Blogging continually comes up as an optimal solution for communicating with your audience. With over 133,000,000 blogs indexed on Technorati since 2002 and more than 400,000,000 people who read blogs globally, it can feel like your blog is just a small node on an information super-highway.
I don’t know how many times I have read the following words, “Content is King”. This means that if you create quality content, eventually readers will gravitate there. My opinion on this subject can be left for another post, but I tend to believe that a successful blog needs a lot more to get it going. With that being said, you still need great content.
But how do you appeal to your target audience? Is it actually best to give them exactly what they want?
I recently read a great post by Adam Singer on his blog The Future Buzz. The post was particularly about how Chris Brogan targets his blog to the masses rather than focusing on being cutting edge. There seems to be a lot of truth behind the idea that most people do not like to go beyond their comfort zone when learning.
What is common becomes popular and what is popular becomes common. It becomes a vicious circle of the same information all over the web. Singer’s final thoughts in his post were interesting:
“…it’s a delicate balance. If you go too deep, you risk falling into obscurity. Go too broad and you’re skip-able.”In my opinion, you need to craft your content with two things in mind: your goals and your target readers.
Goals
Like I mentioned in the post Finding your Voice, what are your organizational goals?
• Are you trying to increase sales?
• Bring more traffic to your website?
• Create brand-awareness?
• Build relationships?
Always keep coming back to the goals you created and make sure that you aren’t going off on a tangent.
Readers
As for your readers, ask yourself some questions that will help you focus your content. Let’s face it, it is kind of cliché but you can’t be all things to all people. Here are some questions to get you thinking about your potential readers:
• Who is your target audience?
• What do they currently think of you?
• What do you want them to think of you?
• Are you writing to other businesses or consumers?
• Where are these people located?
• Who else is competing for similar loyalty?
Blogging becomes a real juggling act, but knowing the size of your audience, their level of understanding and what they are looking for in a blog can help you craft quality content.
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