Note – This is a continuation to the last post where we discussed about Buyer Personas.

Just go out there and publish a post every week..

Isn’t that the advice you generally get, when you are just starting to blog?

It isn’t a wrong advice but can you just go out there and publish a post without knowing who your audience is?

In fact, this is a mistake a lot of us do, I am no different.

When I started off blogging, that is just what I did.

But over a period of time, I realized that I was missing the connect with my audience.

Why?

Because I wasn’t really writing for my audience.

In fact, I didn’t know my audience and so I was writing for some general audience. This wasn’t really something my audience was expecting.

So, I lost that confidence and connect with my audience over a period of time. And I could see this in the decreasing email open rates and decreasing readership for the blog.

After having spent a few weeks and after I put together a reader profile, my posts were extremely targeted and gradually the response rate started going up.

But, the big question here is, how do I know who my audience is, when I am just starting off?

It’s an absolutely valid question.

And I am sure, that a lot of you guys starting off out there would have this question..

So, in this episode, I am going to tell you about 3 simple steps in which you can create a reader profile for your blog.

How to Create a Reader Profile in 3 Easy Steps

We will keep the entire process of creating a reader profile absolutely simple. That’s a promise. But keep in mind that “Simple things are at times the most difficult and the easiest to ignore”.

So, you’ll need to promise that you will implement every single one of these steps.

So, Let’s start out.

Research your competitors

Your competitors are your biggest source of information and what you can learn from them is extremely valuable.

We tend to often ignore them, just because they are our competitors.

That’s one mindset that you need to change. Some of the best things (I mean in terms of returns) I have implemented, are things I learnt from my competitors.

So, what exactly do I mean when I say “competitors”?

Competitors are the blogs that are operating in the same niche as yours and are targeting the same audience as yours.

At this point, there could be 2 obvious questions

* What if I don’t have any competitors? – Then you are in the wrong niche. If there is no competitor, then it esentially means that the niche is not something you would want to get in because it is very likely that there isn’t an audience in the niche.* How do I know if they are my competitors? – Just browse through their blog and check if the content they are publishing is something you too are planning to publish. That would mean that they are your competitors.

Now that both of these obvious questions have been answered, let us look at the not so obvious question.

Where do I find my competitors?