Identifying Your Blog’s Target Audience: Who Should You Write for?
Should you write for yourself or your readers? Who is the audience of a blog? As a blogger, knowing who you write for is just as important as knowing why you started a blog? This is because learning how to identify your blog’s target audience determines the type of content you publish as well as your writing style.
Fortunately, identifying your blog’s target audience is not difficult. Two of the questions you need to ask yourself when trying to find the target audience of your blog are, who are the people you want to read your blog and why do you write in the first place.
Why did you start your blog? Was it to build a community, share your knowledge on a particular subject, or were you simply looking for an outlet or a medium to sort your feelings out?
Knowing the purpose of your blog will help you find your target audience.
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Who Should You Write for?
Every blogger starts their blog for a reason and with an idea of who they want to read and engage with their content. So, who do you write for?
The target audience of your blog is the people who benefit the most from your content and find the information you share valuable.
Depending on its purpose, there are different types of audiences your blog can have. Most people write for either of these types of target audiences.
- Yourself
As mentioned earlier, everyone has their own reasons for starting a blog and the purpose they want it to serve. Some bloggers create a blog but keep it private so that they are the only ones who can view the content.
Such blogs are common for bloggers who use their sites as an online diary or journal to write about their private thoughts and feelings or how they spent their day. So the first type of audience your blog can have is yourself if you run a private blog.
You could also have a public blog but still, have yourself as the target audience. You write about things that interest you without considering what anyone else thinks, what is trending, or whether your readers will like the content or not.
Writing for yourself is one of the best ways to create content for your blog and find a loyal audience because writing about things that interest you will attract readers that are interested in the same things.
Your content will be relatable to them, and many will join you on your blogging journey even though your main focus when writing is yourself and not them.
For instance, if you are on a weight loss journey, starting a blog to document your progress might interest readers who are trying to lose weight too.
- Followers and subscribers
Your blog subscribers and social media followers are the most obvious target audience of a blog. You create content to provide solutions, educate, or update them on various matters.
Your posts also cover topics you know your readers will be interested in and are likely to engage with.
However, writing for your followers and subscribers does not mean that you shouldn’t write for yourself as well. When starting your blog, when you had only a few or no subscribers, you had to choose a blogging niche(s) that interests you.
Creating high-quality content on topics you are passionate about is what made people subscribe to or follow your blog.
Hence, having your subscribers and followers as your target audience doesn’t mean you are stuck writing about topics that do not interest you. It just means that you have them at the top of your mind when creating content for your blog on topics you love.
READ ALSO: 100 Things I Have Learned from Blogging: 100 Blog Posts Milestone
- Search engines
Many bloggers, especially those who want to make money blogging, have search engines in mind when creating content for their blogs because they want their site to rank on the first page of SERPs.
Even though search engines are not the target audience per se, they serve as a medium for people to find your blog easily.
Search engines are very effective at bringing you closer to your target audience and narrowing it down. Thus, if you want to reach a bigger audience with your blog, you should create high-quality content optimized for search engines, with targeted keywords, optimized images, and include external and internal backlinks.
Unfortunately, some bloggers who use search engines as a medium to find their blog’s target audience misuse SEO practices by doing unethical things like buying backlinks and keyword stuffing which could affect their sites negatively in the long run.
So, who should you write for? How do you identify the target audience for your blog?
The bottom line is that if you want to learn how to identify your blog’s target audience, you will have to know why you are writing in the first place. Who will benefit the most from reading your content? Why did you start a blog? Knowing the purpose of your blog will guide you when identifying your target audience.
However, no matter who your blog’s target audience is, it is important to write for yourself and people first before writing for search engines. The best thing you can do if you want your blog to be successful is to find a way to balance writing for yourself, your readers, and search engines.
Ensure that the topics you choose to cover interest you because your readers can tell when you are not passionate about a subject and are writing just to write.
Identifying your blog’s target audience will help you create better content and grow your site’s traffic, as many might decide to subscribe or keep coming back when they need credible information.
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