Marketing Your Blog: Know Your Perfect Reader

Marketing Your Blog: Who’s Reading?

Marketing Your Blog Successfully is built upon knowing who your readership is. If you don’t get your readers, you won’t get readers – and let’s face it – we all want more of them.

Analytics reveals important information about who’s visiting your blog, but at the core of knowing your readers are things that Analytics tools can’t uncover. Understanding who they are, where they are, what they want, what they fear, and what motivates them on an emotional level.

If you don’t know who your readers are, where they are and what they want, you will struggle to provide relevant and valuable content and information, which will translate into inability to build readership, authority and generate income.

Some bloggers and marketers online naturally find themselves doing this right. If that’s not you, fear not – the core skills for marketing your blog can be learned.

This strategy (based on Eben Pagan’s ‘Customer Avatar’ concept) is a simple process designed to enable you to know, understand and target your perfect reader.

Marketing Your Blog: Know Your Perfect Reader

If you don’t have a blog or business yet, this is the perfect place to start.

If you do, this process will help you fine-tune your understanding of your readership, cater better to their needs and market your blog successfully to more people who want what you offer.

Read my recent post Marketing Your Blog: How to Make Your Readers Need You for further tips and ideas for uncovering what your current reader or customer base is looking for.

Introducing: Your Perfect Blog Reader

This as an exercise. Go through these steps and write down the results with reference to your own blog and niche.

1. Brainstorm all the qualities that a reader of your blog may have.
2. Consider the demographic – does your perfect reader fall into a particular age-group? Are they male, female, located in a certain geographical area, have a certain income, education level etc?
3. Identify Commonalities and disregard irrelevant information. Pick out the qualities or characteristics which characterize this person as your perfect reader, and exclude the rest.
4. Imagine an individual who embodies these core characteristics. Give them a name. Sense what they might be like as a real person.
5. Learn to speak your perfect reader’s language. Think about the words and phrases they use, and the way they communicate – especially in relation to your blog’s niche.

Sample Case Study

To illustrate this process in action, here’s an imaginary set of responses to these steps for the imaginary ‘organic-seeds-blog.com’, a blog about growing organic veggies which promotes organic veggie seeds.

1. The perfect reader for our Organic Veggie Seed Supplies blog has the following characteristics:

Interested in healthy living, value quality over economy, care about what they eat, like eating freshly picked veggies, feel strongly about natural gardening principles, dislike chemical and mass food production methods, enjoy growing their own food (or want to), have access to garden or growing space, enjoy a simple, down to earth approach to life, are environmentally aware.

2. Our Organic Seed Blog reader Demographic:

Both male and female, age 30-60, medium income band (have some disposable income). Live in Australia (that’s where our hypothetical business is based). Some college education.

3. These following are the principle characteristics which lead to our reader being interested in reading the material on organic-seeds-blog.com:

Care about what they eat, Like eating freshly picked veggies, don’t like mass produced food, dislike chemical and mass food production methods, enjoy growing their own food (or want to), have access to garden or growing space.

The main demographic factor we really need to consider is the location. Our readers are of a broad adult age range (not very young or old) and of both genders.

4. Our perfect Organic Seed blog reader is a 39 year old woman called Sue.

She and her husband own a one acre property, and although they work during the week they enjoy spending time in the garden on some evenings and at the weekend. They’re both health conscious and believe that fresh organic food supports them in maintaining high energy levels and health.

Sue has two kids and cares very strongly about their health and growth, and wants to impart an awareness of healthy eating to them. Whilst she’s environmentally conscious, Sue’s not an extremist, but is conscientious about doing the ‘right thing’ by the environment. To her, that means reducing her family’s ‘carbon footprint’ and supporting a sustainable global future with the daily choices she makes.

For example, she much prefers to shop at her local health food shop and farmer’s market rather than the national supermarket, even though the food there is cheaper, and she likes the idea of supporting small business with her purchases over supporting large companies and corporations. She strongly feels that growing your own food where possible is an important she and her family can take to make the world a better place.

(Note: This step can particularly benefit from some direct research and connection with your readership)

5. Based on the profile above, we can get an insight into the kind of language Sue communicates, thinks, and searched online with:

Sue has a basic grasp of current environmental language. She understands and uses terms like ‘carbon neutral’, ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘low food miles’. She also uses words that reflect her interest in health on an individual and global level, along with a ‘grassroots’ approach to life, such as ‘wholesome’, ‘nutritional’, ‘nourishing’, ‘nurturing’, ‘organic’, ‘sustainable’.

(Note: taken further, this step is a powerful way to uncover long tail keywords which your readers are using in the search engines)

Now You Know Your Perfect Reader: What’s Next?

Speak to them.

When you produce content, design your layout, craft headlines, develop products and (of course) market your blog – Speak to your perfect reader.

Consider their values, their lifestyle, what they feel strongly about, and incorporate their language into your blog and marketing material.

Done right, your readers will feel like you are communicating with them personally, and understand exactly where they’re coming from (because you do!).

That will inspire them to trust you and feel inclined to read more, subscribe, sign up and purchase your products or recommendations.

Once you’ve run through this process and built up a perfect reader profile, you have the best possible foundation from which to maximize your efforts to market your blog.

Want to know more about how to market your blog successfully? Stay tuned each week for more posts in this Blog Marketing Mondays series, and subscribe to my Blog Marketing Magic Newsletter at the top right of this page for exclusive Blogger’s Alchemy content on how to market your blog – the right way.

Image adapted from: ‘I See You’ by TheFixer – Creative Commons 2.0

Marketing Your Blog: Know Your Perfect Reader © 2011 Blogger’s Alchemy