Blogging 101: Why you should write for your audience and not for yourself

Why you should write for your audience and not for yourself is a multi-faceted explanation, but one  of the biggest mistake new bloggers make is to use their blog as a podium. Our clients are often surprised when we recommend writing for your audience instead of for yourself. While the point of a blog is to have your opinions and expertise heard, there are a number of reasons you should be writing with your audience in mind—in fact we know of 6 fantastically-convincing reasons:
1. A Natural Flow
Most of our thought processes can be slightly disjointed, especially when we are writing something that we are passionate about. Writing for your audience will help keep you on track as you consistently think about what it is they will want to hear about next. It will also help you keep things to-the-point.
2. Aids in Call to Actions
The point of business blogging is to boost SEO but don’t miss the opportunities they provide for awesome call to actions. Writing with the audience in the forefront of your mind will help you place natural call to actions throughout your blog that are fully relatable to your content.
3. To Gain/Find Readers
Internet surfers find their sources of information by searching the information that they want, which means you need to write about the information they want to receive—not the information that you want to give. Without this connection you will find it difficult to grow your readership.
4. Helps you KEEP your Readers
Finding your readers is only half the battle, you then need them to come back enough times to convert to being a customer. Regularly having the information that they want will foster long-term reader relationships by fostering an emotional and intellectual connection between you and your readers.
5. It Gives you Purpose
There are millions of blogs out there, and we’ll bet you that at least a third of them (and this is us being conservative) don’t have a clearly defined purpose. Keeping your readers in mind will give you laser-like focus on the topic(s) you intend to cover.
6. SEO
Google’s main purpose as a search engine is to connect readers with the content they need, and they have built this into their algorithm (those sneaky, brilliant programmers at Google). This means that writing for your audience and the content they seek will naturally help your organic SEO efforts.
Why you should write for your audience and not for yourself covers the gauntlet from better content to improved SEO to reader retention. If you find this a daunting task then feel free to let us, ‘the pros’ here at ReferLinks FCM, do it for you.