It has been an interesting week. My Collective Wisdom Blog attracted over 100 recordable visits (according to Sitemeter) in 24 hours due to two items I posted regarding Dr. Pepper and Dr. J and also a story about the death of the Yellow Pages.
Who reads your blog? Do you care? Are you doing it for a select group of people? Or are you going for the masses?
In my email this week was the following from My Creative Team:
Posted: 01 Aug 2008 04:00 PM CDT
Most blogs have an audience of one: the author. So, you need to understand the landscape if you are going to build a blog audience. Did you know that there are nearly 113 million blogs being tracked by Technorati with an average of 175,000 new ones coming online daily. That’s 18 updates per second and 1.6 million daily posts. Wow, that’s a lot of competition for the blog-reader’s attention.
With all this competition how do you break out of the pack? There are many ways to build an audience and we’ll be talking about that here in the next few weeks. Let’s start with a few basics that I think every blogger should do.
- Select a topic. First, let’s review what is popular. The top blogs tend to fall into one of these categories: sports, news, politics, technology, humor and celebrity coverage. The top 250 tags according to Blog Flux include politics, news, music, travel, art, technology, marketing and business. Seeing a pattern? Now, if you are a world-class expert in any of these topics, maybe you can become one of the top blogs. Or, maybe you dig deeper and look for neglected topics for your blog.
- Set objectives. What is it you want to accomplish with your blog? Is it a corporate blog aimed at providing an open channel with customers, or is it a highly personal blog that allows the exposure of the “real” you? Different approaches that require specific approaches to audience-building and promotion. Do you want to build a mass communication blog, or do you want a small, fiercely loyal audience?
- Define your audience. Are you talking to all carbon-based lifeforms? Please don’t. Narrow down your audience. What do you know about them from demographic and psychographic perspectives? Are you addressing multiple audiences? If so, do you need to segment your audiences and develop emails with different messages? How will each audience profit from our communications.
OK, that’s enough from me. What thoughts do you have on the subject?
I just write ... usually the same as if I were having a brief conversation with a friend.
ReplyDeleteNothing too heavy, nothing that's going to cause readers to get all p.o.'d ... as I have often said, after all the news, politics and sports - I am like "The Parade" section of the newspaper. Just fun.
Thanks Joe.
ReplyDeleteYour blog is exactly as you said, insight into the head and heart of Joe.
Hi Scott,
ReplyDeleteWe at Mahindra & Mahindra have recently started a corporate blog around the 4 themes innovation, sustainability, globalization and customer centricity. These themes have been chosen cause they are the mantras in the business world today.
~Priyanka
www.mahindrauniverse.com