3 Tips to Better Target Your Blogging Audience

Blogging is a great way of building an audience of people who ‘know, like and trust’ you long before they consider using your business’ products or services.

But there’s a big difference between creating a blog and having an effective one that steadily increases its reach.

If you’re looking to build an audience through blogging, it takes a little time and a little patience, but there are some ways to accelerate that process.

Here are three tips to better target your audience and create blogs that pique their interest and consistently have them coming back for more.

Optimise your blog

Crafting your blog content is just the first stage of the process. Once you have an article written you need to optimise it so it can be easily found by people searching for that content.

This optimisation occurs during the actual writing phase and as the post is loaded to your site.

But the aim of the game is to set keywords that allow the search engines to easily find your post and direct people to it.

The process works like this:

1. Identify and set the keywords which you believe people will use to find an article like yours.
2. Ensure this keyword or words are in your article headline.
3. Ensure the keywords feature a couple of times in the article
4. Ensure the keywords are in at least one sub-heading
5. Find and set an image that is renamed to include the keywords
6. Set the excerpt for your post, containing the keywords
7. Ensure your post has at least two crosslinks to your other content
8.       Ensure your post has one backlink to other reputable and relevant content

There are a series of tools which can help in the process of both identifying your keywords and ensuring your post is optimised.

They include:

• Moz – to generate keywords and find backlinks
• Semrush – to find similar keywords that might apply
• Google Trends – to understand what keywords and topics are trending
• Frase – to optimize your content prior to loading it your site
• Rankmath – a free SEO plug-in that helps you optimize your post and analyse its ranking as you load it
• Yoast – A popular and paid plug-in that helps you optimize your post and analyse its ranking as you load it

Use your website analytics

As your bank of content builds, you can begin to learn what topics and articles resonate best with your audience. These are the articles which tend to get more hits, shares and engagement.

Your website analytics offer this insight, including the pages (articles) which get the most hits, time spent on that page and more.

Tools to assist include:

Google Search Console –  which helps you measure your site’s search traffic and performance, fixes issues, and increases your chances of ranking in search results.

Databox.com – which compiles your site data and allows you to track it from any device.  

Share content across mediums

Optimising your content and understanding what your audience wants is just part of the journey. The aim then becomes ensuring that content reaches as many people as possible.

This means showcasing your content to people in places beyond your website and linking them to it.

Great strategies to increase your blog content reach include:

• Posting experts of the article and snippets to your social media channels.
• Repurposing parts of that content in memes, images, and quotes on social media.
• Using tools like RSS feeds to have people subscribe to your content.
• Curating your content and showcasing it in newsletters.
• Guest posting your content on other people’s sites.

A few final takeaways

Creating a blog isn’t just about pumping out reams and reams of content. It involves strategy. First, you need to know who your audience is, and what type of content they’re likely to be drawn to and share.

Then you need to ensure the content you have is optimized so it can be found and available in places beyond your website, in spaces where your audience ‘hangs out’.

Once all these boxes are ticked, your blogs begin to take on a life of their own, increasing their reach and growing their audience.

For more great and simple tips on blogging and using them to best effect, order your own Blogspiration deck, or join me in February 2023 for an immersive three-day content creation workshop.