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Do you know who you are writing for? What’s your ideal audience?

If you’ve been in the blogging community for any amount of time, you may have seen or heard these questions being thrown around, and for good reasons too.

It is super important to know who your reader is because every reader on your blog is a chance for a potential customer.

How do you know who your ideal reader is? Simple. Create a reader profile.

-WHAT IS A READER PROFILE?

A reader profile is a description of your ideal reader. It can either be people already reading your blog, or a description of someone who you want to read your blog. Having a reader profile can be helpful in so many ways.

It will better help you to:

• Sell affiliate products your reader actually needs
• Create products/ design classes they’ll actually need and buy

-WHY DO YOU NEED TO CREATE A READER PROFILE?

-WRITE BLOG POSTS TAILORED TO YOUR IDEAL CLIENT

You don’t want to write for everybody, you want to write for an ideal customer.

The point of blogging for business is to make money from it. You want social media followers to turn into readers, who eventually turn into repeat customers. That’s how a business runs.

If you write to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.

This is also why it is a good idea to pick a niche as well.

Think about this. You, the reader, do a Pinterest search for food recipes. You click on a nice pin and end up at a blog with an amazing pot pie recipe.

With a little more searching, you also find this blog has a great crockpot recipe as well! It’s likely you’ll be excited because you found exactly what you were looking for! But then you also see that the two recipes you found are also the only ones ever posted on the website.

Are you going to return to that site? Probably not, since you can only do so much with 2 recipes!

Now, let’s say you’re the blogger of the website someone found on Pinterest. You don’t really know what your blog topic is, you just wanted to write a lifestyle blog. So, you end up writing blogs posts on food, a workout routine, your latest trip to the Bahamas and pictures of your newborn son…

While each of these topics might bring in readers, people will likely read one blog post and then have to move on to another blog because you only have one post that’s relevant to them! That’s what happens when you write on so many topics!

If you had a niche, and reader profile you would better be able to hone in on what you and your readers want! Because you don’t just want one time readers who never think to go back to your blog, you want readers who return and become long-time customers!

Back to the food blog example, you now have a niche. Its a step in the right direction. Now, you need a reader profile to decide who you’d like to attract with your blog.

I’ll give an example here;

June loves to cook big meals for her family of 5. She has a husband and 4 kids, two boys, and two girls. She is 34 years old and lives in Michigan.

June is the cook in the family, but unfortunately works so much it becomes hard to prepare dinner for her family. She works long hours as a receptionist at the local hospital. So, June would really like to find some easy recipes that she could teach her husband to cook when she can’t.

She’s in the market for a cookbook with a bunch of beginner recipes for her husband, along with some crockpot recipes that she can prepare the night before so dinner will be ready when her family gets home.

She dreams of one day opening her own family-style restaurant and needs lots of inspiration for menu items

June loves to save recipes on Pinterest and show her husband Facebook cooking videos. Those are her primary social media channels, and she often spends her time watching the cooking channel.

You can get a lot of information based off of this reader profile I’ve just created!

• She needs easy recipes to teach her husband how to cook

You now know you can create super easy dinner recipes. But, she also might want some recipes for herself as well, so you could add recipes that take a bit longer or are harder for her.

• She wants some recipes that she can prep and have ready for her when she gets home

From that, you could create some easy prep meals that she could do the night before for her husband to cook. Or teach her how to create a meal plan that can be prepped a week in advance. Or even, create a few crockpot recipes for her as well.

• She has kids

You could add some kid-friendly recipes to your blog. You know how notoriously picky kids can be! Include things kids generally like, make some finger food, or whatever else you can think of!

• Use this information to create products

With all of this information, you now can create a cookbook with recipes for kids, easy recipes for beginners, or crockpot recipes! These are all things she would be interested in buying! You could create that meal plan for her in a free download as an opt-in for your email list and many, many more things!

• Use this information to find affiliate products

But what if you’re a newer blogger? You might not be in the market to create your own product just yet! That’s totally okay! It’s time to learn about the beauty of affiliate marketing!

With all of the information you learned, you could find other people’s cookbooks that fit her requirements, become an affiliate for them, and recommend those to your readers!

You can let the creator do all the hard work like making the book, dealing with customers, shipping, and everything else. All you have to do is recommend the book (or whatever product it might be) and when somebody buys it, see the money into your account!

I’ll be the first to admit though, affiliate marketing is hard to learn on your own. I searched for months all over the internet to find out the secrets. And you know what I learned?

I learned that the best information can’t be found for free. So I bought the course Mastering Sales With Ell and it has totally changed the way I do things! If you’re struggling to make your first sale, I highly recommend checking this course out!

So, as you can see, having a reader profile can be an awesome advantage!

-HOW DO YOU CREATE A READER PROFILE IF YOU HAVEN’T STARTED?

Now the question becomes, how do you create a profile if you haven’t started blogging yet? How are you supposed to know what your readers will want to read?

Easy. This is honestly the best part. If you haven’t started yet, you have the potential to attract anybody. So you can decide on a reader profile that will attract the type of ideal reader you want.

What I mean by that is, let’s say you want to attract readers who love to cook healthy recipes. So you’ll create a reader profile of someone like that. Then, you can write blog posts that your ideal reader will like, and attract them to your blog.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO INCLUDE IN A READER PROFILE?

You can basically include whatever you want or think you’ll need in your reader profile, but here are some ideas to get you started.

Demographics– how old are they, where do they live, what gender are they, what do they look like, what is their name?

Finances- how much money do they have? What is their job? What would be their price range when buying products?

Interests- what are their hobbies? Why would these hobbies bring them to your blog? Why do they need your blog to help them better these hobbies?

Challenges- What life challenges do they face? Lack of experience in your topic? Do they have kids to care for? No time with their job/ other responsibilities?

Web time- where do they spend the majority of their time when they browse the web? What is their favorite form of social media?

Experience with the topic- how experienced are they in your field?

Dreams/goals- what is the ultimate goal they have in mind? Where would they like to get to? How can your blog help them accomplish it?

-MISTAKES NEW BLOGGERS MAKE WHEN CREATING THEIR PROFILE

• NOT BEING SPECIFIC ENOUGH

You want to get really specific when creating your reader profile. For example,

“My ideal reader is someone 20-40 years old, works full time and has a husband and children. She loves flowers and wants to start a garden, but doesn’t know where to begin”

That is a start, but how is it going to help you really get to know who you are writing for?

-WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE READER PROFILE AFTER YOU CREATE IT?

So now you have a reader profile, but now what do you do with it? How do you know if your reader profile is actually accurate to anyone out in the real world?

Because right now, your profile is pure fiction. You don’t know if anyone actually fits the bill. Or, not exactly if someone doesn’t fit it, but do enough people sound like your reader profile to make a profitable blog.

-HOW DO YOU TEST YOUR READER PROFILE?

• CHECK OUT SITES LIKE YOURS

What are the people like that are reading other sites like the one that you want to create? Before you start blogging, you should have a good idea of what other sites are out there.

A quick google search should bring up a ton of blogs that you can check out.

Look what a quick search of top craft blogs has brought me;

There’s a ton of blog to check out right here!

Check out the comments on the bog, what are the people like?

Go to the blogs social media, check out the people following the blog.

What platforms is the blogger using the most? Getting the most engagement?

This could give you a good idea of where the blogger hangs out, which would also give you a clue to where your ideal readers hang out! (of course, it’s not set in stone, the blogger could just have another strategy but it is worth a shot!)

• CHECK OUT FACEBOOK GROUPS

One of my favorite places to find my ideal readers is through Facebook groups. There are hundreds of Facebook groups you could join on so many different topics. Try going a facebook search for a group with your topic.

Browse around in the group and get a feel for the people in it, it could give you a good indication of how to people are to help you create and test your reader profiles!

Do you have a reader profile for your blog? What do you add into your profiles? Let me know in the comments section below!