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Creating a great site or blog with great content is one thing. Creating a site or blog with reader appeal without overloading the reader is quite another. As a blog author and free-lance web developer I am constantly hit with the thought, ‘What does this look like to the first viewer?’. In other words, if I was coming to this site for the first time what would I think? Web folks have to consider the heads of the people they are trying to crawl into. This means thinking like them, which in-inevitably leads us to the first rule of marketing communications. “Who is my target audience?” It’s funny because no matter what field a person may be in, or what they may do as a profession, the question is always the same. Am I reaching people? Am I saying what people want/need to hear? Do my readers even like me? If the answer is ‘NO’ to any of these we have to ask, ‘What am I doing wrong?’. Finding the solutions to these questions maybe easier than you think.

Take a guy like Chris over at Solo Technology. He has a great blog and he posts regularly sometimes twice a day. He posts on ‘Anything Bright and Shiny on the Web’. Very valuable stuff to a person like me, in addition he has a great readership. Which means he is pretty much hitting his target audience. It is important to find people like that who are doing some of the same things you are trying to do and incorporating their habits and successful actions. I personally have three people I stalk regularly, I watch what they do, but more importantly I read the comments of their readers. This will get you valuable insight on what they are looking for. Now in saying that I need to mention that there is a difference between stalking for clarity, and un-ethical behavior. It would be un-ethical for me to start posting comments to their readers trying to lure them to my work/blog. One of the easiest things to do however is to simply ask your peers to evaluate your blog and its content.

A very unique idea I just heard about the other day, is to have a guest author.  Sometimes having a guest author post to your blog can lend itself to a great deal of validity.  Sometimes people find it easier to subscribe, or push your blog to a feed-reader if someone they know and trust has a couple of posts on your blog.

As I have mentioned in a previous posting, sometimes all your blog needs is a little time to gain steam and become one of those things that people read more than occasionally.  We all have busy lives, and sometimes life just gets away from us, and suddenly we find ourselves behind in our reading.  Other people have that problem, and having the kind of content people value is very important to keep your readership alive.