Remember the classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman where the baby bird left the nest, searching for his mother? The hatchling wandered from dog to boat to car to power shovel asking, “Are you my mother?” This was an ineffective and frightening way to conduct his search. (Don’t worry — the book has a happy ending!)
As bloggers, we need to know who our target audience is, where they are, what they need, and how we can help them, but searching for them in the are-you-my-mother manner can become as ineffective and frightening as the little bird’s adventure.
Today’s Wednesday is Friends Day post will share tips on how to find your audience, create an audience profile, discover their needs, and determine what you can do to help them.
Steps to finding your target audience:
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Most blogs and websites come pre-installed with Webalizer, a web server log file analysis program. Understanding the data provided by Webalizer will help you know more about your site’s visitors and how you can better serve them.
Webalizer.org provides a “Simpleton’s Guide to Web Server Analysis,” but it is lengthy, so in this post we’ll “cut to the chase,” so to speak, and list the specific terms associated with Webalizer and what they mean to us as bloggers. This link provides an example of what the Webalizer stats look like.
To access the Webalizer data on your site, enter your blog’s URL followed by /cpanel. You’ll be required to enter the username and password from your web host, which may or may not be the same as the username and password to your WordPress dashboard.
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In the recent post, Article Marketing: 21 Tips to Help You Get Started, I suggested to set an article marketing goal of submitting 2-3 articles a week for two weeks to one directory, then add another directory, and follow that pattern until you’re submitting regularly to 5 directories. Today’s post will discuss which directories are best to submit to and why.
Before I list the top directories for article submissions, I want to share three important things to consider when choosing an article directory site:
- Link Value
- PageRank
- NoFollow Tags Continue reading →
Here are the top five blog posts about blogging that I read during the last week:
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide was originally written to help teams within the Google company develop good SEO habits. Google later released it as a free download for use by all webmasters.
The guide explains:
- The difference between paid and organic search
- How to create unique and accurate page titles
- How to use the “description” meta tag
- How to improve your URL structure
- How to make your site easier to navigate
- Developing quality content
- How to write better anchor text
- How to use heading tags appropriately
- Optimizing image use
- Making effective use of robots.txt
- Information about “nofollow” links
- Good website promotion practices
- An introduction to Google’s free webmaster tools
I hope you find this document useful.
Until next time,
Happy Blogging!
