One of the biggest things to help you boost your blogs traffic is to learn more about your blogs audience, and then make sure your content and promotion of content caters to them. If you already have a blog you can look into your audience insights to understand who you current audience is, but a good activity to try is to describe your “ideal reader” which fits your vision of the blog. You can then compare and contrast this with your actual reader, and try to understand why there’s a difference or if you should change something. If you’re a new blogger, an ideal reader can help guide you when creating content as you know who you’re talking to.
Basic Demographics
First up, it’s good to understand the basic demographics of your blogs audience. Whilst some niche’s will have broader demographics, it’s unusual for you to be able to reach both 16 year old girls who love make up and 75 year old men who love mountain climbing for every single piece of content you make. So it’s better to make an educated guess for some of these, especially when it comes to trying to find readers for your content.
Here’s just some of the demographics to think about when you think of your “ideal reader”
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Ethnicity
- Education level
- Income level
- Industry/job
Preferences and Habits
After basic demographics you can look into more subjective topics like preferences and habits of your ideal reader. If you’re writing about your own interests, hobbies, or passions then your reader will most likely share these with you. However, their may be other activities which are linked that you can also branch out into with your content.
This kind of content can tell you what you could create content around, the tone you should take with content, and how to possibly reach this audience.
The next set of criteria to think about is:
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Passions
- Personality
- What device are they using?
- What media do they already consume?
- What’s their general disposition? How do they view the world?
- If they had a completely free day, what would they spend it doing?
Social Media
Another thing about your ideal reader is guessing where they spend most of their time online. Most people don’t solely use the internet for reading blogs, and social media has a huge amout of users all day every day. So which of the following can you assume your blogs audience uses?
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Other social networks?
Money Habits
Then finally, if you’re blogging to try and earn money you need to understand your audiences money habits too. If you’re a blog all about luxury fashion for example, your ideal audience would be someone who has more disposable income, wants to spend and will splurge on a great piece of clothing. On the other hand, you may have a student focused blog which writes for those who have less disposable income, and would like to save money where possible. Ask yourself:
- What expenses do they have? Disposable income?
- Do they enjoy spending or saving money?
- What do they like to splurge on?
- What do they like to save on?
There’s also a chance for any of the above to change, evolve or be different. Knowing your ideal reader doesn’t mean you have to always cater to them. You don’t need to pigeon hole your content or your blogs audience if you would like to branch out. So if you’re a book niche and your ideal reader is other readers, don’t worry if you want to create content around your other hobbies like gaming, or fashion, or anything.
Checking Your Current Readers
I’ve spoken a lot above about your ideal reader, and the reader you should aim for. However you can use Google Analytics, WordPress and even social media sites to check your current readers. It’s always interesting to check if there’s differences in audiences across different sites and to understand if that’s due to differing content or if it’s to do with the platform itself.