Recent Blog Entries
Try to know and understand your target audience
Written by Tyme White on October 19, 2006
If your site covers specific topics and your goal is to have people read your blog, then one would assume you have a target audience. Do you know who your target audience is?
I often see writers decide they want to write about something (for example, technology) because he or she is passionate on the topic. That’s great. They look at the competition and make their plans. The problem is usually they do not decide who their target audience is. They write then pray traffic will eventually come.
I have a similar situation with Ping Six. As Community Director (actually this started when I was a member) I can no longer do what I’ve always done - talk about writing and writers. That leaves me with a problem - what the heck do I write about over there? For months I debated the issue (which is why there are a lack of updates) but there is a bigger problem: the site has an audience so if I write something way off topic I could irk those readers. The dilemma: do what I want or do what they want? Well, if you know me at all you know how that’s going to go. 
I decided I’m going to do something very different. I’m going to do series of articles on business related topics specifically geared towards online sites/companies. This gives me the opportunity to give 9rules members some additional exposure. Not too far off topic because I am still talking about online “stuff” and technology. Having answered the “what” part, let’s answer the rest:
Who: 25-50, mostly male (that’s the way it’s always been for me), most likely geeky but would like to introduce newbies to these topics to foster online growth.
Why: They want to learn about (and strategies for) online ventures.
When: Updated a couple of times a week. No promises for daily updates.
What purpose did this serve:
1) Knowing my audience will be mostly male, don’t have a site that is too “girly” looking.
2) Again, mostly male audience so I need to write things that balance the mostly male audience with my female ways.
3) Age group: let’s me narrow down topics and make sure I’m covering things of interest for the age range.
Get my point? There are many things that can be drawn by this but knowing your target audience helps you fill their needs. Of course you’ll have readers that do not fit your target audience and you may notice you missed your target audience completely so depending on the nature of the site, you might have to revisit that. Knowing my target audience I can also set goals (try to gain more female readers).
Before you go there, yes, there will be times when you don’t care who the target audience is. For example, when I relaunch my personal site the goal is not to gain traffic but for me to articulate my thoughts. No one has to read it…as long as I’m pleased with what I write, I’m happy. However, if you want to monetize your site then you should definitely have a target audience.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
I think everyone wants to be read, even if it’s a personal site. So your advice is certainly relevant for everyone, not just revenue building sites.
Over at Glittering Muse, it’s mostly about my personal growth and the tools I’ve found toward that goal, and the discoveries I make along the way. But I try to narrow the focus to issues which I’ve defined on my site. Though I’ve meandered a bit in direction, I’m finding my target audience to be those who enjoy beauty and inspiration. Lucky for me, that’s what I enjoy, too.
So, perhaps my advice would be similar to some stock picking advice I read a few years back: pick what interests you and go for it. If you love it, you’ll find your niche.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
I’m curious how did you come to those conclusions? What statistics/techniques did you use to make the assumption that your target audience is 25-50 mostly male? What techniques/statistics do you recommend other people use to make these kinds of assumptions about their websites?
October 20th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Good idea. It’s funny, when I first launched my site, I didn’t really have any specific goals other than getting in the habit of writing. Writing was a skill that I felt I needed to develop, and I wanted to create a fun platform that would encourage me to continue writing. It was more for me than anyone else, and if I happened to have visitors, that was just a bonus.
That was a year and a half ago, and now the site has grown, and my audience and content has grown rather organically. I’ll give you an example:
I recently used Crazy Egg to do some real estate analysis of where people were clicking on my homepage. I have several tabbed categories and these categories might appeal to different audiences: Artwork, Bike Lane, Web Design, and Random Life. Until my Crazy Egg test, I had really been focusing on material for the Bike Lane and Web Design categories. But by running this test, I saw that the Artwork tab was getting a ton of hits. I was thrilled, and I started posting a lot more artwork. It seems that although my audience is split between people interested in Web Design or people interested in Bikes, everyone wanted to look at artwork.
October 21st, 2006 at 12:24 am
I agree with you in principle on this one, but, for many of us, gender and age are immaterial to understanding our audience. I might be able to venture a guess that the majority of my readers are male and probably between 20 and 40 years of age, and, like you, I fall outside at least one of these stated categorizations of my target audience. The thing is, I don’t actually write FOR 20 to 40 year old male readers whether they’re interested in web development or not.
I write for web developers and people interested in web development, and I tend to focus in on the application of that to public television though not exclusively. THAT is my target audience whether they’re male, female, young, old, seasoned web professionals, or complete newbs.
I believe that we create the audience that our writing appeals to. We can all find (or possibly even name off the top of our heads) a successful blog that really doesn’t appeal to us even though we may seem to fall into every categorization of that blog’s target audience. We probably also all have (or could find) a blog that we actually enjoy reading and possibly even being part of that in no way seems to apply to us as a target audience.
When I try to qualify my audience, and this may be different for others, I actually lose the very “voice” (writing style) that got me that audience in the first place.
October 21st, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Yes I agree with you, knowing the audience is one of the keys to success.
I think a lot of improvement could be done in the first place, if we start to understand the needs and desires of the audience.
Thank you for sharing this story with me !
October 22nd, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Should I layout my site’s segmentation early on its life? Not really unless you are building a revenue-making site. I get the feeling that all big blogs out there (you know, the one that isn’t created for revenue-stream) doesn’t start with niche market. I believe that they created as a medium for writers to churn-out whatever ideas that come up to their minds.
Then the site grows to cater the ever-shifting interest of the author and the reader until they “clicked”, as in “hey I want to write this, it’s fun!” and “hey, I want to read this, it’s cool!”.
So segmentation is basically okay, but segmenting at the very start of your non-revenue-making blog? That’s like limiting its upside potential Tyme!
October 23rd, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Sorry for the delay in response. How do I know? I interact, ask, and interact some more so I have a general idea. At one time I attended conferences and I have meet ups where readers come and hang out with me. I get a lot of email (way more than comments) so I have another level of interaction.
However how there are tools that will let you know. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn are valuable tools to find out the interest of your readers. If you use these sites invite people to connect and interact with you. I’ve been having a blast on Facebook and once the submissions are done I expect to have even more as I go through sites.
January 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
[...] The next step to having a wildly popular blog is content. Now, it used to be you had to have great content in order to have a great blog. Not anymore. All you need to do is post a quick blurb of your own thoughts then blockquote some other article and link to it. Usually, the other article is from a more popular site than your own. Send out a trackback or a pingback to the more popular article. If you do this, you get visitors without having to do much thinking of your own. If your site covers specific topics and your goal is to have people read your blog, then one would assume you have a target audience. Do you know who your target audience is? Target audience at 9 Rules [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 9:40 am
This is a great blog. I’m recommedning it for my Ed Tech class.