At first glance, this may seem like a very simple question. If it is, and if you can answer it easily for every blog post you write, then you are certainly on the right track.
Where people get tripped up is that sometimes they do not realize the different audiences are out there and how to tailor content for each one. This can prevent them from widening the net with which they attract traffic.
This morning I am going to talk about a few of these different audiences and how to structure your posts to attract, entertain, inform, and – most importantly – compel them.
Audience #1: Your Core Readers
You should read that heading and be thinking to yourself, Well no ship Sherlock! Of course one of the audiences I write to is my audience.
Good. I hope that was your reaction. I just wanted to get Mr. Obvious out of the way first, but with a few words of wisdom that should not get lost as we move forward.
Your core audience is always going to be the most important audience to consider. These are the people who read you daily, who subscribe to you, who tweet your articles, who email them to friends, etc.
While you should feel comfortable experimenting with new post formats, broadening your content, and doing things that are unique to keep content fresh for you and your readers, you always want to make sure that the core values and goals of your blog are consistent.
This means that if you’re going to structure a post to drive search engine traffic (more on this in a second) it still needs to be around a topic or have the same sensibilities that your core readers have come to expect.
If you alienate your current audience just to attract a new one you will end up playing a frustrating zero sum game. You don’t want to do that. You want to build, grow, and evolve; you don’t want to bulid, lose, build again.
Remember your core readers always. Never abandon them and they will not abandon you.
Image source: Ben-Lang.com
Audience #2: Search Engine Robots
We have talked at length on this site about how to ensure that your blog has strong SEO fundamentals and why this is important. No other single blogging strategy has the potential to drive more consistent, steady traffic than a focus on SEO.
At any given moment in the world, millions of people are on Google or other search engines looking for information. When they are looking for information about a topic you are blogging about, why not give them the opportunity to find you? Not only will you get that visit, but if you inspire, entertain, and/or inform them, you may also compel these visitors to return; this is the first step towards building a core reader.
So, how is writing for search engines different from writing for your core audience? Who knows. Maybe it is different and maybe it is not; it depends on your normal writing style.
If you are someone who writes blog posts that stick to one topic, feature keyword-rich section headings, and you naturally write with keyword density, this may not be much different for you to do. However, if you write long, flowing, stream-of-consciousness posts that you could not summarize in 60-80 characters (like I do naturally) then you are going to have a tough time communicating to search engines what your post is about.
Allow me to use two posts from Midwest Sports Fans as examples of the difference between a post written for my core audience and one written to attract search engine users desiring information about a specific topic:
- For core reader: Article on Manute Bol’s battle with kidney failure and his history of giving back to his native Sudan
- For search engines: NFL Week 17 TV Schedule, Picks, and Spreads
The differences should be obvious.
The article about Manute Bol is long, it includes videos, and it isn’t really keyword-focused in any way beyond perhaps me understanding that people would search for info about Bol’s kidney failure (but that was very much an ancillary concern and you can see it when you look at the page).
The NFL article, however, is 100% written and structured to tell search engines bots exactly what the page is about and what kind of searchers I want to attract:
- Notice the post title, which is rather bland (though expository) and stuffed with keywords.
- Notice the huge heading after the intro that stuffs the keywords with <h2> and <h3> tags again.
- Notice how for every game I have a bulleted list that includes each team’s name along with the main page keywords.
- Notice the ridiculous number of tags at the bottom of the page.
And there are other ways that this post is structured for search engine robots, but you get the picture.
This post drove nearly 6,000 views during the 3-4 days it was relevant between when it was posted and Week 17 of the NFL season. That’s not too shabby. And I bet 90% of the visitors to the page were search engine visitors, with the other 10% being core readers who were used to this weekly post and needed a quick piece of information or gamblers who found my advice useful and wanted help picking games.
I look at this NFL post as a very illustrative example of writing for search engines but not alienating core readers.
Audience #3: Social Media Users
This is another distinct audience that, in most cases for bloggers, needs to be specifically written to in order to drive significant amounts of traffic. Keeping in mind the two posts that I used as examples above, now take a look at this one:
- For social media: 10 Greatest YouTube Moments of Zach Galifianakis
Your immediate first thought probably is (and should be) what does Zach Galifianakis have to do with Midwest sports? The answer: not a whole hell of a lot.
However, I know that most of my core readers share my sense of humor and figured that they would enjoy the videos (which they did). Additionally, I posted this right after Galifianakis hosted Saturday Night Live, so there was a lot of buzz around him. Topics with buzz and that are easily digestible typically will do very well in social media, and this post did not disappoint.
As you can see, it has been dugg 676 times (it hit the front page), it has been viewed 447 times via StumbleUpon, and it has been shared 177 times on Facebook. For a medium-sized website like Midwest Sports Fans that doesn’t have a whole team of people pumping it up through social media, that’s pretty doggone good viral activity.
The question is: what makes something “easily digestible”?
Let’s list out a few ways and I’ll provide some examples:
- An image (or series of images) – The Evolution of Phil Jackson
- A video (or series of videos) – The Galifianakis post above or this single video of a little girl dunking
- A hot, hot topic in news and/or entertainment – Saints Win the Super Bowl
Of course there are others, and there is no specific one-size-fits-all formula for success in social media. The best way I can boil it down is to be compelling.
You can’t just be interesting because lots of things on the Internet are interesting. You actually have to be interesting enough to compel someone to vote/digg/tweet for you and pass it along. The more it gets passed along, the more eyes see it, the greater its chances of reaching a critical mass in any given social media venue and then really exploding (i.e. hitting Digg’s front page).
Final Thoughts
One key point to remember is that these three categories are not mutually exclusive. You can certainly write for all three at once, as I did with this March Madness 2010 post that was a hit with MSF’s core audience, hit the front page of Digg, and drove massive amounts of search traffic for about six weeks; but I strategically targeted all three audiences when I wrote it, so this did not surprise me.
Make sure that when you sit down to blog you understand what audience you are blogging for:
- If you are just writing a post for your readers, worry only about structure to the point that it will matter to them.
- If you are writing for search engines, worry about structure and keywords a great deal while making sure that you don’t alienate your core.
- And if you are writing for social media, make sure you have something easily digestible and compelling to inspire active reading (voting/sharing) over passive consumption (idly clicking through to the next page).
And then, of course, make it good. No matter what audience you’re writing for, if the content isn’t good, nothing else will matter.
What are some other types of audiences?
What other specific strategies can you suggest for any of the three audiences discussed above?
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Jerod Morris is the Director of Blogging and Social Media for Orangecast, a web marketing firm located in Dallas that specializes managing the online profiles of small- and medium-sized businesses.
Jerod is the managing editor for IndieChristmas.com and Corporate Compliance Insights as well as Midwest Sports Fans, where he hosts a podcast, has been a guest on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, makes regular radio appearances, and has hexes named after him.
jerodmsf” target=”_blank”>Follow Jerod on twitter or email him: jerod [at] orangecaster [dot] com.
