First Law of Blogging: Know Your Audience
Know Your Audience
If you want to add a blog to your website, first you must understand the nature of the folks who will be reading your posts. There are 7 billion people on Earth, and they are diverse. You must brainstorm to find the parameters of your basic reader/ customer. You can never expect to write for your entire audience. And at the same time, your challenge is to remain authentic to your core values and not pander.
In the case of my website, this task is both easy and tricky. We make a point of appealing to green, environmentally friendly businesses, which interestingly has led us to write for and about much organic or otherwise natural skin care.
Yet, we are open to writing blogs and doing other types of writing for businesses and groups that express our values, which again are green, environmentally friendly and progressive, socially just, and educationally green and progressive.
I left out spirituality. My spirituality has been New Age for a long time, with some of the best articles I’ve ever written being about Inna Segal and Andrew Bartzis.
My company is progressive, so I don’t expect back-room cigar smoking old farts to be reading my stuff. Although if they did, they might learn a whole lot!
We also wish to write for progressive political candidates.
So, if you take a look at my business profile, you pretty much know where I stand, and you can most effectively extrapolate that I won’t be writing for an audience that conflicts with my core values.
If you don’t know your audience, you need to sit down and think and scribble hard about what they look like not just in body, but in soul.
Yes, in fact, you need to PROFILE your audience. After you complete this exercise, your job is not to suck up to this group as some might, but rather to work with these folks as a communications partner, bringing them the vital information they need to evolve, while your business does the same.
Copyright 2017 by Maria Jacketti