Connection Steps that Lead to Customers

Once upon a time, there used to be a division in how people saw the web.

(Way back in 2009, I wrote a blog post about this, calling the two points of view “the cool kids” and “the internet marketers.”)

That division drew a line between online communication that intended to connect and online communication that intended to persuade and sell.

And that distinction was, of course, completely bogus.

As it happens, Brian Clark, Copyblogger’s founder, was an early heretic trying to show people that there was no difference between connection and persuasion.

Connection and persuasion belong together — because they work better together, and because it’s a natural, normal way to communicate and do business.

But as we all know, people don’t just land on your website, feel an instant sense of connection, then rush to your shopping cart and buy something. Although that would be very cool.

As a content marketer, it’s your job to build relevant paths for people to walk through your site, get a sense of what you do, and — if it’s a good fit — go on to become happy, loyal customers.

Connection matters

Good salespeople have always known that connection matters in commercial relationships.

There’s the creepy kind of salesperson who tries to connect but just comes across as clumsy and predatory. And the great kind of salesperson who actually gives a damn about prospects and long-term relationships.

Here’s the great big secret of selling online:

Internet-savvy prospects don’t have to put up with aggravating sales pitches.

Annoyed online users will block your ads. They’ll mark your irritating email as spam. Or they’ll just close the tab and never see you again.

The web gives us wonderful tools to mute the volume on people who get on our nerves. And the first targets for those tools were the salespeople and ads that tried to take our attention for granted.

How do you make that connection that keeps you out of the dreaded spam filter? It starts with being human and helpful.

Becoming a friendly authority

You might notice that we use the term “friendly authority” quite a bit around here.

To clarify, a friendly authority is:

• Not an entertaining train wreck (they’re amusing but untrustworthy)
• Not a monologue-spewing blowhard (they’re boring and offensive)
• Not a pseudo-therapist (they’re unethical and creepy)

Instead: A friendly authority is an intelligent, reasonably sane human being who clearly communicates solutions to problems in your topic.

You don’t have to over-share, and you don’t have to pretend that you’ll never sell anything. (Both of those are actually counterproductive.)

You just have to be useful, interesting, and human.

The conviction bump

If you want to go a step beyond a simple connection of one human to another, you can start thinking about how you communicate your values and the values of your organization.

It makes me sad that “values” have become a cheap buzzword.

I blame horrible mission statements like:

To be the world’s foremost provider of premier product excellence with world-class service and passion, embracing financially responsible frameworks within an optimized matrix that challenges limitations and nurtures creative solutioning …

At best, that gains an eye roll.

But those abstract nouns we call values or beliefs are also what give our lives meaning. They bring organizations and communities together.

Good businesses live by values — whether or not those values are spelled out.

But beyond that, as a writer and content creator, you have values that will help you get better at everything you’re doing today.

If you want a quick exercise you can start right now, pick five values that matter to you. These are concepts like “Family,” “Integrity,” “Freedom,” that kind of thing.

They don’t have to be terribly noble. “Fun” works. So does “Mischief.”

Write a couple of paragraphs about one. Do that with a different value every week. Maybe on Monday mornings.

When you spend a small amount of time thinking about your values, those values will start to make themselves felt in your work. Your writing, your videos, your podcasts, your graphic design, will start to resonate with something beyond the nuts and bolts of your topic.

When you’re connected with your values, you communicate with conviction.

When you communicate with conviction, others feel it — and often they’ll want to connect further.

Conversion follows

Content marketing’s purpose is to make it a whole lot easier to sell stuff.

Thoughtful, well-executed content paves the way for what we want our audience to do — whether that’s buying something, opting in, or some other activity.

We use content to create a context of persuasion, so that when we move toward a business transaction, it makes sense and feels logical and natural.

Does that mean content marketing doesn’t do any selling? Well, only if you absolutely don’t care what your audience does next.

If you’re crafting content as a hobby or to gain attention for something fun, that’s fine.

If you’re crafting content to support a business, it would be great if people bought stuff.

Conversion is what happens when interest turns into action.

Our friends the traditional copywriters are excellent at this step. They have a lot to teach about persuasive language, clear calls to action, reduction of risk, and all those other excellent copywriting topics.

We try to make those topics user-friendly and accessible (even for those who are a bit nervous about selling) right here on Copyblogger.

Conversion uses a different toolkit than connection and conviction do … but that doesn’t mean you’re going to throw your values and your relationships out the window.

Remember that making sales online — particularly in a world of spam filters and ad blocking — is about constructing paths that lead people to your business. All of the stones in each path should fit together.

The more strategic content you create, the more paths you build — and the more business you’ll attract and convert.

If you’re terrific at creating content for the relationship part of the path, but your conversion steps are clumsy or awkward, your users will stumble … and they won’t move forward.

Get education for the whole path, not just one stone

Some marketing education focuses just on conversion techniques — crafting great ads, landing pages, and sales sequences.

Some marketing education focuses just on connection and conviction techniques — earning and nurturing relationships, without any of that pesky selling.

If you want to create content that markets a business — whether it’s your own business, a client’s business, or an organization you work for — you need to hone your skills for the whole path.
That’s what we designed the Authority community of content professionals to do for you.

Our online master classes cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Persuasive copywriting and site design
• The structure of effective content
• Content creation that attracts new customers
• Strategies to nurture prospects and create a better bond with existing customers
• Productivity and mindset management
• Improving the quality of your writing
• Search engine optimization for lasting results

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What Is an Email Conversion?

 The success of a business boils down to whether customers buy what you’re selling. In marketing terms: whether they’re converting. And since email marketing programs exist to support the business, email conversions are a critical metric for most programs.

However, in part because email programs have many secondary goals that are unique from the business’s goals, the definition of a conversion has become more than a little hazy, creating misalignments at some brands. To bring some focus to this issue, we asked five experts two simple questions:

WHAT IS A CONVERSION? IS AN EMAIL CONVERSION DIFFERENT FROM CONVERSIONS IN OTHER CHANNELS?

Everyone had a fairly similar definition of a conversion (which we’ve highlighted in their responses below). However, as they expanded on that, things got blurry quickly. Interestingly, everyone agrees that there are a couple of different kinds of conversions—but they don’t agree on what those two kinds are or what to call them. The possibilities include:

micro-conversions and macro-conversions
email conversions and website conversions
direct conversions and indirect conversions
conversions and conversions to sale

Our experts make great points about why each of these distinctions is important.

ALEX BIRKETT, GROWTH MARKETER AT CONVERSIONXL, SAYS:

A conversion can be many things—it’s simply “the completion of a desired action.” That said, there are two general types of conversions: micro-conversions (opens, CTR) and macro-conversions (end-goal conversions like sales and signups). In general, I think many marketers are optimizing for the wrong type of conversions (micro-conversions) because it’s easier and you can see bigger uplifts.

So for example, if you send a bunch of people an email promising them free beer and pizza, you’ll probably get a sky high open rate and quite a lot of clicks. But then when they hit your landing page and find out you only sell socks, be prepared for a massive bounce rate—and lots of burned trust resulting in an eroded brand reputation. That’s why landing page optimization is such a large part of email marketing—if you maintain message match and keep the conversion scent through the funnel, the results are generally better at every stage.

Don’t get me wrong, measure micro-conversions. They can provide tons of insights. But play the long game and optimize for the macro-conversions. In other words, keep your eye on the sales, not the clicks.

STEVE LINNEY, FOUNDER OF EMRKTNG, SAYS:

A conversion is simply an action taking place on your landing page—or any other area of your website—that triggers an outcome you want to track. You define what the conversion is you are looking to measure, such as a new subscriber or a purchase.

For me, conversions don’t take place within the email, but on the website. However, website conversion rate is only one part of the story and you need to make sure that all parts of your email marketing funnel are rocking:

• Targeting your audience | measurement: send number
• Subject line | measurement: open rate
• Quality of message and offering | measurement: click-through rate
• Potential customers on your website | measurement: visitor numbers
• Visitors don’t like what they see and leave | measurement: bounce rate
• Visitors do what you want them to | measurement: conversion rate

A/B testing, refining, and tweaking should be always be happening to ensure you have the best user experience and offering you can possibly give. Keep in mind that testing is never ending as there is always something you can improve to ensure you give the customer the experience they are looking for and you stay ahead of the competition.

ERIN KING, SR. EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER AT LITMUS, SAYS:

Marketers often wrestle with determining the value of conversions if they’re not tied to sales, which can lead to the thinking that if a campaign isn’t making money directly and immediately, it’s a failure. The thing about conversions, for any channel, is that they don’t always have to happen immediately, and they don’t always have to follow a straight line.

Basically, an email conversion can be defined as when a subscriber takes the path you point them toward in your message. For example, if your email promotes an event, a click through to the registration page is progress, but a completed registration is a conversion. If you’re sending a monthly newsletter with links to your blog content, the conversion can be measured by how many of the featured posts are read, or how long your subscribers spend on the blog post-click.

Some emails lend themselves to direct conversions (I promote a product, you buy it). But there’s also value in “indirect” conversions, where your email inspires some other interaction with your site or product.

For example, say I send an email promoting a report download. My subscriber opens the email—and then does nothing. But my email reminds them that there’s other content on my blog that they want to check out. Later on, they visit and read some posts, see a promotion for a weekly email they’re interested in, and decide to sign up for it. Is this conversion the one that the original email intended? No, but the email was still the catalyst that started the subscriber down the path to signing up for a new email list, so it’s an indirect conversion.

APRIL MULLEN, SR. MARKETING STRATEGIST AT SELLIGENT, SAYS:

Very simply, an email conversion is when a desired action takes place as a result of a customer receiving an email from your brand. Many marketers, though, consider an email conversion taking place when email is attributed as the source after a customer makes a purchase or some other action such as registering for a webinar or signing up for a contest. That view is fairly myopic, though. Email is so much more than the final conversion event. It has a critical hand in the revenue-driving process by moving your customers down the funnel toward the website through a series of micro-conversions.

What’s a micro-conversion, you ask? They are all the smaller, desired actions that your customers go through to reach the end goal you had in mind for the campaign. Everything from delivered, opened, clicked, etc. should be considered as conversion events or micro-conversions that all have a hand in a campaign’s success.

In fact, if we really consider where the sale/registration/contest entry takes place, which is on a website, then email’s ultimate conversion event is really a click that passes a customer on to the website. I believe email’s ultimate goal is to sell a click because email isn’t actually the place where the final conversion event takes place (that is, unless you are one of those exceptionally innovative brands that has figured out a good experience to sell right from email without driving customers to your website).

The next time you see an email campaign that has incredible click-throughs, but low conversions, don’t blame email. Unless it over-promised something that the website couldn’t deliver, the email did its job.

JOHN CALDWELL, PRESIDENT OF RED PILL EMAIL, SAYS:

Broadly speaking, conversion means any desired, measurable action taken by prospects and/or customers, irrespective of channel. That was the definition of conversion in pre-internet direct marketing. It’s the broad definition of conversion in email, as well.

A conversion doesn’t always involve money changing hands. A conversion can be filling out a form or downloading a report. This is especially true with high-consideration, high-ticket, long-sales-cycle purchases, such as the business-to-business prospecting that marketing-services providers typically engage in. However, for some organizations, conversion always means a sale. Those are called conversions to sale.

Whether or not conversions involve immediate sales, it is important to measure the value of those conversions on a rolling monthly and quarterly basis. Measure the number of sales that result from the period’s conversions and divide the number of sales by the number of conversions to get the conversion-to-sale percentage.

But remember, any of these desired actions cannot be considered conversions unless they’re a result of some action taken by the organization. You want to be able to accurately gauge your marketing efforts without artificially inflating them with serendipitous leads and sales.

THE RISK OF CONVERSION INFLATION

Our experts make great points and the distinctions they make are valuable ones. But at the same time, it’s easy to see how confusion can arise and conversion inflation can occur.

The risk is that email marketing programs become out of alignment with business goals and objectives so that you may have a “successful” email program that doesn’t contribute to the success of the business. While the conversions associated with a campaign or email can vary from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the conversions that business leaders talk about and care about exist primarily at the bottom of the funnel.

The easiest way to avoid fuzzy metrics, definition creep, and false equivalencies is to keep track of campaign goals and metrics, but then also translate those results so they match up with the business’s goals and metrics. Keeping your email-centric metrics separate and distinct from your business-centric metrics will ensure that your email marketing will be a success in the eyes of your business’s leaders.

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4 Ways to Build Facebook Lookalike Audiences to Expand Your Targeting

 Do you want to reach more consumers with your Facebook ads?

Looking for creative ways to reach more people like your ideal customers?

Lookalike audiences allow you to build new audiences using an established source audience such as people who have viewed your video or previously purchased from you.

In this article, you’ll discover how to use Facebook lookalike audiences to successfully scale your ad targeting.

What Are Facebook Lookalike Audiences?

Facebook lookalike audiences are an advanced targeting option that goes beyond the basic interest and demographic targeting functionality. They’re currently the most effective Facebook targeting tool to find your ideal customer.

At the core of all lookalike audiences is a source audience upon which you build a lookalike audience. Facebook takes all of the data points of your source audience and finds new, similar people using a set percentage sample (which you specify) of the population in your chosen country.

Unlike interest-based targeting, lookalike audiences allow you to create the source audience, giving you more control. As a result, you end up with better-quality audiences because you can find new audiences that are almost identical to your existing ones.

Lookalike audiences are best used to target new cold audiences at the top of your sales funnel. For example, you could run top-of-funnel content campaigns to all of the lookalike audiences you build. This would start to warm them up as you take them from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

Now let’s look at how to create four types of lookalike audiences.

#1: Create a Video Lookalike Audience

Facebook users watch 100 million hours of video on the platform every day, so it should come as no surprise that video is Facebook’s best-performing content.

Video allows you to build brand recognition and trust with your target audience quickly. If you’re running a video-based content strategy and want to scale your campaigns to reach more people, lookalike audiences let you find new people based on those who’ve already watched your videos.

Before you can create a video lookalike audience, you first need to create a custom video audience, which will be the source audience for the lookalike.

Create a Custom Video Audience

Custom video audiences allow you to segment your viewers based on what videos they’ve watched and their level of engagement.

To create a custom video audience, open your Facebook Ads Manager and navigate to the Audiences dashboard. To do that, click the menu button and click All Tools.

Under Assets, click Audiences.

Next click Create Audience and select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu.

In the pop-up box that appears, you’ll see four custom audience options. Select Engagement on Facebook.

Next select Video.

You’ll see the box where you create your custom video audience. Select your engagement criteria from the Engagement drop-down list and choose the videos from which you want to build your audience.

Define the time period, give your audience a name, and click Create Audience.

You can create an audience for all video views at every engagement level: 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 95%. To create each one, repeat the process outlined above for the different engagement options.

Build a Video Lookalike Audience

Now you’re ready to create your video lookalike audience. Navigate to the Audiences dashboard in your Ads Manager just like you did when you created the custom video audience. Then click Create Audience and select Lookalike Audience from the drop-down menu.

In the Create a Lookalike Audience box, you’ll see three fields: Source, Country, and Audience Size. For the source, select the custom video audience you created in the previous step.

Next choose your country. This is typically the country in which the majority of your source audience is located. For example, if you work predominantly with UK-based businesses, any lookalike audience you create will be in the UK.

Finally, select your audience size. Audience sizes range from 1% to 10% of the total population in the country you choose, with 1% being those who most closely match your source. You may want to start at 1% and increase the audience size when you want to scale campaigns to reach more people.

When you’re finished, click Create Audience. You’ll receive a notification when your lookalike audience is ready to use, which could take up to 30 minutes.

#2: Set Up Email List Lookalike Audiences

Email-based lookalike audiences often deliver the best results. Why? Because you can take your existing customer list and use that as the source for your lookalike audience, essentially cloning your customer base.

As with video lookalike audiences, first you’ll need a custom email audience of your subscribers/customers before you can create an email-based lookalike audience.

Create a Custom Email Audience

Navigate to the Audiences dashboard, click Create Audience, and select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu. In the first pop-up box, select Customer File.

You have two options for adding your email data: upload your data as a file/copy and paste the data, or import it from MailChimp. If you’re uploading your email list, click Choose a File or Copy and Paste the Data.

Next upload the email list (which is a CSV file in the example).

Then map your identifiers. The more identifiers you use the better match rate you’ll see. In the example, we’ll use First Name, Last Name, and of course, Email Address.

After you click Upload & Create, you’ll see a progress bar and how many rows of data were successfully uploaded.

Now under Next Steps, click Create a Lookalike Audience.

Build an Email Lookalike Audience

In the Create a Lookalike Audience box that opens, you’ll see your custom email audience in the Source field.

Select your target country (from which the majority of your email list comes) and choose the audience size. Consider starting with a 1% lookalike audience and scaling from there. Then click Create Audience.

#3: Create Conversion Lookalike Audiences

Conversion lookalike audiences let you find new target audiences using a website custom audience of people who have completed a specific conversion event.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce business running a discount code lead magnet, create a website custom audience of people who have triggered a lead event action by opting in for the discount code. Then use that audience as the source for your lookalike audience.

Before you can create the source audience for your conversion lookalike audience, make sure that you’ve set up and installed conversion tracking.

As with video and email lookalike audiences, you need to create the source audience first. It will be a website custom audience of people who have completed a specific event action.

Create a Website Custom Audience for Conversions

In the Audiences dashboard in your Facebook Ads Manager, click Create Audience and select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu. In the pop-up box, select Website Traffic.

From the Website Traffic drop-down menu, select Custom Combination.

Click the URL drop-down menu and select Event.

Choose the event you want to create the audience from (Lead, for example). You’ll see a list of event actions you’re currently tracking using the Facebook pixel.

In the field called In the Last, enter the time parameter for how long people will stay in your audience once they’ve completed the specific action. For example, you might choose 120-180 days to have the maximum number of people in your audience.

Finally, make sure the Include Past Website Traffic box is selected, give your audience a name, and click Create Audience.

Build a Conversion Lookalike Audience

Now navigate to the Audiences dashboard, click Create Audience, and select Lookalike Audience from the drop-down menu.

In the Create a Lookalike Audience box, choose your website custom audience from the Source drop-down list.

Then select your country and choose the audience size (1% is a good place to start).

Finally, click Create Audience and wait for Facebook to build your lookalike audience. Once it’s ready to use, you’ll receive a notification and it will appear in your Audiences dashboard.

#4: Construct Page Likes Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences for page likes are the easiest to set up because you build them from the fans of your Facebook page. If you have a large number of Facebook fans who actively engage with your organic posts, a page likes lookalike audience is a great way to find new similar target audiences.

Differing from the three lookalike audiences above, you don’t need to create a custom audience for your source audience.

In the Audiences dashboard in Facebook Ads Manager, click Create Audience and select Lookalike Audience. In the Create a Lookalike Audience box, select your page name from the Source drop-down list.

Then choose your target country and select your audience size.

Tip: With all lookalike audiences, the larger the source audience, the better quality the lookalike audience will be (since there are more data points to use). A general guideline for building lookalike audiences is that the source audience must have at least 1,000 people in it.

Conclusion

One of the advantages of using lookalike audiences is the ability to scale your campaigns quickly and easily. Because you create lookalike audiences based on a percentage sample of people in your target country (from 1% to 10%), you can start with a closely defined 1%, and as you reach higher ad frequency, introduce the 2% audience, and so on.

Compare this approach with interest-based targeting, which is more hit and miss when you have to create new audiences from different related interests.

What do you think? Do you use Facebook lookalike audiences for your Facebook ads? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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4 ways to leverage email marketing with PPC

When it comes to the fast-moving world of internet marketing, everyone is looking for that competitive edge. If SEO and email marketing are already a developed part of your marketing campaign, PPC (pay-per-click) can be another useful tool to help grow both your conversions and your leads.

Use PPC to test email marketing elements

While we can use email marketing to increase leads in a variety of ways, PPC advertising offers a great way to test out the elements of your marketing emails, like landing pages or possible subject lines, before using them in a mass email. PPC gives you ample space to safely test out that edited copy, those new keywords or a new landing page and get an early peek at conversion rates. Using these tools can help optimize your message and increase its rate of success before sending it out to your entire list. That said, PPC ads are not only a great environment to test out elements of email marketing, but are versatile enough to try out nearly any element of your marketing campaign.

Build email lists with PPC

A great way for anyone to start introducing PPC into their campaign is by using it to grow your email list. While email can be used to increase both conversions and leads, PPC is a terrific way to boost both of those numbers even further. In this case, you can measure every email gained from a PPC ad as a conversion and a success toward this goal. Someone clicking on a PPC ad should arrive at a page that shows off the service or product one is offering, but with two possible ways of gathering potential customer information:

First, the primary focus of this page should always be the conversion itself. Part of this process will gather the customer’s email along with other information for things like receipts and contact or shipping information. Simple enough.

Then, you should always include a secondary call to action (CTA) that can still obtain an email conversion even if the person decides not to purchase. This shouldn’t distract from your main objective and should encourage potential customers to give you their email address and offer them something in return. An example of this might be “Sign up to be notified of future discounts” or “Sign up for news and tips” — anything that could appeal to someone interested in the ad but not quite ready to commit to what you’re offering.

Use your email marketing data to optimize your PPC ads 

The information you have gathered via sending conversion emails and looking at click-through rates isn’t just useful for your email marketing. While emails commit to a higher percentage of overall conversions for many businesses, PPC ads can be a powerful tool in gaining conversions themselves. The keywords, subjects, headlines and offers that have been successful in the past can likely be integrated into your PPC ads as well. At the least they are powerful starting benchmarks to help augment your marketing strategy. This can be great information in reaching out to a brand-new audience or wider market, and increasing your numbers across the board.

Plan PPC campaigns to boost email click-through rates 

A large part of successful advertising at its core isn’t just about the message itself and how strong it is, but about the amount of exposure to your message that your potential customers receive. Time and time again research shows us the power of the Exposure Effect, and how customers who are exposed to a product or service multiple times are simply more likely to commit to a purchase. PPC ads can provide more exposure to your message outside of your emails. You can do this by starting a PPC ad campaign that begins a day or a two before your email campaign goes out, and ends a few days afterward. The awareness and exposure of these PPC, ads coupled with your hard-hitting emails, can work well together to increase conversions.


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Did You Know You Can Choose Your Blog Audience?

Whether you refer to it as your target market or your blog audience, the people who read, watch, or listen to your content are the most important people in your blog world. These blog readers are your advocates, your supporters, and hopefully your customers, so it’s important that you pick the right blog readers. That’s right– I said “pick”.

You might think your blog audience chooses you, but do you know you can choose your blog audience?

No, I don’t mean you can go out into the Internet and tell specific people that they have to be in your readership. You can’t actually make people read your blog. Pretty sure that would have the exact opposite effect.

What I mean by “choosing your blog audience” could also be described as fostering or nurturing a blog reader through a journey. It’s about whittling down a huge group of people to a targeted blog audience, because if you want a successful blog, you need the right audience.

That right blog audience is going to be different for everyone, but in general it needs to be a niched-down, loyal, dedicated, and excited group of readers.

Two reasons why the right blog audience is important

Most people think “the bigger the better”, right? Wouldn’t a bigger blog audience automatically mean more sales, more social shares, and a more successful blog? It absolutely would, but only if you have the right audience.

It wouldn’t matter how many views or hits you have on your site if no one is taking any action. Same for you email list. If you have 10,000 email subscribers but only 150 of them are active, would you call that a success?

You can do better, and the first step to doing better is understanding why the right blog reader is important in the first place. There are two main reasons why choosing the right audience for your blog is important.

Reason #1: Choosing the right readers helps you know what kind of content to create. Defining your ideal blog reader is a major step in narrowing down your topic and creating super targeted content just for them. After all, how can you begin creating content before you know who your blog audience is? And the more targeted your audience and content are, the easier it will be to create the kind of content that establishes you as an authority on your topic.

Reason #2: Choosing the right readers means an increase in your conversions. Again, thousands on thousands of page views don’t mean much if you aren’t making sales. A small handful of invested blog readers can be more powerful than a huge list of lukewarm visitors.

Once you’ve decided what kind of audience you’re going after, you can create the targeted content that speaks to their goals and ambitions. It’s in that space that you build the kind of trust and authority that leads to sales.

But you can’t build your blog and expect the readers to flock. There’s no honing siren that vibrates pulses of content energy to the right blog readers. You need to go looking for them.

How to choose your blog audience

First things first, how to choose your blog audience begins with knowing what type of person you’re going after. Now you might expect me to teach some kind of avatar exercise to define your perfect audience member. While I do think it’s a great practice, you can read about creating avatars everywhere. It’s been talked about enough. Instead, I want to talk about real people you already know.

When you put your ideal blog reader in terms of someone you know, everything changes. You likely already know their goals and ambitions for their life. You’ve probably talked about things like what they want to learn to grow in their career, who influences their work, or their favorite social media channels. With that info it’s as if the clouds part and blog ideas just starting free-falling from the sky.

So how do you figure out who represents your ideal blog reader? Here’s four steps to make it happen.

Step 1 – Make a list of people

Open a word document or grab a sheet of paper and write down the names of at least 10 people you already know (ideally 25 or more) who you would love to have as readers and customers.

Step 2 – Make a list of attributes you want in a blog reader

These attributes should describe your ideal reader, the person who would most benefit from learning about your topic. Why would they care about your topic? What are their struggles related to your topic? What inspires them about your topic? What motivates them to learn more about the topic?

Step 3 – Compare the lists

Who on your first list has at least some of the attributes on your second list? If you don’t know for sure, who on your first list is likely to have at least some of the attributes on your second list?

Step 4 – Pick a name.

We need at least one name, but if you have more that’s great. If you don’t have one real name, then look through your contacts in your phone, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections until you find at least one person who fits the bill.

That one person now represents your ideal reader. Everything you write and create for your blog should be with this one human being in mind. By focusing on one specific person to start, you’ll eventually find the universal content that matters most to what will be your now narrowed down blog audience.

I promise that if there is at least one reader like this, there will be many more just like them. It’s like when your teacher would tell you not to be afraid to ask a question because most likely one of your classmates has the very same question. That one person you narrowed down in this exercise is not alone in their goals and ambitions.

It’s possible to have thousands upon tens of thousands of other blog browsers interested in that same niched content. It’s just a matter of finding them.

Where do you find your ideal blog reader in real life?

Now that you’ve picked your ideal reader for your blog, it’s time to go into the Internet (and sometimes real life), find them, and connect.

Identify your potential readers’ hangouts

If you want to meet someone, you need to be where they’re hanging out. What social media channels do they use? Are they in any Facebook groups or Slack communities?

And it doesn't need to be all virtual. Check out the local meetups in your area, attend conferences, or if you have the means, host your own meetup. Those face-to-face connections are powerful and should never be overlooked even though you’re running an online business.

Join in on the conversation 

But it takes more than just showing up. Once you know where your potential blog audience is, get involved. You have to put your networking hat on and jump in the conversation. Lend your advice in forums (like Quora) and online communities. Spark up new conversation that gets people interested (but don't walk in guns blazing by promoting yourself and your new blog nonstop).

Doing this is also a great way to start coming up with blog topics. Ask your new community friends what problems they’re facing in the industry and what they want to learn more about. It’s like getting the results of a survey without having to actually send out a survey.

Think outside the box

Every point of contact doesn’t need to spring from your core topic. When you’re looking for your ideal readers, think about other topics that correlate to yours that would draw similar people. For example, if your topic is about creating wedding cakes, you could also look through communities that focus on pastry baking or cake decorating.

Who will be your blog audience?

Choosing your blog audience and then reaching out to grow your readership takes time. Stay persistent, keep reaching out, and get involved. The more you do and the more authentic and honest you are, the more your ideal reader will naturally be drawn to you and your work. Basically, keep being your smart, thoughtful, creative, helpful self– and do it in public.

Take time today and do Steps 1- 4 to start dreaming up your ideal reader and let me know how it goes. What attributes are you looking for in your blog reader? And where do you think you’ll start looking for them? Share your thoughts in the comments and let’s discuss!

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