Does Your Blog Offer Meet Your Readers’ Needs?
“If you only have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail.”
(source: popular wisdom)
You decided to start a blog. Do you think that everybody with internet access should like it? What if they refuse to obey? Get a bigger hammer, hit them harder, or…
- Define your communication objective
- What do you want your readers to do, think and feel when they read your blog?
- Why do you want that?
- Define your reader
- What does she want?
- What does she need?
- What are her habits?
- Come up with a “blog vision”: this could be defined as the “encounter” between your readers’ needs and your blog offer.
- Communicate it:
- In your blog’s layout
- In your articles
- In online places your readers frequent
- Get feedback from your readers
- From comments
- From polls
- From the number of subscriptions
- From reactions on other blogs
- Evaluate your communication
- Are your readers doing, feeling and thinking what you wanted them to?
- What do you need to change?
- Fine-tune your communication
- Rinse and repeat: your reader is a moving target; the more she reads, the more she changes. So do her needs and expectations. You and your readers grow together, so be sure you keep the pace with their evolution.
A reader with fulfilled needs is a happy reader. Do you think fulfilling readers’ needs could be an ultimate sign of reader appreciation?
Ronald Huereca says...
I need to work on #4 .. The design part that is. Too much life happening all at once.
Patrick Lee says...
Hmmm, #5 would be easier if I actually got comments.
Not even going to attempt a poll until my subscriber base is above 50.
Simonne says...
Yes, Ronald, life happens sometimes very fast. Over the past four days I already packed twice to go on vacation, once I canceled before leaving and the second time (only a couple of hours ago) I returned from the country border. Tomorrow I’m making the third attempt.
@Patrick Lee: I agree with you on the poll thing. Regarding the comments, what do you do to attract them? Are you active in some social network communities? Do you comment on other blogs? Do you link a lot? All these matter especially if you have a new blog and you want to show it to the world.
Patrick Lee says...
Social networks: LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Xing, Digg, del.icio.us, etc.
Comments on other blogs: ten or twelve a day usually
Link a lot: I assume you mean deep-linking to posts and getting trackbacks. I could do a better job on this one.
Most of this stuff just takes time I suppose…
Simonne says...
OK, Patrick, I have a few suggestions you may find useful:
- Monitor the response you get from each social network and stick with the top three. It is better to be known as an authority in a few places, than as some other guy in a lot of places. Take a look at StumbleUpon, it can provide some good traffic.
- Links: yes, I mean deep linking to posts you like and you find useful for your readers. This is important because many bloggers look at their stats and visit the blogs which linked back to them (at least I’m always curious to see who is linking to me). Don’t link only to A listers; try to find some peers so you can grow together.
inspirationbit says...
Hey Simonne, are you getting under 8 Bits spell too?
Sometimes it’s hard to define readers needs, because we often have very different readers, and sometimes the readers don’t know all their needs themselves. But I guess the readers are like friends - you can’t be friends with everyone, so you can’t please all your readers either.
Simonne says...