Before you start overthinking color choices for your blog, fonts, menu styles, page structures, and other site elements, stop for a minute.
Customizing the theme and writing blog posts are the last things you need to worry about in this stage.
For now, all you need to do is remind yourself what the goal(s) of your blog is. From where we’re standing, your goals are probably to get as many followers as possible and become a respectable member of the blogging community. Perhaps you also want to get brand deals. Ultimately, we guess you want to do what you love (blog) and make money doing so.
Well, if you want to reach all the previously mentioned goals, you need to know for whom you are building the blog, that is, who your readers are going to be. After all, the people that read your blog posts are the only ones that can help you turn blogging into a profitable business.
Here’s why determining your target audience is crucial for building a blogging empire.
Imagine that you are a food blogger, and you like preparing (and eating) delicious, low-carb, high-fat vegan dishes, and desserts. Your blog’s design is pretty lightweight and easy to digest, just like the food you prepare 一 the primary colors on your blog are light green, white, light grey and the font you use is hip and highly readable. The overall design of your blog says that your blog is a place where one can find healthy, simple recipes that are meat- and dairy-free.
Now, answer this question: do you think that hardcore carnivores would be interested in reading one sentence of your posts? Do you think they would care about your cashew-based avocado dip or vegan cauliflower Alfredo sauce? Probably not. In fact, we are pretty sure that they would rather eat at a poorly rated barbecue place than reading one of your articles or preparing your dishes.
And that’s fine. Those carnivores are NOT your target audience anyway.
You are writing blog posts for people that know a thing or two about the vegan diet, and that, most likely, follow a vegan diet. Carnivores won’t help you build your blogging empire, but vegans will.
So, before you start customizing the theme, create your potential readers’ profiles. Write down how old they are, where they live, what their hobbies/interests are, what their marital statuses are, etc. Defining your audience will also help you determine the voice and the tone you should use when writing the posts, and if you know how to speak their language, you are one of them 一 they will gladly keep coming back and wait impatiently for your next article.
Once you have a clear representation of who your readers are, you can move onto the next step.