was of great interest to my audience and as a result I started writing more posts on Twitter which resulted in higher traffic, more comments and low bounce rates.
How To Determine What Is Important To Your Reader
1. Survey-use wp-polls plugin to run a survey, asking your readers what that want to read about. It’s better to use open answers instead of pre-determined ones, so they use their own words to describe how they feel.
2. Analyze Content-use Google Analytics and myriad of other tracking tools to determine which articles have low bounce rates, high on page times and high incoming traffic.
3. Popularity Contest-another plugin to use to determine leading topics is Popularity Contest. Using pre-determined criteria such as comments, unique views, time on page and others popularity contest will come up with a list of most popular articles on your blog. And to play it safe, you can create a widget listing all the articles on your sidebar.
4. Keyword Research-use Google Keyword Tool to determine which key phrases are the most popular and try to create more content focusing around those keywords. It worked for me when I used Twitter as a leading content magnet for my blog.
5. Forums-visit forums, groups and message boards to see what your readers are talking about. See what bugs them these days and blog about it.
6. Blogosphere-visit blogs and websites your audience visits and see what is the most popular topic, what the blogosphere is talking about.
7. Discover Early Trends-use Google Trends to see which trends are evolving and try to predict a trend early on. For example: Joseph Wood spotted an iPhone trend and predicted an iPhone apps trend early on. He created a business around it and now he’s enjoying himself.
In blogging-communication is key. Use everything you can to find out as much as possible about your readers and create a reader avatar which should have the following parameters:
- Name
- Age
- Sex
- Occupation
- Income level
- Interests, hobbies
- Avg. time a day spent online
- Which web publications he/she reads
- Goals/Dreams
- Desired outcome out of reading your blog
It’s important to communicate with your reader as if you’re sitting across the table. Don’t make the mistake of addressing your audience in plural-your reader wants person-to-person communication and it’s your job to deliver.
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Understanding exactly what your readers want is very important to your success. Just asking people what they would like to see on your blog or what information they care about is absolutely huge so much in fact that by doing so, if you have some followers, you’ll have massive results in no time.
Learn to be a reader and you’ll be better and writing.
Great to read your articles as always, Igor.
Keep helping people succeed, man!
.-= Eric´s last blog ..The Most Money You’ll Ever Make With Your Blog =-.
Great point Eric! That’s exactly what’s needed!
Igor