Thinking about the kind of audience I’m targeting my blog at.
(Have you ever noticed how your life slowly grinds to a halt when you give in to your fears? I’d better start drawing again soon otherwise I won’t have a blog left to target.)
Before I started with this blog I had a Dutch blog for two years. Kind of a diary. I talked about my life and the kind of problems I faced on a daily basis.
You can imagion that hardly anyone read that blog. I had about 1 reader a week. I always suspected that the only people reading where colleague’s of mine who were afraid that I would tell were the skeletons where buried.
When I started this blog it was not only meant to be a podium where I could tell my stories but also as a kind of marketing tool to present (and maybe even sell) my drawing. So I wanted a lot more readers then I had with my old blog.
So I did what you are supposed to do. I read the Problogger site to learn about blogging. I read Weblogtoolscollection to learn about design and plugins and most important I read Copyblogger to learn about how you should write. In July I came across a site that promised to teach you ways to get free traffic and for a month I read The thirty day challenge.
I did learn a lot.
- I learned that if you write several articles a day you’ll get a lot of traffic from google. But my main focus for this site is to present drawings and I don’t do 3 or 4 drawings on a day.
- I learned that the blogshere is kind of a community. You’ll get much more readers when you comment on other peoples blogs. But I have a hard enough time to communicate in real life. I don’t like talking to strangers and I don’t want to talk to people only to get them to read my blog.
- I learned that there are a lot of plugins that you can use to increase the joy of writing and reading a blog but that you shouldn’t over do it otherwise your blog will look like a Christmas tree and no one will like it.
- And I learned that you should think about your target audience.
That last piece of advice always puzzled me the most.
There are some 500 million people on the Internet. Some of them visit my website ones in a while. Why would I want to think about who they are?
I never think about who people are.
I think about the way they act. I think about what kind behavior I can expect of them. But I never think about who they are.
(I’m told that’s typical of autistics.)
A few months ago Ed Dale, the king of affiliate marketing and the guy behind the thirty day challenge, advised his reader to read the book Made to Stick
I’m not that interested in advertising but Ed was very enthusiastic about this book so I bought it.
It’s turned out the be a very interesting book. With a lot of anecdotes and fun the book explains how you can get your message across in a way people will remember as good as the story about the guy who lost his kidney.
After reading about two thirds of the book I just realized that they also tell a lot about targeting your ads at the right audience. The only difference is that while every other book and site stresses on how important it is. The writers of this book just give examples of real problems governments and companies face and how these problems were solved and how they could have been solved.
A few years ago the state of Texas had a problem with littering. They spent a lot of money cleaning up and educating the public with messages like “Please Don’t litter” but nobody paid them much attention.
The problem was that the kind of guy that littered: A 18 to 35 years old, pickup-driving male who liked sports and country music. He didn’t like authority.
“Bubba” wasn’t impressed by the states message not to littered. On the contrary. The more state stressed not to litter to more “Bubba” did.
The advertising companies they came up with was targeted at Bubba: “Don’t mess with Texas” says a lot about how you would want people to deal with Texas and with littering.
You’ll have to read the book if you want to find out which techniques were used to get to this slogan. The point that interests me is that by targeting the message at a specific person it becomes much clearer what you should say to get the message across. The book has a dozen more examples where imagining a specific person clarifies the message. But only after reading the story about Bubba I realized that companies who advertise have the opposite problem of what I have.
I’m not trying to get a message across. My problem is that with all the techniques I’ve learned about blogging I’m pressing myself into a mold that isn’t really me.
I’m trying to do all the things you should do to get more visitors:
- Finding interesting meaningful titles.
- Telling what the article is about before I start with the article.
- Writing an article you can scan without loosing the track of the point.
- Presenting interesting content. Never forget the “content”
- Making it an interesting story.
- Giving enough backstory. Taking care that some one who hasn’t read the rest of my stories still understands what I’m talking about.
Giving enough backstory is the point that I find the most difficult. Even with communication in real life I usually have the feeling that people know almost every thing there is to know about me. I know they don’t. But it feels as though they do.
It takes a lot of effort not to make remarks that refer to other articles I’ve written or even to articles that I’ve jet to write.
How can thinking about my target audience help me to improve my blog?
Well for one thing now I know for whom I’m not writing. I’m not writing for people who find me via a search engine. Most of them only stay for something like 1 second so they don’t actually read anything. The few that stay for longer usually come to read either my articles about fireworks or my articles about abstract drawings and then they leave.
Which is fine. But they don’t seem to be that interested in the rest of the things I talk about.
So for whom am I writing?
I think people that have some personal interest in autism, either because they are autistic or because they know someone who is. I like to think that my writings would be of interest both for people who believe that autistics can lead a full and fulfilling life and for people who don’t think they can.
And of course I also write for any one who is interested in drawing and in my trails and tribulation while I’m learning to draw.
(If you’re in neither group you’re still welcome to read my blog 
)
See me draw
