Starting a blog with the goal of making money is fine, but monetization strategies won’t work if you can’t convert traffic into long term readers or subscribers.  Converting that blog traffic means having the right content that will keep new visitors on your site.  And creating that blog content begins by defining who your target audience is.

Your Primary Target Audience

A target audience can be as broad or as narrow as your blog’s niche allows, but requires definition so that your blogging efforts can be focussed on meeting the needs of that audience.  If you don’t know who you are writing for how can you know if your blog content will resonate with the reader?

Take a few moments and think about who your blog’s target audience is in a broad sense.  You might come up with definitions such as:

• Photographers
• Cooking enthusiasts
• People who want to lose weight
• Parents of school-age children

Next try to identify the types of problems or questions these people in your blog’s primary target audience might have that they will be searching online for.

For cooking enthusiasts you might come up with ideas such as:

• Which basic ingredients to keep in your kitchen at all times
• The most versatile or useful kitchen utensils to buy
• How to make homemade pizza bases
• How to cook for a large party
• Low fat alternatives to delicious recipes

Those five ideas alone can expand out to dozens of interlinked blog posts – for example making pizza bases requires the correct basic ingredients on hand, the right utensils, and can then carry forward into a potentially limitless number of pizza recipes.

You can then write tips on how to cook a lot of pizza for a large party, and how to make low fat pizza recipes at home.  All of those blog posts would satisfy your primary target audience.

Your Secondary Target Audience

After defining your blog’s primary target audience you should take some time to consider who your secondary audience might be.  To me a secondary audience is someone who will find your blog content useful and interesting because of how it relates to their primary interest.

It is important to define secondary audiences because they can become a very large part of your blog’s traffic without you actually straying from your main topic.

If your primary audience is cooking enthusiasts then your secondary audiences might include the other examples I mentioned earlier – photographers, parents, and people wanting to lose weight.

• Some photographers dedicate themselves to food photography and enjoy well photographed galleries of recipes and meals
• Parents want to know which ingredients to keep on hand for quick and easy meal options, how to cater for their children’s parties, and how to feed their family low fat, healthy meals
• People who want to lose weight are always seeking out low fat food recipes especially when they are delivered as daily or weekly meal plans to help manage their calories
• Combining two of the above, busy parents who want to lose weight often struggle with finding the time to cook healthy meals, so if you can deliver them low fat, convenient recipes that their kids will also enjoy you’ve got yourself a killer piece of highly targeted content

Secondary audiences are important if you want to blog in a broad niche, but they can also help you define a much smaller niche to focus your efforts on.  There is no reason you can’t be a successful food blogger focusing only on a specific cooking topic such as pizza, or tips for busy parents, or low fat diets.

As long as you understand who you are writing for there should be no shortage of on-topic content ideasfor your blog that solve reader’s problems.

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Audience, Blogging, Traffic, Visitors