6 Steps to Focus Your Blog Content to Your Target Audience

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Maybe you are about to launch a blog or possibly considering how to focus your content to draw a specific customer. Content consumers – your customers – are looking for something when they come to your blog. Do you deliver? How do you know?

In this article we discuss techniques so you can gear your blog content to your target audience. With a solid plan and a little legwork, you can focus your content and capture a more pinpointed audience. To do this, you must follow six clear steps.

Define Your Niche

People have a specific goal when they start looking for information. They may not know exactly what that is, but they know it when they see it. Whether you get traffic to your site by search engines, referrals, or word-of-mouth, the goal is to answer the question or solve the problem of your customer.

If you cant say what you do in a sentence, you might be trying to reach too broad of an audience.

The best way to do this is to carefully define your niche. What is it that you do best? Can you summarize this in a single statement that could become your blogs tagline?

If you cant say what you do in a sentence, you might be trying to reach too broad of an audience. Not that this is wrong, but it means you likely have a lot more work ahead of you.

On the other hand, if you can sum up your niche in a sentence, you are on your way to focused blog content. It is much easier to decide what kind of content to provide when you know exactly what it is your customers expect.

Define Your Customer

Once you know your niche, you can start to define what kind of readers will be visiting your blog. This does not have to be a highly technical definition. You do not need to be so specific as 35-50 year old females in the upper 10% income bracket who are single.

While this level of definition can useful, in general it is overkill. The key is to understand your customers needs. Often your blog will answer questions or solve problems that are completely independent of gender and income.

For example, you may have a blog that provides content for a specific industry. In this case, education and software selection may be far more important than the gender and income of your readers.

Research Your Customer

Once you have carefully defined your customers, you have to research them. Even if you are an expert in your field, you must throw assumptions aside for the short term and approach your readers from a fresh perspective. You will likely find that you discover something new, relevant, and useful for focusing your blog content to your target audience.

Many research options are available from industry specialists for building analytics code into your website. The goal here is to thoroughly understand:

• The needs of your readers.
• How your readers find answers.
• The type of content that your readers want.

Your research should provide you with a list of questions your customers are asking and methods they use to find answers you can provide.

Plan Your Blog

Next you must prioritize your content. If 80% of your readers find you through a Google search, then you should make search engine optimization your priority and develop content that makes it easy for your customers to find you. If your readers find you through referrals, then you should study these referral pages and see why customers are discovering you through these portals.

Your plan should bear in mind your customers and how they go about finding answers. When you start actually writing (or re-writing) your content, your plan will keep you on the right track so you avoid wasting time on efforts that are outside your readers needs.

Develop Your Content

With a clearly defined customer, it is much easier to write content for your blog because you know what questions your readers want answered and what problems they want solved.

A common strategy is to write articles for several weeks in advance so you have some lag.

A common strategy is to write articles for several weeks in advance so you have some lag. This allows you to rest and recharge and still have some content flowing on a daily or weekly basis. Then you catch back up and keep plenty of articles in your pipeline.

You have many sources of inspiration at your disposal, from other bloggers to news articles, to your own understanding of your readers needs.

Another method of generating content is to write a multi-blog series that covers a topic over several days. This gives you new content and keeps your articles short. But you do not have to come up with an entirely new idea, either.

Finally, keep your articles shorter, rather than longer. Typically, readers struggle consuming more than 300 words in a sitting. This article is different because you are different – youre a blogger and have a much longer attention span! So do keep your specific readers in mind when deciding on length.

Quality content is king. Never forget this. Avoid using mediocre content at all costs. Readers know good content when they see it and will write you off in split second if they get even a remote hint of amateurish or spammy content.

Quantity is also important. You do not necessarily need an article or more a day, unless thats your goal. But you do need a consistent stream of content. A huge mistake is to produce a glut of content up front and then nothing for weeks or months. This signals to readers and search engines that your blog is not up-to-date, so keep a steady set of articles coming.

Measure Your Success

How do you know if you are successful? This goes back to your plan and your definition of your customer. If the right people are coming to your website and staying longer and reading more pages than before, then you can start to celebrate and maybe even do a happy dance.

But how do you really know? Standard practice is to implement analytics into your website. A common free version is Google Analytics, which is free and easy to use. Once installed, you can start measuring just how well your blog is doing and how your readers are finding you.

Wrapping it Up

Successful blogs have a clearly defined niche, customers, and consistently provide a steady stream of quality content that answers questions and solves problems for their target audience. It is all about making your answers accessible. Before long, your readers will know and trust you to provide quality content.

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