Planning: Who is my Target Audience?

When you are creating a content rich website or blog, you will need to decide who your target audience is. If you do not know who is going to be reading your blog (or who you aim to be reading your blog) you could end up wasting many hours writing something that nobody will end up looking at. When you narrow down your website's focus to one particular group or demographic you will find that your viewership will increase drastically.

How do I choose a group to write to?

Well let's for a minute take a step back and think about the topic of your blog. Imagine you're in a mall and you are walking around and you see a store. In that store they're selling products that relate to your blog. Who is currently in the store? How old are they? What gender are they? Are they looking at the products with friends or are they by themselves? Do they have prior knowledge about the products already or do they need help from staff and salespeople?

For example, let's pretend I'm writing a blog about parakeets and at the mall there is a pet store that sells primarily parakeets. When I walk into the shop I currently see people ranging about 16 to 30 years of age. For the most part, most of the shoppers are in the store alone but there are one or two groups as well. The groups are families (with at least one adult and one child) that are buying a new pet and have little to no knowledge about parakeets and require a lot of information about pet care with their purchase. The people shopping individually already have a pet and are either buying food or products for care and maintenance. These single people usually know what they're doing but they're willing to hear about new foods and methods if it will help their pet or make taking care of their pet easier.

And so with my Parakeet blog I can take my imagination and break my audience into two groups :

• Families or first time pet owners. Typically they have little to no knowledge about pets and so require a lot of help in picking out care products, food, books about handling and training their pet, etc. This group (while sometimes have kids) is relatively young and mainly consists of 14 to early 30s years of age. No gender preferences. A blog directed at this group of people would want to be an easy read, informative, and fun. The blog would mostly have information that new or prospective pet owners would need and want to know.
  
• People that already own a pet. The pet-care experience of the people in this category range from beginners to expert. Usually these people have preferences to what food they purchase for their pet, how they train and handle their pet, etc. No gender preference for this group either. A blog directed at this group would contain helpful hints, tips, and guides for training their pet. While this group usually knows the basics, they usually would not mind hearing more about new foods, books, etc., if it could make things easier for them.

Once you've broken down who your potential audience is, it's much simpler to decide what to write about and what to put on your site. Now, like in the case of the example I gave, you just need to decide which audience appeals more to write to. Once you've made that choice, you're that much closer to creating a successful blog or website.