Net-Tech Report with Chris KauzaBlogging is a great way to not only establish your credibility in a particular market, but also to connect and interact with your audience as well. But, as with most things, to be successful with it, you should have a planned approach to what and how you will blog. Generally speaking, there are three types of blog categories:
- organizational
- business-oriented
- personal blogs
The first category, organizational, uses the power of blogs to communicate either externally with the public or internally within their organizations. These blogs generally facilitate internal communications among various stakeholders (i.e. - employees, colleagues, etc.) Organizational blogs will typically also publish information that is of interest to the public, such as seminar schedules, meetings, announcements, etc.
Business-oriented blogs will typically promote a company's services or products, as a way of generating market interest to help increase sales and profits. Business blogs generally try to increase a company's reputation and authority within a market, by publishing content that shares expertise and knowledge of interest to a specific market portion, niche or industry.
Personal blogs are probably what most people are familiar with. In fact, almost all of the original blogs started out as personal blogs. People didn't quite understand how to leverage this tool to promote products and services. (It was a quaint, innocent time back then!) Typically, on a personal blog, the blogger will share his or her thoughts and opinions. One of the things that really distinguishes personal blogs from the other two types is that the blogger typically really enjoys sharing and documenting their everyday life, their stream of consciousness thoughts and even their hate for "...that @^%$#^ music those hooligan college kids are playing, while they are on my lawn!"
(I'm not kidding about that - Yikes!)
The Target Audience
To really be successful with your blog, however, you should understand who your target audience is. Knowing this will help you structure your content and craft your style. You should know what they want, need and desire to read about. The blog you create and the content you publish must provide quality and value to the readers in order to be effective in establishing communication and expanding your readership.
The type of blog you want to create essentially creates its own target audience. For instance, an organizational blog is meant for those who are members or clients of a certain organization. Although the target audience may be limited, as long as you keep developing good, quality content for your target audience, then in all likelihood, you will attract more readers. But be careful what you wish for! You still have to interact with your readers, or else they may go somewhere else. Over time, if you stick with your plan, you should see your readership grow.
If you identify your target audience successfully, you will be more successful in targeting the message you want to share, and with a readership of people who are really interested in your topic. Some of the greatest rewards of blogging come from interacting and gaining new insights with your blog's readers.
I hope this article gave you some good insight into how you should think about planning your blog. If you'd like more information, feel free to contact me directly at ckauza 'at' FettMarketing.com. Next month we'll talk about small business blogging.
For more information, please visit Chris' TNNW Bio.
The National Networker Companies
Forward/Share This Article With Colleagues And Social Media:
No comments:
Post a Comment