Most bloggers use the word “you” somewhere in their content. But they usually don’t place any thought on who that word is targeted at. And that’s a serious problem.
Face it. You can’t write for everyone and every single audience. So you’re going to have to focus your content on the right group of people.
Here’s why it’s important to pick the best one: If you focus on the wrong type of people, it won’t perform well. But if you decide to place the focus of your content on the people who were your friends all along, the people who promoting your content the whole time, your content will bring you to new places: one of them being success. Doing this helps you maximize the value of your content without doing too much extra work in the first place.
If you don’t know who you’re writing for, stop and think. What group of people have given you the most during your blogging career?
For me, it’s other bloggers and other webmasters interested in blogging. That’s one of the kinds of people I focus my writing on. After all, I often blog about blogging. I also place a lot of focus on people you are interested in SEO, because I’m an SEO consultant.
But what about you?
How To Find The Right Audience For Your Content
Take A Look At Your Community
A great way to find out who your content is supposed to be written for is to look at your community, or in another word, your commentators. Get to know who they are and what they do. This won’t just help you make friends with them. It will also help you find the kind of people that will talk about promote your content for you.
For example, if some of your best commentators are people who write about PHP coding, (a random example, I know) focus your content on these people. While you also want to deliver for PHP beginners, focusing on the experts as well might just help your make-believe blog with PHP commentators get to the top.
Find Out Who’s Tweeting About You And Your Content
Personally, this is my favorite way to both find my target audience and make friends with other people. Make a quick search on Twitter and see who’s mentioning your username. Whether it’s to retweet, mention you in a FollowFriday, or something else, these are the kind of people who’ve actually visited your blog and liked your content enough to give it to other people.
These kind of people may just be the right kind of people for your content. After all, they went through a click or two just to get the word out about your content. They wasted space on their Twitter profile just for you! And shouldn’t your content be focused on people who like it? Twitter can easily give you the answers about who really reads your blog, but only if you use it correctly, of course.
OK enough about finding the people you want to write for, how do you actually focus your content on a group of people?
Actually, this should be fairly simple. To satisfy your target audience even more, you’re going to need to think of them when you’re writing. That’s it. Just write with them in mind, answer any questions you think they may have, and write words that make them stop and think. That isn’t so hard, but it will bring you results in the long run. After all, as a blogger, your job is to help people, why not help yourself too?
What do you think about this post? Got any more tips for find the right people to write for? (if that was a pun, it was intended ;)) I didn’t cover actually writing for these people too much, so why don’t you do it for me in the comments?
Thanks for reading! R-E-T-W-E-E-T-I-N-G is cool. 🙂