When starting a blog, there is a long list of things to be tackled.
One of the most important is knowing and understanding your audience. Knowing who reads your blog will affect everything you do such as understanding what kind of blog posts to write to them, where to find them online, what their needs and goals are, what they struggle with and so on.
When I first started my blog, I did not really know just how important this was and my efforts for the first year or so were a bit helter-skelter.
I did not know where my audience went online, so I set up social media on every platform but there was hardly any activity on channels like Pinterest and I had the most engagement on Facebook. That should have shown me that spending time on Pinterest was not very fruitful and I needed to share more posts and engage with my audience on Facebook and spend any money on Facebook ads and not on a different channel.
When I first started blogging I would churn out articles that were 2000 – 3000 words. I found out that people do not want to take that much time to read an article and I have reduced them to 600 – 800 words.
One day I paid a web designer a lot of money to create an online shop on my blog. Had I first understood that my audience is not willing to easily splash their money online, it would have saved me my Swedish Kronors 🙂
Knowing your audience and pleasing them involves some trial and error and a little time invested but it is worth it in the end.
The tools that helped me get a better understanding of my audience were;
•Google analytics: This is an important tool that gives you an insight to how your audience relates to your blog. There are so many things google analytics tells me about my audience. For example, it tells me how many people visited my blog, page views over a week, a month or even a year. It tells me the geographical location of my audience. It shows me what posts resonated the most with people so I can change the way I write my articles even more. Google analytics is comprehensive and one can read all about its features including installation here.
•The second thing I did to understand my audience better is monitor how posts were received on Facebook, blog comments, shares on social media and articles picked up by other blogs. That gave me a clue as to what was interesting to them and what did not affect them in anyway. If an article had no traction, I knew not to go in that direction and try something else.
The blog taught me that it was really not about me but it was all about my audience.
Nyakarima King is the blogger behind www.asummerbunny.com, and has an author website at www.nyakarimaking.com. Follow her on twitter at@nyakarimaking and like her “A Summer Bunny” Facebook page.