Target Your Market: Identify Who You’re Talking To

This morning I was tooling around the internet, noticing what people are writing about, and how they are pulling their blogs together. It dawned on me we should probably talk about that now, while we’re still mostly in the planning stage.

Without getting all technical we need to talk about who you and your blog are talking to. This is called your “market”. Each market can have a different “feel” to them. You want to make sure you target your market so they will become not only readers, but avid fans. This is how word of your blog spreads!

Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about.

For example people who are way into going green and people who are really interested in cutting coupons and spending less than 5 dollars a meal are very different markets.

While they may both enjoy recipes, they may both be moms, and have many other things in common if you try to combine these two markets on your blog instead of capturing both groups you’ll probably end up alienating both. The way they speak, the things they want to read, the resources they want are completely different. If you try to cater to both you’ll end up catering to neither and lose your readership completely.

Here are a couple blogs that do each of those things well.

5 Dollar Dinners ~ Coupons, recipes, dinner meal plans always made for under $5 for the whole family.

Kid vs Produce ~ getting kids to eat more produce.

Everyday Paleo ~ an entire blog filled with only paleo diet recipes (some of which are super yummy!)

Crockpot Cooking ~ a New Year’s resolution to use the crockpot every day in 2008 (which has turned into a real cookbook for sale on Amazon.com)

Green and Natural Parenting ~ plenty of info to help families live a little greener

As you can see each of these blogs are very different. While you could probably add content from each to one site ~ it just wouldn’t work because the people reading each are so different, even though they may share a lot of characteristics.

This can be true in one niche as well. Let’s take the parenting niche. (just because I know a little about this niche). If one were to think about doing a parenting site you would need to think BEFORE you start about exactly what types of parents you are targeting. Then you want to create content that speaks to those people. You can not, in the same space, cater to the attachment parenting crowd as well as the spanking crowd ~ it just will not work. You will end up alienating everyone.

If you wanted to do a blog on attachment parenting, you’d want to do just that ~ or other similar gentle parenting methods. You could even open it up further like that ~ by doing gentle parenting techniques, and this may be a stretch for that market. You could also do a site on more “traditional” parenting methods. Either way is fine, but realize that the people in those groups have completely different concepts, beliefs and values on parenting. It will be nearly impossible to grow a readership if you tried to combine them. Keep in mind the more “fanatical” (for lack of a better word) people are on their topic the harder it will be to combine that topic with others.

Here’s a great attachment parenting blog. Take a look at the topics, the posts, what they write about.

Now take a look at this site. See how they are both about parenting, but the likelihood of people reading them both is highly unlikely.

Free Range Kids all about giving kids freedom without going nuts.

Along the same lines if you’re going to do a blog about horses ~ you want to do a blog about horses. You don’t want to do a blog about horses, cats, lizards, dogs and chickens. The owners of each of those types of animals are pretty different. I know as the owner of 2 cats, a dog and a small flock of chickens if I’m looking for chicken information and resources I don’t want to weed through a bunch of horse talk or cat talk to get to it.

If you want to do a craft blog ~ choose one type of craft to focus on.  There are so many different kinds of crafts, it will be hard for someone to be a repeat visitor and reader if they want to learn how to stamp, and the first post they read on your site was about stamping, but then you moved to a different kind of craft.

The one way around this is if there is an overall theme to the site. For example here the main idea is internet marketing strategies. So I talk about different types of strategies. This still causes problems though. In fact, I just got an email this morning saying I thought you were talking about authority blogs why am I getting email about squidoo. So there are some logistical things even with an overall topic.

Here’s a great example of a craft blog who stays very focused on stamping.

Here’s another example of a great craft blog that does scrapbooking.

I hope this helps get you thinking about the topics and theme of your blog. We’re going to be grabbing domain names on Monday (if you don’t have one already) so think about what you want your overall theme to be,  and how you’re going to speak to your target market.

If you have any questions about this please feel free to ask. I’ll be on and off the computer through the weekend.