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 🙂
