Target Audience, Spot Promotion

My most successful blog is purely topical. It is easy to stay on topic with serial fiction. I mean, what else is there to put in it? Occasionally there is an author's note type thing when I want specific feedback from my readers, but basically it is a daily installment of the ongoing story. It doesn't actually fare well in the blogosphere, but to the target audience it becomes a regular part of their day. There are frequently 'cliffhangers' that have readers checking back the next day, and e-mailing me to get posting if I take too long about it. But how did I find those readers? More importantly, how did they find Arvil Bren's Journal?

First thing to note is that things sometimes take time. I got Arvil Bren's first regular readers in the usual way; I bred them. My sons fit the profile of an Arvil Bren reader perfectly, and reading daily at work became part of their routine. They provided the first valuable feedback that helped clean up formatting and ease of use issues before they cost me readers. So my first recommendation about promotion is don't. Don't do it until you have developed the project into a sustainable and marketable form. I've done a lot of promotional things that netted me five readers. If I had done those things before I had a quality product I would have gotten five visitors, which would not have been worth the effort. But since those five readers have returned to the site dozens of times each, and done things to help with other promoting that has returned even more readers the effort put into getting them has been well spent.

Once the product is ready marketing becomes a two part process. Finding the target audience, and appealing to them. Something to be very careful about is that there are processes for finding them that will make it very hard to appeal to them. In a word, spam. I don't mean the technical spam that is in your junk e-mail folder when you log on, I mean the spirit of spam. Put my name in front of everyone and the ones that like it will answer. Garbage. Put your name in front of everyone and many of them will be offended by the process, period. So start slow. Practice the craft.

To find your target audience is simple. Search. Do a search that would find your blog and see what else it turns up. If your blog is a collection of current investigations into ghost sightings, do a search for ghost sightings. This is the internet. You'll get 303,000 results if you do a Yahoo search. I know because I just did. That's how easy it is. The first one is trueghostsightings.com, and in the brief description it says "links to other ghostly sites". Hmmmm. That would be great for the fledgling blog. First instinct is to click and go there to get linked. STOP! That site came up number one for a reason, and there is very good reason to want that link. So let's not spend our one opportunity to appeal to them without practicing first.

Practice makes perfect, and the key element in practicing is feedback. So add one more word to the search. FORUM. The internet is full of forums; places where people meet and discuss all manner of things. Okay, not far down the list is 'The Ghostzone Forums', which is a spiffy little forum with 141 members. Like most forums there is an access to some key stats. The most recent ten posts I see are all within the last week or so, and are by a total of three different people. At a guess of those 141 members maybe ten of them will ever log in here again. You are saying "why bother", and I'm saying "perfect". I would join this forum. To register on most forums you give some information and get an activation by e-mail almost immediately...save that. You'll want to come back here. As soon as you are active post a 'hi I'm new here' topic in an appropriate place and mark it to e-mail you when there are replies. You will get some. The administrator of the board will definitely welcome you warmly and quickly.

Talk to these people! They are clearly in your target audience, and within two or three posts the reason you are there will be acceptably obvious. You are looking for readers, and they are good candidates. And they will be happy to tell you why they will or won't be regular readers. If they tell you you are a rude spammer invading their space graciously apologize and refine your approach. If they tell you they didn't like your site, ask what they think needs to be done to improve it. If they tell you they will you have readers. No matter what it's a win. It isn't hard to get attention on a little board like this, so you will get results very quickly, and if it doesn't go well you haven't lost a lot of potential. If it does go well you can start a topic on this board in fairly short order that will be basically a discussion of your blog. Stop in once or twice a month to give them your two cents worth (and keep the topic current) and that topic will be a live source of readers forever especially if the board administrator becomes a regular reader. And they probably will.

Okay, that was steps one and two. Craft your content first, then find a small forum board or two to hone your marketing skills on. We'll move on from there shortly. That number one listed result on the search is beckoning!