How do You Find Your Blog Audience?

YOU DON'T!!

That’s right: according to the website SocialWebSchool, you don’t find your audience. They find you. Your job, as a blogger, is to make it easy for them to find you when they decide to look for information. It’s a simple formula, but it’s so easy to get off-track.

The following information is on their website, but do check their website to learn about many blogging tips!

Identify your audience, or “Tribe” if you prefer. You’d be surprised how few bloggers even think about this. If you’re writing for one-legged ex-sailors with an unhealthy obsession with white whales, you will need to write differently than if your audience is primarily librarians who recommend books about sailors with an unhealthy obsession with white whales (also, these two groups will face different problems, I would guess).

Understand your audience’s needs, desires, and frustrations. Do NOT assume they are just like you: they aren’t, although you may have some things in common. Do some research. Find bloggers who are already engaging your audience and read their posts and, just as important, read the comments.

Once you understand who they are and what they need, share information that helps them solve a problem. Pick one problem per post. Another day, another problem, another blog post.

Worried you will run out of problems to help your audience solve? Don’t. Your audience will never run out of problems. Collectively, they have more problems, with more variations than you can possibly imagine. If you keep researching your audience (oh, did I forget to mention that’s an ongoing task?), and interact with them, you will discover new things you can help them with.

Their problems (it doesn’t have to be a big problem; it could be a small problem like “where can I find pipe tobacco locally?”) are what send them to Google in search of solutions. If you have created a focused, frequently updated resource of information and search engine magnet by writing blog posts that address their questions and issues, they will find you.

What is an audience?


An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called the "reader"), theatre, music or academics in anymedium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only modest clapping and criticism and reception.


But a blog audience is perhaps a little different, or is it?

Followers of blogs usually follow a blog that is of interest to them, maybe on travel, fashion, cooking, fancy cars, photography or anything else that maybe of interest.


My blog is titled:

my life in Singapore

My thoughts and feelings about my life in Singapore. What we have seen, the places we have been, what we have done and the people we have met.

and that is what it is about ...

people we have met, places we have been, what we have done and what we have seen. But it is also about how to help my fellow Expats, where to find what, how to get where, how we found something, what's on in Singapore, anything I come across that I think will help someone else here in Singapore .... I will blog about!

My most popular blog posting (over the past four years) is on "Taking the bus from Singapore to Johor Bahru" I probably get about 20 - 25 visits per day on that page alone!

This week's most popular page is the one on the rehearsal fireworks for the National Day Parade. Have had about 90 visits to that page over the past few days.

When the "Great Race" was on TV recently - well a few months ago - I was getting about 25 hits per day just on eating an Ice Cream sandwich, only because they had interviewed one of the Ice Cream uncles along Orchard Rd .... this led to my photographs appearing in the June issue of Food and Travel.

Another popular blog posting is titled: Would you eat a sandwich with a spoon?, it is about certain foods that require the appropriate utensil. Asian foods are no exception: they seem to taste better eaten with chopsticks!
So if you want to be one of the FOLLOWERS of my blog, then click on the FOLLOW button on the top of the blog page! 

According to my stats, I have had over 200 visits to my blog in the past 24 hours. Including 94 from Singapore, 56 from the US and 19 from Germany ..... and yes I see only 5 from Australia, most unusual as it is normal to only get one or two daily. No one from down there is ever interested in reading what is happening in Singapore!!

But in the past 12 hours I have had visitors from Argentina, Kerala, Vietnam, Hay River in the NorthWest Territories of Canada, Hong Kong, New York, Surrey, Japan, India, Kuala Lumpar as well as many other places.

The referring sites are firstly Singapore Yahoo (big surprise there), then Singapore google, thirdly it is google.com and next comes Facebook.

There are now an estimated 220 million active Internet users worldwide, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, but the value of that audience seems to be falling even as it grows in size and scope.

Web companies like Yahoo, which reaches 35 million users per month in the United States alone, and AOL, which reaches 37 million, have scrambled to replace lost revenue as the value of Internet ads -- and, by extension, of surfers' eyeballs -- has eroded.

But even though the wisdom of plastering banner ads on general interest Web sites may be in question, the Internet audience is still a highly valuable commodity, if it can be harnessed in the right way. As some bloggers have found out .. to their advantage too.

If you do not have a blog and am interested in getting started, click HERE to read the blogger's guide and help page, or HERE to learn how to create a blog.


But let me know how you go and if this blog posting was of any help to YOU!!




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