Who Is Your Blog For?
Who is your blog for? What purpose does it serve?
It’s good to have a goal when starting your blog.
Knowing what you want to achieve helps keep you on track. Having an idea of where you are headed serves to guide your decisions.
Focus on the prize, indeed, but not to the exclusion of your audience!
Consider the stereotypical grasping used car salesman, insurance salesman, builder, whatever. You know the type, I am not singling out any particular market here, there are dodgy geezers everywhere.
You walk up hoping for a fair deal, they sense a sucker, and of course go in for the kill.
“What can you pay? I need to go talk to my boss … he says he can do it for that if you take the magic paint, go-faster stripes and the furry dice … at 29% APR”
They are so focused on what they want out of the deal they are quite willing to burn up customer trust. Nailing one customer after another with abusive, greedy, high pressure evil.
What happened to the win-win?
So back to the question. Who is your blog for?
You? … Wrong answer.
Your audience? … Also wrong. Unless you are purely doing this out of the goodness of your heart.
What is the correct answer then?
A blog should offer both your audience and yourself value. It could be entertainment, for you or your audience, it could be information for your audience and leads for your business, or it could be news and ad clicks.
If you get no benefit then you will not keep it up or even might start to resent the hours you put in, while if you don’t provide benefit to your audience they won’t stick around.
The point is you have to always keep in mind what your audience needs then work out how you can supply the solution while working towards your goal.
Get the balance right and everyone is satisfied. Good times 
By Chris Garrett. Posted in Blogging
Hi Chris,
As you know, my blog for government officials and others for e-Governance promotion is already in place. I will be hosting different blog categories in my rajeshshakya.com – for government officials, Separate blog for technical professionals, students, tourists, business houses, entrepreneurs and others. I will bring all of my blogs under one domain. Do you think that will be a good idea?
Cheers,
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
That will be fine providing your audiences overlap – for example ballet dancers and fishermen are not overlapping audiences so require separation whereas realtors and lawyers might be an overlapping audience where real estate sales are concerned. You have to work out if what you are writing about interests all parties.
I created my blog for the purpose of reaching out to the fitness industry and teaching business owners, and marketing staff about the importance of SEO.
As time went on, I found myself posting more and more with the SEO community in mind, which caused me to lose a lot of my fitness industry readers because they don’t want to read lines of code to do mod URL rewrites. They aren’t ‘there’ yet. I could never develop a truly loyal following in the SEO community because the blog was fitness-related.
It was a classic case of mixed-messaging and not thinking about who your real audience is.
These days the blog is ‘dumbed down’ a bit in terms of SEO, and tries to focus a bit more on fitness-related posts. It is doing much better in the fitness industry.
Good Post Chris! This is my first time here, so I see that you are using that nifty WWSGD WP plugin. I tried it, but for some reason it wouldn’t play well with one of my other plugins. Oh well…
True.dat
It’s important to write so that your audience will be interested, but if it isn’t something you’re actually interested in, you’ll get bored of writing it.
Terrific post, Chris.
The highest possibility in relationship is that both partners will grow from the experience. It’s true in marriage. It’s true in client relationships. And it’s true in a venue such as a blog or newsletter.
I run an education blog, focussing on computers (Macs in particular) in the everyday life of a student. So sicne I have to come up with itneresting ideas and cotnent for students, I, as a student myself, put a lot of time into reflecting on my student life. The blog is just a way of sharing my organizational ideas and tips.
Furthermore, the blog is definitely useful for anyone who has to be productive. A college student is just an extreme productivity animal, so I traget more than just students.
It’s interesting to watch blogs change as time goes by. Some start off linking to everyone, commenting all the time, etc. Once they start gaining an audience this all slackens (as you may expect). The voice begins to change as they gain confidence, and they become more authoritative.
Sadly then, some begin to then focus more on the income potential of their blog, rather than bulding relationships and serving their readers. Their goals have changed, and possibly without them ever recognising it.
Good post Chris!
It’s a bit of a different ‘take’ on blogging, to focus on audience first. And therein lies the irony:- as with any communication medium, a blog needs its audience to fulfill its purpose.
I’ve had a lot of helpful suggestions over the past year about ‘narrowing the focus’ of my DG blog, but in actual fact I am hardly ever ‘off topic’ there – because the interests of a particular ‘demographic’ are my blog topic. My job as a lifestyle blogger, as I see it, is to refine my understanding of that audience and respond accordingly.
My blog is for me and me alone.
Just kidding.
My blog is for the Googlers and whomever else finds it…
Thank you for this post. It’s seems crazy to me how easy it is to get off track and or cut corners when you really don’t feel like posting.
I think you make a great point about our blogs being for both the reader and the writer. Also, that we need a plan, goal or vision.
I also try to remember it as an exercise in focus and discipline; two critical components of ones character but two difficult things to keep at in today’s world.
Thanks for taking the time to focus on your content. You Rock. M
Good post! Focus is important…as is ensuring you are blogging for the right reasons; your own and your audiences.
I started a blog a year ago, with a very narrow focus. It was geared to a specific audience. I forgot part two of your advice; The blog wasn’t generating value for me!
It was a chore to update, the content was something I was periodically interested in, but not enough to ensure the quality of the blog was up to my standards.
Lesson learned…
This is one of the most important questions every blogger needs to ask. Who is my blog for? To be successful, you gotta get real clear on this one. Otherwise, who are you writing for? I know I like to hear myself talk sometimes, but I don’t often write just see my words on the screen. I want to help people and make a difference in people’s lives. Only way that’s going to happen is with being clear who my blog is for.
Thanks, Chris.
Yes! Completely agree with you here. It really goes back to strategy – and everything online should be managed by one. For me – amongst other things – it’s about offering value to my readers while creating opportunities for me.
@Everett – WWSGD plugin, not sure about it myself, I find it just a little annoying as it still shows for me even though it is supposed to place a cookie …
@Jeremy – exactly, there needs to be value on BOTH sides
@Jeff – Agreed, I guess some people are too give or take focused in all human interaction. Balance is the key
@Arjun – Drawing from your own experience is a powerful way to blog
@Armen – Yup I see that too. One of the reasons I did my commenting challenge was that I see too few people get off their own blog and comment
@Jen – A focus can be defined by the topic or the audience. For example my personal blog doesn’t have any one topic, it is for people who know me (or want to)
@Paula – But what is the payoff, for you and the googlers – that is the question …
@Mike – Indeed, focus and discipline … easy to say but so hard to keep up
@Brad – It is amazing how blogging can be a chore or joy depending on the topic and its meaning to you
@Dawud – If you can touch peoples lives in a positive way AND benefit, that there is gold
@Gino – And blogs work GREAT for creating opportunities once you have the “value to my readers” part cracked
Hey Chris, yeah, it’s unfortunate that it took me the exercise of building and maintaining a blog I wasn’t really into, to learn that lesson. Ah well, the good ones don’t come cheap.