Prioritizing Your Blogging: Who Are You Writing For?
It's a simple, straightforward question. Unfortunately for most bloggers, the answer is not. In fact, when you read half the blogs on the Internet, it's hard to figure out who they're writing for at all.
Visitors
In an ideal world, all bloggers would be writing content based on their visitors' interests. The posts would be informative, fresh, relevant, and unique to that particular blog. You want visitors to come back and the only way to do that is to give them a good experience the first time. No worries at all about meta tags, keywords, competition, ranking... just the sheer joy of writing something because you want to write it.
Search Engines
Of course, you've got a better chance of having visitors in the first place if you give a little consideration to the search engines. You might be providing the best content in the world on a given subject, but if the folks interested in that subject can't find you, they'll never know how fabulous it really is.
Advertisers
If you're blogging because you want to strike it rich, then you have to write content that will attract folks willing to advertise on your blog. This doesn't have to be a select group of sponsors, but even if you're using AdSense, chances are you're going to target your posts toward higher paying keywords because they're the ones that will earn you the most cash.
Take an example site about pets hosted free on Wordpress.com. Pet Memorial World is full of various stories about pets that have appeared in the news. Some are funny, some tragic, and some just outright weird. Yet, very few of them relate to what the site owner obviously hopes is a profitable source of income - suitable ways to remember a much loved pet that has passed away.
Did the site owner start out targeting pet memories? Who knows? But as of now, the top keyword driving traffic to that site, (according to Alexa) is "top ten dog names". Not sure how many folks are searching for that keyword, but it's a good bet none of them are searching names for a dog that has passed away.
At the end of the day, blogging should be fun. If you're writing about stuff that interests you, then it's worth doing. If other folks also happen to be interested, that's a bonus. Because then you can earn money by doing something you enjoy.
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