Realising who your target audience is hugely important if your blog is to be successful.

Ask yourself who you want to read your blog posts – are they customers, local businesses etc?

Writing blogs with an audience in mind helps to refine your writing and reach out to them. If you are simply writing to attract anyone who finds your blog in a search engine, it could simply be a stab in the dark and may prove unsuccessful.

What do your audience want? What do they need?
If you’re writing a blog, it should be about giving them something. Are you skilled in a certain area that you can help them with? If they’re coming to you for advice, then they aren’t quite as skilled as you, so your knowledge can offer them a reason to keep coming back.

Writing Manner
If you are writing a technical blog, are you offering professional details and ‘how to’s’ or are you open to injecting humour into your blog? You should decide this based on your audience – they may not appreciate the humour or you might prefer to write in a more formal way because that’s what your readers want.

Length of Post
What will your readers like? A difficult one because people like both long and short posts, some posts of around 200 words could be punchy and offer just a couple of bits of information to keep your readers reading. Don’t leave it too static, change the length of your posts every so often and after posting a few, check how successful each one is.

Who ever is reading your blog make sure you keep paragraphs short so that people will read them and not skim the post.

Invite reader engagement
At the end of the post don’t forget to Invite comments from readers. most readers have opinions but often they wont leave them unless prompted to do so.

So as above, if you have a comment about this post please do leave it below.

Blogs are written to target a specific audience, so its only right that we cover how to blog successfully. Bloggers want to attract traffic and to receive comments so your writing should be of interest to a certain type of person ( your target audience ).

Regularity
Make it regular – blogs should look active so by writing pieces regularly, your followers will return to see new posts and in turn will start to add comments to your pieces.

To Read or to Skim
Some readers will read a whole post so keep it short, don’t be scared to use bullets and headers, and for those that only have time to skim the text add ‘action’ words that get noticed.

Commenting
Blogging is an interactive project, something that lets your readers get involved so let them leave comments and ask you questions and respond quickly. You can use widgets ( add-ons ) that can let you do this, and by using one that lets readers message each other adds value and interest.

Home Page
Use your home page as an inlet to the rest of your blog. Use eye catching headers with images that attract your readers, let them read the first sentence or two. If they’re into the header and the taster sentence they’ll click through to read the rest of it, give them the option to read it or not – the text isn’t in your readers face and they have the choice to click through to the piece they ‘need’ to read.

Things to Avoid
Avoid being over opinionated – people don’t want to be told how to think. Talk with your audience and get their opinions too.

Don’t fill the post with too much information, instead spread your info out into a couple of posts. Give little pieces of good strong info and add value to it by asking for comments or opinions.

Try not to fill a page with blatant key words, search engines favour blogs which are relevant and active so focus on interesting pieces and add pages to the blog regularly.