If I told you that Robert De Niro was a frequent reader on my first blog would you be impressed?
Well, don’t be – it turns out that it was just my readers doing their best impressions of him from Taxi Driver: “You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the @#%! do you think you’re talking to?”
It turned out to be a great question.
Like many novice bloggers, I wrote about whatever popped into my head at the time. As you might guess, it was very confusing for my readers. I’d focus on one niche topic for a few weeks and then suddenly I’d be talking about a completely unrelated topic for a few weeks. I hadn’t found the ONE person to whom I was writing yet.
I ended up carving two separate blogs from my original site, because two communities had grown up around it. Each was so divergent that they needed their own site. As I look back, I missed three signs warning me that I was losing my target audience:
The Wrong People Were Commenting on My Posts
Do you remember writing your first blog post? Did you wonder if anyone would even read it? I’d prepared myself for months of silence until my blog found its audience, but I wasn’t expecting that an audience would find my blog.
Before I knew it, I had a small tribe forming around my site. They were commenting on my posts, encouraging me, and telling others about me. Sounds great, right? The problem was that they weren’t who I was trying to reach with my blog.
I struggled to write on my blog’s niche topic, and found myself writing on the topics that interested them instead. I’d convinced myself that I could convert them over. I felt a lot like Danny Brown when he talked about trying to impress the wrong person.
By trying so hard to impress the mom, I was missing out on trying to impress the one I really should have been impressing – my girlfriend. So what if her mom liked me, when I wasn’t really being the guy my girlfriend wanted, but a poor substitute for an approving mom instead?
Who’s commenting on your blog posts? Do they match the description of your one person? Or, are you trying to impress the wrong person like I was by catering to your readers instead of your target audience?
My Blog’s Demographics Didn’t Match My Target Audience
Peter has talked about the need to niche many times on this site, but he points out that many of us still go about it the wrong way – especially when it comes to defining our audience or target market.
The problem is that we also tend think ‘target market’ when we’re determining our niche, which implies a group of people. I’d like you to stop thinking ‘target market’ and start thinking “customer profiles”, which implies ONE person — the ONE person you exist to serve with your product or service.
To demonstrate this, he gives us a typical example of what many of us think of as our target market. It goes along the lines of something like, “Women, 27-39, single, educated, income of over $40,000 and who like eating chocolate.”
While I agree with his point, this general description can serve as a warning sign to determine if you’re losing your target audience. Most small business owners don’t have access to more robust marketing research; however, there is a free tool available which works nicely with this general description:
This snapshot was generated by Alexa, a web traffic tracking company. If Peter’s example was the target market of this site then we could see that they’re definitely in the right ballpark with the traffic they attract. No warning signs here.
Note: Alexa depends on information provided by people who use their toolbar. Marcus Sheridan has written about how this can cause Alexa’s results to make little sense at times. For our purposes, they are simply used as a potential warning sign.
My Posts Weren’t Shared Where My Target Audience Hung Out
While you can have a successful blog without social media, it’s much easier to promote it when these platforms are part of your marketing strategy. Are your posts primarily being shared on blogger forums when your target audience hangs out on Facebook?
If so, your readers may not be part of your target audience. Relying on the old axiom that there’s no such thing as bad press, I facilitated these shares to places my target audience didn’t hang out by providing voting buttons on my site.
What about you? Are you making it easy for your readers to share your posts on the social media sites where your target audience hangs out?
Those were my three mistakes, and once I corrected them, everything started to improve. Are you making these mistakes? Maybe you need to correct them, too…
So tell me – has Robert De Niro ever showed up at your site? If so, how did you respond? What warning signs would you add that indicate you might be losing your target audience?
Brad’s Big Feet Marketing helps people on a limited budget enlarge their online footprint using blogging and social media. His other blog, Marketplace Christianity, examines faith’s role in how we earn and spend money.
{ 0 comments… add one now }