If you are about to start a new blog it is important to spend some up front figuring out what your goals are as that will guide every aspect of how you run your blog. One person running a business blog is likely to do things very differently from somebody writing a political blog for example.
It doesn’t matter if you are starting a new blog from scratch or if you already have one; it’s always a good idea to think about your blog direction periodically.
Who Are Your Target Audience?
The first thing to consider is your target audience – the people that will read your blog. Are they men or women? Are they young/old, married? What kind of jobs do they have? How is their income? What are their internet skills like?
The reason this is important is because it helps you figure out how to market your blog. A young man who is heavily into the Internet is more likely to Digg your latest blog post than somebody who still finds email tricky.
How will your visitors read your blog posts? Some people such as older people tend to read slowly, taking in every word you write. Younger people with busy lives are looking for a quick read and haven’t got time to read long posts. This will very much affect your content and writing style.
Plan Monetization Strategies Up Front
If you want to develop a profitable blog then you should be thinking of monetization strategies right from the outset. For example, if you know that you want to run private ads on your blog then you will need to ensure that the design of your blog and it’s layout support adequate space and good placement for advertising.
If you are promoting something that is already in existence such as your services, or an existing business then you will want to make sure that you prominently work your promotional content into your blog seamlessly.
Another popular strategy that bloggers use is to place contextual ads such as AdSense. Even this requires some thought – should you place them straight away or wait until you have more traffic?
If you know that you are blogging for profit then you may as well start placing ads from the outset. You might not get much income at first as your traffic will be low but it means that when new readers come to your blog they know what to expect. Some readers can become offended when bloggers suddenly introduce advertising at a later date.
Also, you will often pick up future advertisers from within your blog audience but if you don’t have any ads on your blog they would not even know that your blog would be a suitable place to advertise.
Think About Your Brand
Branding is an important thing to think about because it is very difficult to change later on – especially if your brand is built into the domain name of your blog! Do you want to brand yourself as a person using your name or are you branding some business name or product etc? If you are promoting yourself consider graphics – do you have a suitable image of yourself that you can use as an avatar? You need to get this right because when you start using social media that avatar will get absolutely everywhere!
What If Your Blog Is Changing Direction?
It is not unusual to start out a blog and then later on realise that you want to change the direction it is going in. If you have an already established blog think about where it stands currently on the points mentioned above. What kind of audience does it currently attract? Is that the audience you want? What monetization are you using and are you happy with it? Is your audience responding well to it? Finally, what image are you projecting, if any?
If you need to change anything that is ok, it is better to figure it out and then bear those changes in mind as you move forward rather than just blindly continuing on with something you are not happy with.
Authors bio is coming up shortly.