How to find your optimal target audience

Building a blog isn’t very hard. In fact, a blog can be setup in minutes, including everything from getting hosting to buying a domain. The hard part is getting the right kind of traffic. In order to get the right visitors, you need to first find out your optimal audience. Here is a three step process to find out. The only caveat is that you need to have an active blog with a mailing list.

Step One

The first step is to send your mails to your mailing list with your signature content. We need to find out who is reading the content you usually send out. Now export the list of users who opened your emails. These are also the most likely people who are the top readers on your blog.

Step Two

Now that we have a list of the top readers, we proceed to finding out whom they are. Now how this is done depends largely on the nature of the website. For more professional topics we can use sites like LinkedIn. In other situations there is always Google+, Facebook or even Twitter. Armed with the list of email addresses create a spreadsheet with all the demographics you want to track. Now use some like rapportive to find social profiles. Do this for all the email addresses  and fill out the sheet.

Step Three

Once you have decent amount of data, use it to create charts and graphs. For example an age based bar chart will give you the rough distribution of the ages of your visitors. Once you have have this information, you can target the content and your marketing efforts towards these demos.