Seven Most Important Blog Lessons Series – Lesson One: Consider Your Audience

Today is the second anniversary of Pajama Professional. To celebrate, I am running a week-long series of posts sharing the seven most important things I have learned about blogging. In the two years I have been writing and managing Pajama Professional, I have learned more than probably any other sequential period of my life. This is significant because I am a highly curious learner by nature. As soon as I could read (my mom taught me before I even went to kindergarten) I studied all sorts of different subjects.

Each week my Dad would take me to the library and I would check out books about everything from supernatural occurrences to state histories. It’s not that I want to be a know-it-all so I can impress other people. I just have an insatiable curiosity to know things.

This insatiable need to know how things work is what originally brought about my interest in HTML coding over a decade ago. I didn’t just want to surf the internet, I wanted to make the internet. I wanted to learn how it worked so I could become part of it.

Despite my years of participating in forums, journalling and building websites, I never felt I’d found my place online until I started blogging. And when I found WordPress and created Pajama Professional I knew I had found what I really wanted to do: design blogs, create content and use all the tools I could get ahold of to succeed at making money online. It’s never been about making money, though. It’s about knowing how to make money. And with the speed at which technology changes, there is always something new and interesting to learn.

With that being said, I decided that for Pajama Professional’s second anniversary I would share what I consider to be the seven most important factors to being a successful blogger. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these are things I consider to be universally green (fresh) tactics for online success.

There are all types of people online and they are interested in all types of different things. The type of people you are writing for will change based on the niche in which you choose to participate. Not everyone in a niche will always be the same, but there are certain niches that attract a certain type of person. You need to be sure that you consider your audience with every article you write.

The best example I can think of for this is profanity. Though most people aren’t seriously offended by profanity, I truly believe it can be detrimental. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, there will always be people who are offended by cursing and those people won’t stick around if you’re throwing around f-bombs.

Secondly, even if visitors aren’t really offended by profanity, it can detract from your credibility. It often comes off as unprofessional and immature in some niches. If you are writing a serious business blog and want your readers to respect your experience and look to you for advice, they will automatically discount your ideas if you include a lot of profanity. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction we all have from being told that swearing is wrong. Most readers will automatically lose trust and belief in you.

And the third reason to reconsider swearing on your blog is strictly logical: most directories and search engines – especially Google – have content filters or guidelines. Even I sometimes turn on my filter (mostly when I’m looking for images) to avoid porn and other junk in which I have no interest. If your blog includes a bunch of profanity, you decrease your chances of search engine and directory inclusion. It’s about sheer numbers – the more pages/articles that search engines pick up, the more chances you have for people to visit your blog.

I do occassionally include profanity in my posts, but only if I feel that it is somehow necessary. If a post includes uncensored profanity, I generally place a warning at the top. The one occurence of the f-word in Pajama Professional is quoted anchor text from a post on another blog. Aside from that, there is only one word from George Carlin’s list of seven dirty words that I include in this blog and I use “!” instead of “i” to censor it.

If you know enough about a niche to attempt to write a successful blog about it, then you should also know your targeted audience very well. Knowing your audience is key to knowing how you should write. Do you need to define certain niche-related buzzwords or will your audience already know their meanings? Will your audience read a long, in-depth post or do they prefer shorter posts in a series?

I didn’t consider my audience when I started writing for Pajama Professional. I learned quickly that visitors were more likely to come back if I offered quality in-depth content that taught them new things instead of short affiliate-product-pushing posts. I can use this blog to sell things, but I keep those offers few and far between and I make sure it’s something I truly believe in. Now I know that researching potential readers before I begin a new site or blog is just as important as researching keywords.

This is just the first post in my Seven Most Important Blog Lessons Series so be sure you come back tomorrow for Lesson Two: Building a Business Takes Time.