Target your audience

Targeting your audience is a very important thing to think about when you’re about to write a new weblog article. I think there is need to focus on someone when writing an article. You need to make sure that there is actually someone who wants to read it. It’s the same with movies. They have a specific idea of which people should see a movie, otherwise producers and directors would not think about making it.

There a several groups you can think of when writing a new article:

Google

What you want: Visitors that come via a search engine.

The first important thing to think about here is the title of your article. It should fit to what the potential visitor is looking for in Google. So the title should include the keywords you think people are using in their queries. Google will rank pages higher if the keywords appear in the title tag. That is where your title should appear in WordPress or any other blogging tool.

Also, make sure that you’re using the keywords you want to target in your article. When writing about your topic, stick to the important facts in the first few paragraphs. People do not even spend a second on a page they found through a search engine, when this page does not appear to have the information one looked for.

I think adding outgoing links to pages with the same topic is a good idea, too, since Google recognizes outgoing links.

Bookmarks

What you want: Visitors that bookmark your page and add it to large bookmarking site like del.icio.us, furl, digg, etc.

Get people to bookmark your pages is more complicated. First, you need to write a good article. One that people want to read. It should contain interesting facts or things, something like that. With the bookmarking sites, your article should make people feel “Oh, this could be useful in the future – not only for me”.

The other way to get into lists like del.icio.us‘ popular sites is to write an article about del.icio.us or something that is really useful for del.icio.us users. Like my article about Extremely-fast del.icio.us bookmarking.

Regular readers

What you want: Keeping regular readers subscribed, get them to read an article, resonance.

Targeting an article on regular readers is not that difficult, since they read your site regularly. Most people will read your blog through the RSS feed they subscribed to. That is why you should pay attention on the title you choose for your article. Good titles make people click on it and visit your site. Others make them not even read the description given in the feed.

If you have a lot of regular readers, you can target them and you get bookmarks automatically.

People with same interests

What you want: Others to link to your article.

That is very much related to bookmarks. Make sure the article is interesting and contains useful information. Then you can contact other bloggers and tell them to check out the article. If they like it, they will mention it in their blog, maybe. Nothing easier than that, huh?

Conclusion

Targeting your audience should just give you an idea who you can think of when writing an article. Just have in mind that someone should read it. Do not write articles, just because you have to. Every target audience is related to another, so writing for someone is just the beginning. It is likely that you will attract other visitors, too. And that’s of course not a bad thing.

Published by

Julian Bez

Julian Bez

Julian Bez is a software engineer and former startup founder from Berlin, Germany.

  • http://suchshakespearestuff.blogspot.com Duane Morin

    I agree completely. I used to write about Shakespeare all the time on my personal blog because it’s just something I’m geeky about. But as I ended up getting the most of my traffic from reality television topics I realized that the two audiences really were just getting in each other’s way. So I moved the Shakespeare stuff over to its own blog and the hit rates on adsense have been much better ever since.

    The only real trick to it is deciding how much to break it down. For instance if like to talk about mostly reality tv, and some traditional tv, do I address one TV audience, two, or maybe even one for each show? That’s just a matter of watching the traffic that each topic gets, and deciding if you’ve got enough to write about each one that merits its own site, in my book. Thus far the Shakespeare’s all I’ve moved over to its own topic, and everything else stays in the catchall of my personal blog.

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  • http://www.thomsinger.blogspot.com Thom Singer

    Staying on topic is very important. I try to do that with my “Business Development / Marketing Blog”….and I now have some regular readers (dozens….sadly, not hundreds). However, it is interesting that the most positive feedback I get is from my “Weekend Blog” posts where I talk about odd topics, things that I enjoy, my family, etc….

  • http://www.dolbydesigns.com harris2004

    I think Search Engine Traffic is what makes the money, other users will not click on your ads and most of the returning users will be ignored for multi clicks, so if you get can a decent amount of traffic from Google then you are set for money making..MSN is good too..