I recently gave a talk to a great bunch of journalism students at the London College of Communications. I promised I would do them some notes on the presentation I gave them: 10 steps to blogging heaven. Here is the second of them. Also check out the first.
Step 2: Know your audience (and be sure you have one)
It's easy to get carried away writing a blog which only you are passionate about (or perhaps a few others). My first website covering Doctor Who filming locations was a great example of this. I was hugely interested in it but only a few hundred people a month were equally keen.
I would never discourage anyone from pursuing their passion in blogging but if you want to make a living out of it, you'll generally need thousands of people to visit your blog every month.
This is because the vast majority of people who visit your site will not buy anything or interact with the other ways you have making money (eg by clicking on adverts).
How to work out if there's a big enough audience
Google's keyword tool will tell you if there is an audience. It is easy to use. Type in a few words relating to your topic, then search. After a few moments it should display a list of results which show keyword ideas (and how many times a month they were searched for).
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Ideally, you are looking for thousands of people doing searches on your topic.
Follow this up with a browse of Amazon.com's magazine area. The existence of a dedicated magazine means there is potentially enough money in the audience to support you. You can also repeat the search in their books area too. Ideally, the books should be in the top 500,000 sales rank.
Both of these should also give you an idea of the kind of content your audience is interested in and what tone of voice to use.
Finally, create a description of your audience and try to picture what they look like in your mind. Then bring that picture back into your mind when writing each blog post. It is a lot easier to write for someone than the void.
Making a living from your fans
I will go into detail later about how exactly to turn blog visitors into a living later but the following is a useful principle to understand.
If you are going to make a living from blogging - you will need people to like you. These are fans.
1000 true fans is an interesting idea which says if you can get one thousand truly dedicated fans, you can make a living. Dedicated means each of those fans is willing to buy everything you offer e.g. T-shirts, books, CDs, tickets to gigs etc.
The nice thing is that one thousand fans doesn't sound too difficult. Basically, if you manage to convert one person each day for three years, you'll have enough fans.
Don't get hung up on the idea that you need to get exactly one thousand fans buying tickets, CDs etc. It is the principle of having fans regularly buying your products which is important. Don't think you have a product - don't worry we'll look at that later too.
You want more? Of course, you do. Check out Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. In this bestselling book, he talks about how to generate word of mouth and create true fans (he calls them mavens).
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