How to Define Your Audience

You understand the need to keep your audience in mind each time you write, record or create a blog post. To do that successfully however, you have to have a clear idea of who your audience is so that you could properly address your thoughts toward their needs. That’s the catch. Although defining an audience is a blogger’s prerogative, identifying the demographics of your audience is not always easy to do.

I’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to define your audience. This is in no way an all-inclusive guide. It’s definitely not intended to be one; I’d only like to give you a sense of direction to help you navigate through the confusion and frustration of your own demographics. See how it fits your goals and purposes and let us know how it worked out for you. We love to hear back from everyone of you.

1.    Decide on your area of expertise. Knowing what you are writing about gives you an idea of who might be interested in the subject matter. If you are blogging about children – babies, toddlers and teens – you can be sure parents will be interested. If your blog focuses on personal finance that could be anybody’s game; you might want to qualify that further into Personal Finance for Women. That would make women from all walks of life pay attention. Just remember to stay abreast with current trends and update your knowledge. Nothing is more embarrassing than selling stale ideas.

2.    Define your target market. Using the previous example, personal finance for women is in fact a broad audience. Single women with no children have different financial concerns than single moms; single moms have differing concerns than married moms. Personal finance will also be slightly different for those in domestic partnerships. This narrower focus is useful in defining categories and in writing individual articles so it’s equally important to examine these details carefully and write from this perspective as well.

3.    Pay attention to what they’re saying. After your generic posts have drawn feedback from readers, sift through the trends in your comments section. Reader feedback is a very good gauge of current issues confronting your audience. Besides helping you write on a subject of interest, collating information gleaned from reader comments is an excellent way to get fresh blog ideas.

4.    Focus on one subject a time. Each post or series of posts should only address one topic. For example, if your blog entry is titled Ways to Save $100 a Month, talk about how to save and not why you should save – that should be another post.

Successful blogging is all about marketing your ideas to the right market. Although blogging is a recent discovery, the principle that makes it work for webpreneurs are the same, old-school principles centered on one core concept: customer is king. Your audience is your customer. Get to know them and treat them well. Your efforts will pay off faster than you could imagine.