A great number of successful bloggers all over the world always spout the importance of focusing on a niche topic that both readers and Google recognizes as specific and useful. Sure, this is a great approach, but there are already a hundred apples in every basket – nearly every topic you could think of has hundreds of blogs on it! Not a great number of blogs, however, focus not on a topic, but on a demographic. Some extremely successful bloggers have, instead of blogging on a specific topic, focused on helping a specific demographic of people get a one-stop-shop for themselves. Having a dedicated audience that you tailor to can really help your blog come alive and go to the next level!
What Demographic Is Reading Your Blog?
Before you can start to focus on engaging a specific group of people on your site, you need to understand who these people are so that you can tailor to their needs. There are plenty of ways you can do this, one of which is by looking at your site’s page on Alexa. Google Analytics also has some good information on viewer demographics, so if you have that set up, you should go on there and have a quick look. Though services such as these try to give you an idea of who’s looking at your site, the surest, most effective way to know your audience is to interact with them.
Interacting with your audience on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook are the best ways to get to know who your visitors are, what they like, and what they don’t like. If all of the people liking your Facebook page are hipster females who all enjoy shopping, instead of trying to rank for keywords about Coach purses and blogging about the topic of purses, you can instead shift to tailoring for the audience of young female hipsters. (I will cover how you can do that in the next section). Knowing what your audience is like is the key to unlocking the power in focusing on a specific demographic and making your site a one-stop-shop for these visitors.
How Can You Tailor To Them?
The types of sites that choose to tailor to a specific demographic, for example, geeks, focus on writing posts that they know that this type of person will enjoy. One site that does this well for geeks is Incredible Things. Their posts are seemingly unrelated – at the time of writing this post, they have a post on Edible Chocolate Candles next to a piece on a woman in a rather risque Wonder Woman bikini. These articles show us that they don’t care if Google is ranking them for a specific topic, they are instead worried about keeping their audience happy. Who is their audience? Unmarried male geeks, predominantly. You will see that most of their posts tailor to this audience, and this is how they maintain popularity.
Another blog that focuses on the demographic of geeks and does it well is Geekologie. Again, you will see that their posts are not really on a focused topic. A girl singing a song about hobbits here, lightsaber lasers there. These posts are all meant to entertain geeky men in their twenties, and they do it quite well. The writing style, the topics, they all fit. And, as a result, Geekologie has a targeted audience that is very engaged in commenting and sharing.
Why You Should Target A Demographic
Targeting a demographic may sound like a bad idea. You may think that it’s just better to be like everyone else and rank keywords for a specific topic. Well, you would be wrong – successful blogs are not like everyone else – successful blogs are different from all of the other sites. Also, traffic and revenue will both go up if you turn your site into a place where a specific type of person goes to learn and engage!
Traffic
Around 20% of my personal site’s traffic comes from social media referrals. How could I increase that number? By increasing the relevance of my posts to what my audience is looking for. My average time per visit statistic for my geek culture blog is around 2 minutes. How could I increase this number? By increasing the relevance of my posts to what my audience is looking for. If I know exactly what my audience likes, then I can keep giving them that content, regardless of whether or not it all falls under the same topic. At the same time, you need to remember not to get too broad – this can kill your site. Also, try to rank for specific keywords within your posts, and for keywords throughout your posts that describe your demographic. For example, both Geekologie and Incredible Things rank very highly for things with “awesome” and “geeky” in them, as these are terms that their audience uses.
Revenue
Bloggers make thousands of dollars per month on direct advertising. Why do advertisers pay for a spot on your site? Because they feel that your audience will resonate well with their product. If you can brag that your audience is of a specific demographic, then advertisers will flock to you! They know that all of your visitors will be interested in their product to some degree, and thus, the CTR will be much higher, and you will get paid higher rates.
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Adam Gottlieb @ The Frugal Entrepreneur says
This is so true, and yet so many bloggers and website owners miss this point. And the funny thing is that by focusing on the *people* who are coming to your site (and NOT just the hottest key words and search terms), you are putting yourself in a better position to earn something from them- whether a sale, a job request, or even a click on an affiliate ad.
After all, those key words won’t pay your bills, but your readers may. And when readers feel like you are providing content just for them (as opposed to “keyword stuffing” for the search engines), then they’ll be more likely to return as well.