Do you know what your blog is about? Strange question, but a serious one!
What YOU think your blog is about and what your audience thinks it is about might be two very different things …
As you might have already read, I used to read Scott Adams Dilbert Blog, in the “before times”, and he once told a story about how readers determine what your theme is …
Readers tell you what your comic is about, regardless of how many times you address a theme.
Scott Adams
Essentially he says no matter how many times you write about a certain topic, the subject that connects with your audience is what they will remember and is therefore the real theme of your work.
How does this relate to blogging?
Consider what you believe you write about, is that the same thing that attracts people to read your blog?
By not writing about what they expect, are you letting your audience down and reducing your appeal?
Could you be annoying your core audience by providing something that doesn’t match what they want from you?
It’s actually strangely familiar.
Is It Your Content Or Your Referrals?
There are a whole bunch of people who think this is an SEO blog. I have written a fair bit about SEO over the years but I would not have thought nearly enough for it to be labeled as such.
I put it down to the strong referrals I managed to acquire from the SEO community at one time. Back in and around the early 2000s, there were a bunch of us who used to hang out online, and those relationships stick.
Of course, the people that ProBlogger or Copyblogger sends me are going to have a different idea of what my site is about too.
It’s no different to social media, there will be people who think my accounts are about cute pets or dad jokes!
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Product-Market Fit in Content
If you are blogging for yourself or as a journal/diary, it is of course absolutely up to you what you write about.
Just like a one-hit-wonder recording artist, do not be surprised if you suddenly have something go popular and you are forever being asked about it.
But if a large percentage of people “misunderstand” what you are about, then you do need to analyze the situation.
- Who are you TRYING to attract?
- Who DO you attract?
- What are you doing to attract the above?
- What do those people want?
- What are you showing clear success with?
Sacrifice, Segue, or Settle?
What can you do if people think your site is about one thing but you have other ideas?
- Sacrifice the topic – Stop talking about it, move it elsewhere,
- Segue – Bring those people along to the new subjects, maybe update old posts to bring them more ON topic.
- Settle – Understand this is how it is going to be sometimes!
In my case with social media, other than the newer tools, I split my activity up into subject areas so the retro computer people didn’t need to see pictures of me painting little plastic space men.
For my maker website, I split off the “programming old computers” content to its own site.
On this site, I think SEO content is 100% in line with the expectations of people who want to learn to be more successful in blogging so that is fine by me.
What I did stop writing about on this site, however, were technical topics like website development, marketing technology, and programming. People who come here just didn’t really take to it.
What Next?
- Create marketing pen portraits of your most WANTED reader.
- Ask your existing readers what they want from you!
- Check your analytics to see what is working for you and what connects those topics.
