Last year I was asked to speak at SWIPE summit about blogging. I decided to make it a confession, to share some of the things I’ve done wrong since I wrote my first blog post back in 2007.
The part that scared me most is that the audience at SWIPE was going to contain a lot of marketing people. They were sure to be surprised that I’d only recently considered creating reader personas.
Reader persona’s and how to create them are the topic of episode 14 of the Blogcentric podcast. You can download my reader/customer persona worksheet here.
Listen below to find out how and why you should create a reader persona for your blog
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Why create reader personas?
- You can ensure that you are writing the right content in the right style for the people you want to attract
- It will give you loads of ideas for content
- It will give you a better understanding of when to post and promote to get more readership
- If you target the right people with the right content you’ll get better results
- For those of you working in teams. persona names can work as shorthand when creating content. ‘This post is targeted at Boris’
6 Key points to consider when writing your reader personas
1. Who are they?
What age are they? What gender? did they go to college? What sort of job do they have?
I always think it’s worth basing your persona on a real person, a good customer or reader. It’s even better if you can sit down and interview someone that you would like to write for.
2. What does their day look like?
Do they have a routine? When do they get up? Do they travel to work or work from home? Knowing what your readers are doing during the day can help you schedule the right content at the right time to reach them.
3. Pain points
What really annoys your reader and how can you fix it? I know my readers are short on time, knowing this helps me create content that will help them.
4. Values & Goals
What is important to your reader? What are their goals? How can you help them reach them?
5. Where do they get information already?
What newspapers do they read? What magazines? What radio stations and TV programmes? What online content do they read already? This can help define your writing style and understand what you are competing with.
6. What do they love about you and what stands in the way of them doing business with you or reading your posts?
Probably the most important question. This is where you will find out what content you have to create to make sales and gain repeat visitors.
As bloggers we need to think about the sort of content we create as well. Are our long posts a turn off for some readers? Would they prefer to listen to a podcast or watch a video?
This week’s challenge
Create at least one reader persona. You can download my full worksheet here.
To find out how I’m progressing with the blogging challenges, what’s working and what’s not, follow me on Periscope.
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I am a disciple of the persona approach too. It makes the writer’s life so much easier when they know exactly who they’re writing for, particularly where are a number of target audiences.
Hi Eilish, Thanks for your comment, oddly I can see it on the back end of my website but it won’t publish! I’ll work on rectifying that 🙂