But looking at the latest Problogger poll, the majority of Problogger readers haven’t written any guest posts. This is interesting to me, because that is the group of people I would most expect to be active guest bloggers—they know the benefits and have the motivation of growing a blog and going pro.

Some of the comments on that post hint at the reasons for not guest posting, and I’m curious to find out more specifics, so if you’re not guest posting, I’d love it if you’d take this quick poll.

Have any other thoughts on guest blogging? Leave a comment!

Sure, you might still get a little Google traffic, and if it was a really good post, hopefully some other bloggers linked to it and you’re still getting a few visitors clicking through. But wouldn’t it be nice to keep the post alive and kicking on your own blog?

Fortunately, it’s not that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress (I mention some plugins below that are for WordPress blogs, but you might be able to find equivalent ways of doing these things on other platforms, too). Read on to discover a few tricks you can use today.

Help readers find related information

The easiest way to keep old posts visible is to link to them. It’s also extremely effective: you can pretty accurately predict what will be interesting to a reader based on what they’re currently reading.

The simplest way to do this is simply to link to older posts when you’re writing a new post. Use the search tool on your blog to find posts that you may have forgotten about, and quickly scan through the titles of posts in the same categories you’re planning to use for the new post. Anything relevant? Link directly to the old post within the content of your new post.

Don’t stop there, though. Include a list of “related posts” at the end of each post. If you’re on WordPress, there are several plugins that can do this for you automatically (I use Similar Posts). Even if you have to create the list manually, it’s worth the effort.

Why? Because when a reader reaches the end of a post, they’re at a kind of crossroads—from there, they’ll decide whether to read something else on your blog or close it and go elsewhere. It’s a natural decision point, so giving them links to the posts most likely to interest them will encourage them to stick around.

Don’t overlook the value of the built-in archives, either. Many bloggers display their archives as a list of months on their sidebars, but you’re much better off showing categories and/or tags instead of (or in addition to) dates. Most people can pick a topic they’re interested in from a list, but the dates aren’t nearly as useful unless someone wants to read from the beginning.

For the same reason, make sure your blog theme shows a list of categories and/or tags for each post, preferably at the end (for the same reason you should have related posts at the end). This is an easy way for readers to continue reading about a topic that interests them.

Share the love with other bloggers

When you’re trying to keep your readers around, it may seem counter-intuitive to link to other blogs, but there are several good reasons for doing so:

1. Linking makes your blog posts more useful to your readers. If additional information would help clarify your post, but you haven’t covered it before, linking elsewhere is a service to your readers.
2. Linking attracts attention from other bloggers. Most bloggers check their stats and notice when someone links to them, and they appreciate it. They’re likely to check out your post, and might even link to it (or another one in the future) if it’s a good fit.
3. Linking raises your own awareness. If you’re paying attention to what’s being said elsewhere on the same topic, you’re less likely to write redundant posts, and more likely to be truly well-informed.

How you choose to link to other bloggers is up to you. If the content is highly relevant, you might feature an excerpt and link to the full post, or you can just create simple links in body of the post (similar to how you’d link back to your older posts).

Another option is to create a “further reading” section at the bottom. You can use tools like Zemanta or Sphere to automate the process, or do it manually, and you can change your approach on a per-post basis, too. You can even visually show that the links go to another site—the External Links plugin does this for WordPress, and if you’re on another platform, there are a range of methods.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can easily overwhelm your readers with too much good information. As a reader, I always prefer blogs that collect and summarize the best information available, rather than link to everything available, which makes me feel like I have to read a gazillion posts just to be marginally informed.

That said, a “further reading”-type list implies that it’s optional, and is very helpful for those who’ve read your post and want to learn more about the specific topic.

Highlight your best posts

Now that you’ve tackled links from individual posts, it’s time to think about your blog as a whole. Consider it from a first-time visitor’s perspective. Is it obvious what your site is about? If they want to learn more, where do they go to do it?

Highlighting your best posts is a great way to help answer these questions. Like most of the previous tips, you can use a plugin like Popularity Contest to create the list automatically, or you can create it by hand. Doing it yourself ensures you are promoting your very best, but can be harder to maintain. You can also do both and see which works for you.

Once you’ve created your list, there are several good places to draw attention to the best of the best; use as many as make sense to you.

1. List popular posts on your sidebar or other prominent location. You can see an example of this on Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur-Journey.com, right at the top.
2. Create a special section under your posts. Again, the “crossroads” logic—you hit the reader at the moment they’re trying to decide what to do next.
3. Create a separate page.

Repurpose your blog posts

Bonus tip! This one is a little more work than the others, so I’m including it here as extra credit.

Once you’ve written your blog post, if you find you’ve got a winner on your hands (good traffic, or lots of comments, for instance), it might be worth re-using.

How can you re-use it? Well, you should first be prepared to put a little time into polishing or re-writing so that the new version is at least a little different from the original. How much of that you do will depend on how you intend to re-use.

Here are a few ideas:

• Submit it to an article site (see this selection of article sites). If you write a good mini-bio, you can get ongoing traffic to your blog with this method.
• Use it in a newsletter. If you have a newsletter that’s got similar-but-not-identical readership, this is a good option. Or another blogger might be interested in using it in their newsletter, too.
• Use it as the basis of an ebook or free report. If you expand it or make it more valuable in some way, you can sell it or use it as an incentive to get people to sign up for your newsletter or feed. For instance, Leo at Zen Habits compiled his best posts into an ebook that’s now for sale.

photo credit: 顔なし

Since my last post about how I add followers on Twitter, I’ve received some questions about the metrics I use to choose who to follow back (or not). Then I posted a tweet that generated a much bigger response than I expected:

Can’t believe how many “Internet Marketing experts” follow me who obviously have no concept of Twitter etiquette. Not so impressive.

Based on the flurry of “are you talking about me?!?” messages I got, I clarified:

Specifically talking about the (self-proclaimed!) experts who are following 2k, followed by 15, and only tweet links to their own sites.

Still, it made me realize that many new Twitterers don’t really know what the culture is like, and they’re trying to get started without adequate information and wondering if they’re inadvertently offending people. (Although, honestly, if you’re worried about offending people, you’re already better off than the people who just charge ahead regardless!)

Some people will tell you that you can do anything you want on Twitter, because people have a choice about following you. That’s true, but presumably you’re not hanging out Twitter just to yell into a void; most people hope to get something from it (whether that’s friends, interesting conversation, website traffic, or leads). There are things you can do (or not do) that make your time on Twitter more effective.

Of course, these guidelines are my opinions only; hopefully others will weigh in with comments or posts of their own.

Figure out who you want to connect with and why

What are your goals for using Twitter? You might want to get new clients, or you might just want to find funny sites and videos to amuse yourself. Many people use Twitter with the hope of getting more blog readers (probably most of this blog’s readers fall in that category!). Those are just a couple of examples.

Think about the kind of people who can help you move towards your goals. If you are looking for more readers or clients, then you probably want to connect with people who are similar to your existing readers or clients—people who need to know something you are an expert in.

If you’re looking for entertainment, you’ll want people who are on top of the latest viral videos and send things before everyone’s seen them.

Once you know what you want out of Twitter, you’ll be much better prepared to make connections and participate intelligently.

Post regularly on topics of interest to your followers

Okay, so you might not have anyone following you yet. Pretend you do, and that they’re the people you really want to connect with. Then write your tweets for their benefit. What kinds of things do they want to hear about?

This doesn’t mean you can’t ever post updates on frivolous, personal stuff—that’s par for the course on Twitter. But keep your tweets somewhat balanced, and try to make your frivolous updates as interesting as you can.

This brings up the point of sending out updates about your blog posts: do it in moderation. Start by being realistic. Not every post you write is that great—so save the impact for the ones that really deserve attention. By picking and choosing, you’re showing respect for your followers and highlighting your best work.

Again, balance is key. Figure a minimum of maybe five to ten “normal” tweets per link to your own work. These other tweets can point to other people’s work that is interesting, or quick comments on something, anything useful to your followers, but remember that people will follow you when they get some benefit from doing so.

When you send out an update about your blog post, try and make it interesting and help people understand why they should care. If your post answers a question, use that question as an intro. This is always more helpful than just saying “My latest blog post: ” and throwing in the link. (And yes, this usually means sending these updates manually, rather than using an auto-tweet service. If you’re being selective, you’ll be sending them manually anyway.)

Start slowly

The temptation is always there to follow everyone and anyone in hopes that they’ll follow you back. This generally doesn’t work.

The main reason is what we call “social proof”: if you follow thousands of people and have very few people following you, you look incredibly boring. People subconsciously think, “Wow, nobody cares what this person is saying,” and write you off.

And that’s the most charitable version. If your tweets look entirely self-promotional, or you don’t have any updates, they’ll assume you’re a spammer and that you are only following people to accost them.

Let’s face it: we’re all approaching Twitter with a measure of self-interest. If we didn’t hope to get something out of it, it wouldn’t be worth spending time there. So from a purely self-interest perspective, realize that you’ll be much more effective at reaching whatever Twitter goals you may have if you are a little bit strategic about the process.

The best approach is to follow a few people, keep posting great updates, and be patient. When a few people follow you, follow a few more people. It’s easiest to start with those you already know or have something in common with (like location—I’ll follow almost anyone from my town).

When you’re expanding the people you follow, look at your profile page critically. Will the people you want to connect with see an obvious “hook” in your recent tweets? Will they immediately understand why they should follow you? If not, post something better.

Some of you more analytical types are probably wondering: exactly how many people should I follow? I’d say start with 30 or fewer, and then keep it to a ratio of 2:1 (following:followers), erring on the side of following fewer people. Obviously that’s arbitrary and just my opinion, but that’s what I’d do if it was me.

Engage with others

This is the whole point. If you’re not interacting with others, you might as well be muttering to yourself.

Pay attention to the people you are following who particularly interest you (if you want technical tips on how to do this, let me know and I’ll post something). When they send out a good tweet, use the @reply feature and tell them so.

Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Thank people who help you out or provide you with good ideas. Pass on particularly useful tweets that your followers might find helpful.

If you forget about trying to follow a kajillion people and instead focus your time on helping the people who already follow you, you’ll find you get more followers without much effort at all.

photo credit: luc legay

Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.

When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.

The time management pit of managing Twitter followers

The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly).

I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss’s obsession with batching regular tasks, so that’s an obvious first step. Instead of jumping off track with every new follower, I let the notifications gather and go through them once every few days or so.

My tools and tactics for evaluating Twitter followers

From here on, this post is going to talk about specific technologies and tools that I use. They’re certainly not the only ones available; they just happen to be the ones I’ve picked.

I’m admittedly a hopeless optimizer; if you have less Twitter activity, more time, or more sanity than I do, this may be overkill for you. I encourage you to look through my list and play with the ideas that appeal to you, and not worry about the rest.

Getting to the essential information

With my Twitter notification settings, I get several types of notices:

• Email copies of direct messages sent to me through Twitter
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m already following)
• Notifications that I’m being followed (by someone I’m not following)

I like to glance through the first two types for general info, but only the last group is relevant to the process of evaluating new followers for potential follow-back.

Sorting through email messages is not a good use of time, so I started using filters in Gmail to help with this some time ago. I noticed that only the third group of messages use the phrase “you may follow” (encouraging me to check out their profile), so I easily set up a rule to “mark as read” any message from Twitter that doesn’t say “you may follow”.

That was a good first step. In conjunction with a filter that routed all mail from Twitter to its own folder/label for easy batching, I could tell at a glance what kind of message it was.

Breaking free of email

When it comes down to it, though, email is not really a good tool for this process. The emails themselves don’t contain enough information to make a decision (except in cases where I happen to recognize a name)—it’s the link to the profile that I want, and clicking through dozens of emails just to click one link each is not very efficient. But what would be a better tool?

There are probably other tools that would work, but RSS is the one that comes to mind for me. With an RSS feed, I can very quickly scroll through an expanded list, ctrl-click the links to open them in new tabs, and be on my way.

The only trouble with this idea is that (to my knowledge) there is no RSS feed of recent followers. Enter MailBucket, a tool that takes email and turns it into an RSS feed on the fly.

With MailBucket, all I have to do is edit my Gmail filter to send “you may follow” messages from Twitter to my MailBucket email address, and then subscribe to the resulting feed in Google Reader. If you don’t actually use an RSS reader, you could even take it a step further and run the feed through FeedBurner, subscribe via email, and get one “daily digest” of all new follows.

Edit: The MailBucket feed doesn’t make the profile URLs clickable, so I’ve done a little magic with Yahoo! Pipes to remedy that. The specifics are probably beyond the interest of most readers, so I’m leaving them out, but if you really want to know how I did it, leave a comment and I’ll post more info.

See follower quality at a glance

With a lot of followers comes a lot of cruft. Having specific standards helps weed out the worst. I generally won’t follow those who:

• Only tweet with links to their own posts (if I wanted to subscribe to your blog, I would)
• Don’t ever @reply to anyone (it’s not very interesting to listen to someone who’s talking into a vacuum)
• Don’t have any tweets at all (do you understand the premise of Twitter?)
• Follow way more people than follow them (this seems spammy, or at the least, desperate)

Obviously some of these are very subjective, so they’re just general guidelines. You’ve basically got eight or nine tweets to catch my eye (that’s how many show up in my first screenful).

For the last item on the list, I also use a cool little Greasemonkey script called Twitter User Classify that visually shows me the user’s ratio of “following” to “followers”. (Like all Greasemonkey scripts, it’s only for Firefox, but that’s my primary browser so it works well for me.) The ratio is not the be-all-end-all, but it’s a helpful clue.

When to un-follow?

Honestly, I hardly ever un-follow people unless they’re downright annoying (sending inappropriate direct messages or other forms of spam).

A lot of the interest factor of Twitter is in wandering into conversations that I would never otherwise encounter. Being fairly entrpreneurial, I like to “cross-pollinate” with industries outside my own and see what I can learn and apply to my own projects. Following a lot of diverse people is surprisingly useful to that end.

How do you manage your Twitter account?

I’d love to hear how you handle the info-challenges of Twitter. Leave comments or post on your own blog, and by all means, if you have any questions (about specific tools, my philosophy, whatever), leave those, too.

And follow me on Twitter.

My perfectionistic tendencies get the better of me and I resist trying PPC until the site is perfect (copy is polished, design exactly how I want it, oh, and that new feature is added…). Long story short, I’ve only dabbled in PPC a couple of times, even though I know it can bring great traffic. I just worry about spending too much money before everything is how I want it.

Well, one more excuse to scratch off the list: money. Our friends at AdGridwork have published a list of free PPC vouchers that let you try out the various services with minimal upfront investment (notice that the first four on the list require no upfront payment at all!).

I’m going to quit my procrastinating and sign up for at least the first couple and use them to promote my almost-launched new site. What will you promote?

First, the dead-obvious suggestion: start with the blogs you’re already reading. Hopefully you’ve selected some high quality blogs that are written for people who are a lot like your ideal reader.

As you’re reading through posts, stay alert for points that catch your attention, give you an idea, remind you of something else, or even irritate you a little. Those things are excellent comment-fodder and, if you can communicate a response with clarity and intelligence, you’ll probably get the attention of the blogger and the readers.

Once you’ve visited all your “usual suspects,” though, where should you turn next?

Technorati

There are lots of options, but one of the best discovery tools is Technorati. Technorati’s claim to fame is their huge directory of blogs—over 110 million as of this writing. They also keep tabs on new posts, so they’re a great resource when you’re looking for fresh blog content on a specific topic.

The easiest way to find the most relevant posts is to use the search feature. Because of the absolutely massive amount of posts, you’ll want to be pretty specific with your search. Play around with it until you’re getting 3-10 relevant posts over the last couple of days. Then just read each of those posts and leave a thoughtful comment, and you’re done. (Well, almost. I like to track all of my comments with Commentful, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Google BlogSearch

For our purposes, Google BlogSearch is a lot like Technorati. Often you’ll see the same posts in both places, so try them both for a few days and see which one you prefer; then just use the other briefly to pick up any that your primary method missed. Be sure to brush up on your search syntax to get the most out of Google.

CommentKahuna

I’m also growing to love a free little program called CommentKahuna (sorry, Mac folks, it’s Windows only). As far as I can tell, it’s being given away free to get people on a mailing list, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a still a great deal for me.

So what does CommentKahuna do? It finds blogs and blog posts that match your search terms. Exactly what you need, right? And it has a couple of other features that make it even better.

One is that it can be set (under “Options”) to mark blogs that will link directly to you, without using the “nofollow” attribute. This matters because you’ll get more benefit from Google by commenting on these blogs. Similarly, you can view the resulting blogs ranked by Google Pagerank and focus your efforts on the blogs that are already Google’s favorites.

The process of commenting with CommentKahuna is very simple. First, you create a “Profile”; this is your personal information that you normally fill in along with your comment. CommentKahuna keeps track of this info and fills it in for you, which saves a step.

The program also lets you visit the blogs right through its interface, one right after another. This saves time, but more importantly for me, means I’m less likely to get distracted (my biggest time-waster of all!).

In many cases, the link that CommentKahuna gives you goes to a blog’s homepage. In this case, just take a quick browse through to see if any of the posts catch your eye. If not, move on.

I find it’s most effective for me to search for keywords that are related to my most recent post. My reasoning is twofold. First, this keeps the me from constantly getting the same suggested blogs. Second, this makes it more likely that a visitor following my link will be interested in my blog.

You’ll probably have to tweak CommentKahuna somewhat to get it “just right.” I’ve had better results limiting the search to WordPress blogs; otherwise I was getting a lot of quasi-blogs that didn’t have traditional comments. I’ve also found it important to quickly note the dates on posts; adding a comment a year after the fact doesn’t really promote the relationship unless the comment is extremely relevant.

What is blog comment marketing? It’s just a fancy way of saying “leave comments on other people’s blogs”—taking something you’re probably doing already, and just making it intentional.

Up till now, you may not have given any thought to the comments you leave on other blogs. Or maybe you have, but you aren’t great about getting around to it. Let me give you three good reasons why you should kick up your commenting.

1. Comments are the first step in forming a relationship with another blogger. Think about how you feel when you receive a comment. You read it, and if it’s thoughtful, you appreciate that someone took the time to write it. Good comments improve the quality of a blog, so you notice the folks who are helping your blog be better. As you leave comments over time, you’ll start to be recognized, and you might find yourself able to help the bloggers you interact with in the future… and vice versa.
2. You’ll get “pre-qualified” visitors. If you’re smart about where you comment, and you leave a good comment, you’ll attract not only the attention of the blogger but also the other readers. If you clearly know what you’re talking about and they’re interested in the topic, many of them will click through to your blog to find out more.
3. You’ll learn something in the process. If you read other blogs on your topic or blogs that are geared towards your ideal reader, you’ll pick up some useful knowledge in the process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to answer a client’s question with something I recently read in a blog post.

But before you go crashing into comment marketing, leaving a wake of annoyed bloggers behind you, make sure you’re being a considerate commenter.

1. Only leave a comment if you can add something to the post. The point of blog comment marketing is to establish good will and useful links. If you’re not contributing something helpful, guess what: you’re not establishing good will, and the links you’re making aren’t useful. This isn’t about trying to beat the system; it’s about intentionally forming relationships. Besides, if you leave useless comments, you risk getting marked as a spammer; get marked too many times and you won’t be able to post on almost any blog (thanks to Akismet, a central database of spammers).
2. Put your blog URL in the “Website” or “URI” box and nowhere else. There’s a reason you’re asked for your website; most blogs will link your name to your site automatically when you leave a comment. To add your link anywhere else is just rude. The only exception is when you are linking to something that’s extremely relevant and specific (pretty much never your homepage), and will be considered genuinely helpful by other readers.
3. Don’t cram a bunch of marketing hype into your name. One of the current trends is to use the “Name” field as an extra place to stick your marketing message. Resist. Be consistent in what you put here (see this free PDF ebook for why it matters) but err on the side of not looking like a spammer.

My next post will talk about how to find good blog posts for your comment marketing. Until then, remember to be considerate!

1. Clarify the business goals for your blog
2. Commit to blogging goals for long-term success
3. Why create an “ideal reader”?
4. How to identify your ideal reader

If you’re convinced that you need to create an ideal reader, you’ll be eager to dig into the details. Get a notebook and pen, or use your computer and open up a text editor. Let’s go!

Start with generalities:

• Who is your target audience for your product or service? Does it make sense for your ideal reader to be the same?
• Thinking about your business goals for your blog, who is the target audience that is most likely to help you reach those goals? For instance, if one of your big goals is three leads a week, then your ideal reader is someone who is your ideal customer, but has increased motivation to take action now. If a big goal is to increase credibility and become known as an expert, your ideal reader might be a person who’s considered an expert among his or her peers and has a lot of connections and influence.
• What is your reader’s main motivation to visit your blog? In the first example above, the “ideal customer” is motivated to find a solution to a problem that’s currently causing discomfort or pain. On the other hand, the “connected expert” (in the second example) is more likely looking for interesting information that he can pass on to his circle to enhance their opinion of him and cement his good reputation.

Once you have some general ideas about your ideal reader, start to narrow it down and discover a single person that would read your blog. You might be able to use an existing customer or colleague as your model. Feel free to start writing a bit of a narrative rather than just answering each question individually.

• Is your reader male or female? How old?
• Is your reader tech-savvy?
• Where does your reader currently get the information he/she needs? For instance, talking with people, books, magazines, websites, etc.
• Why will this reader care about your blog?
• What’s significant about where your reader works, lives, shops, and or/plays?
• How knowledgeable is your reader about your topic?
• Is your reader reading for personal enrichment or professional development?
• Is your reader’s need for your knowledge urgent or curiosity-driven?

Now get really specific, beyond things that have a direct relationship with your blog. These details will help you think of your ideal reader as a specific, individual person. You might find it helpful to clip a photo from a magazine to represent your ideal reader. Having someone to look at can be surprisingly helpful.

• What is your reader’s name?
• Is your reader married? Are there kids? How many? What ages?
• Ethnicity? Hair and eye color? Height and weight?
• Is your reader’s work fulfilling?
• How is your reader’s free time spent?
• How does your reader dress during the week? On the weekends?

You get the idea. Just write and write until you feel like there’s an actual person. You may come up with a composite of people you’ve met, you might find a complete stranger, or you might discover that your ideal reader is someone you already know. It doesn’t matter, as long as you find someone to write to.

1. Clarify the business goals for your blog
2. Commit to blogging goals for long-term success
3. Why create an “ideal reader”?
4. How to identify your ideal reader

In blogging, like any other aspect of life, trying to please everyone usually results in pleasing no one. Not only will keeping your ideal reader in mind help you avoid straying too far from your goals, it also makes the actual process of writing easier.

Consider how much more quickly words flow when you’re writing an email to a friend versus creating a formal business presentation. When you have a specific recipient in mind, you have a much easier time communicating your ideas.

Picking just one “ideal reader” is easier said than done, though!

Ask any business who their target customer is and you’re likely to get a general category in response: small-to-medium-sized businesses; people who want to improve their health; growing companies who need accounting support but can’t afford an accounting employee. You’ll often encounter that truly optimistic soul who says, “Everyone needs my product!”

Along the same lines, if you ask most bloggers who their ideal reader is, you’ll hear more broad terms: people who want to lose weight; progressive liberals; frugal moms.

These categories are a start, but I prefer something I’ve found much more practical in the day-to-day work of blogging: think of one person—your ideal reader, not readers.

A local radio station does this. Their “ideal listener” is a made-up, but extremely detailed, woman named Jane. If you ask any of the station’s employees, they can tell you how old Jane is, how many kids she has, what her hobbies are, and just about anything else that matters to her.

This might seem a little overkill, but imagine how much easier it makes music or programming decisions. Instead of trying to decide if the nebulous “listeners” would like a change, the question is just about one person (a person who is intentionally representative of “the listeners”). It becomes much easier to have a core focus and escape distractions.

When you use this concept as a blogger, your benefits are similar. When you’re evaluating a potential blog post topic, you can ask yourself, “Why would Sam (or Jane, or Harriett) care about this?”

It’s way too easy to justify off-topic posts by reasoning that they’ll be useful to someone. If you have to feel confident that they will be valuable to Sam, the result will be a blog that is a much better resource for the actual people you want as readers.

Having a specific ideal reader in mind also will help you in the writing process. As you get to know your ideal reader, you will start to write directly to that person and anticipate his (or her) questions. You’ll be able to frame your suggestions and observations in a way that resonates, and everyone who reads your blog will benefit from the specificity.

You might think that focusing on one person would exclude others and cut your readership down. I’ve found, though, that people are pretty good at abstracting specific concepts to fit their situations; they also just ignore what doesn’t fit for them.

How many times have you seen a specific resource, like a book written “for dummies”, described as “not just for beginners”? Good information, presented well, will be useful for a broad range of readers, and they can usually tell pretty quickly.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you of the value of having a specific ideal reader. In my next post, I’ll tell you how to create one.