In a perfect world, starting out as a blogger would involve you writing the perfect material for an already existing audience. Unfortunately, this is not the case; it takes hard work to start a blog: determining an audience, writing the type of material that interests you as well as engages and builds an audience, and expanding upon your blog and audience while experimenting with new topics.
Below are some tips on finding your niche to craft your writing for the development and the expansion of your blog audience.
Define
To develop an audience to expand on, you must first define your target audience. A blog post without a target audience in mind is like throwing a piece of paper into the wind. Sure, it’ll land, but you don’t know where. Knowing where to direct your blog posts is crucial to your level of readership as well as coming up with blog topics.
Everyone has areas in which they have acquired some level of expertise. Whether it be hobbies, simple interests, your occupation, or problems they have gone through and can lend some tips to ease the trouble for others. Finding a balance between your expertise and level of interest and how often you can write about topics in that field is foundational to defining your audience. If you can persistently write with enthusiasm about a certain topic, you have found your niche. It should also be acknowledged that you may have several niches, which is great!
After you have found your niche(s), you can now begin to pinpoint who you need to direct your posts to. Consider the demographics who are interested in your niche; if your niche is quilting, it’s probably best not to gear your tone, style, and focus toward an eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old tech audience. To get a good idea of your target audience, look at who are the leaders of your niche. An internet search—or better yet, a search on social media—can illuminate your target audience. Demographic analysis and communication with the people participating in the comments of these social media communities are great ways to ascertain your target audience.
Develop and Expand
Now that you have defined your target audience, you can start gearing your blog and blog posts towards them. Tease out relevant blog post topics by involving yourself in the social media communities in your niche—determining what people would like to know more about, recent news, and discussions. You can now begin writing with enough confidence to establish a blog to advertise your blog posts, since when you begin writing and publishing posts, there will be a known audience who will have an interest. Along with writing these relevant posts and knowing who to publish them for will come a development readership and followers.
Now that you’ve got your blog, topics, and an audience via your social media presence, you can start experimenting with expanding that blog audience. Maybe you’d like to try out some new topics or niches or simply just increase your readership. Your social media reach will prove to be invaluable not only in getting your existing audience to share your posts with potential readers but in gathering opinions on new topics or opinions you are thinking about for the blog. You can explore the idea of new topics to reach a larger audience while retaining your existing audience.
A strong social media presence will allow interaction with your audience to show that you value your readers’ opinions enough as to not quickly change course, but gently expand your horizons to reach a bigger audience. Your social media interactions will also assist in your promotional efforts to maximize the reach of your audience. As this becomes more of a self-governing entity, you have only one thing left to do, the thing you set out to do in the first place—consistently write blog posts to maintain and grow an expansive audience!
What seems like hard work, in reality, just boils down to maintaining constant conversation between yourself and your audience. A good analysis of what you would like to do and how that coincides with your audience will always maintain the interest of both parties, facilitate consistently relevant material, and get your audience to share with other readers. These all play a role in expanding your blog audience.
About the Author:
Avery T. Phillips is a freelance human being with too much to say. She loves nature and examining human interactions with the world. Find her on Twitter; comment or tweet her at @a_taylorian with any questions or suggestions.
Image: © Depositphotos.com/Melpomene