Best Blogs on Blogging _ Pro Blogger

I have been reading Pro Blogger for some time now and I always enjoy the posts. It is a high readership blog and has contributions from many other people, as well as from its owner Darren Rowse. This really is a top of the line Pro blog on blogging. It’s fast to load and change pages, the related posts and links to other content is outstanding and frankly – I have to say that I’m outright envious and know this is the standard of blog I’m aspiring to create and as yet don’t have the time or resources to do.

I just finished reading this post about targeted readers
Targeting Your Readers
and as with all tricky questions it always seems to come back to – market research.

Rather than give specific strategies he returns the question to us all and asks us.

What type of readers do you want?

Knowing what you are blogging for and assessing who may want to read what you write is hard. Our heads are full of info and send us off in many different directions and pinning down specific goals is like trying to keep a tablecloth on an outside patio table on a windy day. If you want to keep it there you can peg it down or weight the edges but simply putting a bowl on the table is not enough.

Pinning down your objectives is something worth doing. Similar to nicheing it requires that you cut something into bite sized bits. I have a feeling this is some advice I’ll have difficulty following. Stubborn as I am, I will come around because I can see results when I follow good advice.

So, are you wanting beginners, intermediates or advanced readers? he asks.

I know it to be true that beginners can’t understand advanced information because they have no clear picture yet about the concepts. Just as a toddler may guess “dog?” when it sees a goat for the first time, beginners will make mistaken assumptions about what advanced users take for granted. Likewise advanced users will skim a beginners article and dismiss it because they already know that and don’t want to waste their time on it.

Short of having three blogs however, how can you assess where the intermediate lies. The extremes are obvious. If you have no domain name or host and the only html you know is a text link – you are a beginner. If you can ftp and go straight to a page in the blog template and change some php, then you are fairly advanced.

In the middle are all the intermediate shades of grey in between.

Although ProBlogger is by name on pro blogging he has this post there for beginners.
Blogging For Beginners

Most people writing blogs on blogging are not experts, they are just taking turns in passing on information (me included). I fall into the intermediate range and claim no advanced expertise but to people who don’t know what a blog is I’m an expert – so point of view or perspective is also a factor.

Best I can say is try to be consistent and honest. I don’t mean brutally honest or nakedly honest – both are embarrassing to the audience. I just mean sincere.

If you have a sense of humour and tell a story, embellishing the truth, then let people know (subtly) that this is you. People will not need it spelled out if all your posts have a similar flavour. Don’t change track from post to post and be earnest in one and flippent in another, unless the topic itself is an obvious cause for the change. Remember when you write that people have no facial expressions to use as clues to your meanings.

Finding your blogging voice is important and it will take you a few tries. I started writing my blogs quite stiltedly as an educator or teacher, couching the articles in personality less business speak but my own voice wanted to be heard and it came through in the end.

I have a quirky love of double entendre, or in other words of saying things in a way where two meanings may be taken from a phrase or sentence. It comes out in my poetry and it shows in the types of quotes I use. It usually goes right over the head of my kids (luckily, but they are learning) and is often not picked up by many readers, but that’s ok.

The same advice goes for staying on topic. Your targeted readers are coming to your blog because of your blog description. In my case here, they are probably arriving because I have monetize your blog in the title. To be honest, as yet,  I have failed to give them what they are looking for here. This is mainly because my time is too divided between too many other projects.

I have articles on all aspects of blogging because its blogging I really have an interest in. But if I want to please the targeted readers I am getting, I’ll need to get my act together! Peripherally these readers may also be interested in traffic and readers ( what this post is about ) about plagiarism, about other blogs, about niche research, ( what the last few posts have been about ) but their main interest, reasonably,  is making money.

So unless I have some recent posts on making money I have failed to satisfy the impulse that brought these targeted readers to my blog.

So just a few more things to things to think about while we’re in the market research methods weeks of the launch. The above pro blogger article recommends you hang out where your targeted readers hang out and see what questions they are asking. Find out how they speak (technical babble or help me I’m a newbie screams), interact with people and start to build relationships and write about the niche topic you have set for your blog.

I wish applying what you learn was as easy as reading it!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Best Blogs on Blogging, Market Research Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.