Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Getting The Right Audience To Your Blog

As a freelance writer, I’m always excited when I see new search terms listed on my stats that show where my readers come from. Today’s entry will give you some advice on how to get the target audience you want to your blog. If you are a writer or want to be a writer and are not blogging, it's time to start. Who is the right blog audience? These are people that want the information you are posting and who will buy what you are selling, subscribe to you, link to you and who will tell their friends about your blog.

Niche Blogging

Freelance writers often have many blogs in various niches. I know I do. Not only does it help me build clips but it helps me do so in a specialty area and if you have a specialty, you can get higher writing rates in that area. It also brings in residual income if you do it right. I have three areas I like to focus in the most in my writing so that's what I blog about because I have an endless amount of things I can say about these topics because they are near and dear to me.

If you have a niche blog, you are looking for a specific type of audience. How do you get that audience to find your blog? You have to think like the searchers and think like search engines at the same time.

Is Your Blog Search Engine Friendly?

If you were looking for your blog in cyberspace, what search terms might people use to find you? If the automated search engine programs looked at your blog right now, would it be glaringly obvious what your niche is? In order to get indexed in search results for specific terms, the search engines need to find relevancy in your blog postings. Look at your titles and headings to help you. Are there related keywords in them? Does each paragraph have words related to the subheading and overall subject? If you were a program designed to find relevancy, would the last post on your blog meet the needs of that program?

Don’t bother to keyword stuff your blog entries as you want good flow for both the search engine crawlers and the human visitors on your website but be sure that if you were thinking like an internet spider, you would want to crawl through and index on multiple types of words related to the subject matter. Too many keywords will turn off the people viewers and not enough keywords won’t get you noticed by the robotic search engine crawlers.

If you look up the keywords that you are targeting for your website, what comes up on the first page? Be sure your meta description is as good or better than those others in terms of not only using multiple keywords but also for readability and interest piquing for those who are going to see the search results come up. Think of your meta description as a headline and your target audience the readers of a newspaper looking at the classified section. Those readers will scan a page with their eye and look for the most interesting or eye catching heading.

When you pay attention to each blog entry not only for the existing subject matter but think about how that specific entry ties in to your whole blog in terms of niche and seo you’ll find that you will naturally feel the way to structure your posts. It's ok to go off topic once in a while but if you do it too often, you are decreasing your blog's focus and lowering the relevancy to the keywords you've spent time focusing on.

Utilize Free Blogging Tools!


Don’t forget that you should social bookmark with proper tags and categories as well as visit and comment on blogs and websites that are related to yours. Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog are great for getting new traffic, indexing and subscribers a plus finding where your traffic is coming from as well. People can search on these social tools to find blogs on topics they are interested in and you can use these tools in many ways.

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