PB033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog - a podcast by Darren Rowse: Blogger, Speaker, Author and Online Entrepreneur

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How to Find Readers For Your BlogToday's episode is about how to find new readers for your blog. It's the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the first of several podcasts on this topic. We will be getting into some tactical and very practical ways to build readerships over the next few episodes, but before we do that, today we look at the two questions you must ask yourself if you really want to get blog readers.




abstract concept of education by Oleksandr Lysenko on 500pxIn This Episode
You can listen to today's episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we'd also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). Today we talk about:

How I damaged my blog by chasing traffic instead of trying to create meaningful relationshipsThe 2 questions you must ask yourself if you really want to get blog readers
How to find out who your current readers are and what their problems are - so you can solve them
How to create reader avatars for your blogThe 3 secret ingredients of blogs that change peoples'lives

Further Resources For Finding Blog ReadersHow to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging - includes examples of my first reader personas.Full TranscriptExpand to view full transcript
Compress to smaller transcript viewHi there. My name's Darren Rowse and welcome to episode 33 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today, we're talking about finding readers for your blog. You can find today's show notes at problogger.com/podcast/33.

Today, we're starting a series of episodes on the topic of finding readers for your blog. This idea came from you. We ran a survey recently of podcast listeners (which we really appreciated the responses of) and by far, the number one challenge that you asked us to produce podcast episodes on was finding readers for blogs. 

This was absolutely no surprise to me whatsoever because it's always the number one thing that people ask us to produce content on at ProBlogger. When we run sessions at our events on finding readers, the rooms are always packed. When we write posts on the ProBlogger blog, those posts are always most read and most shared. When I talk to bloggers, this is always the question I'm asked, “How do I find readers for my blog?” It's also something I've experienced myself—the frustration of not having readers or not having enough readers and wanting more. Even from day one on my blogs, it was something I wanted.

I put time and energy into creating content. I wanted people to read that, it's only natural. The same thing when you create a podcast, when you've got a Twitter feed, when you've got a Facebook page, you want people to consume the content that you create. 

For the next few episodes, I want to share with you some ideas on how to find readers for your blog. This will probably go for four or five episodes. Later on in this series, I'm going to get really practical and share some actual techniques, some very practical things you can do. 

Before I get into those practicalities, I want to just step back a little, get you to ask a few questions, and talk about some principles of finding readers for your blog. I think if you rush into it, you may actually end up with a whole heap of readers who really don't convert to anything. They're not the right readers. This is particularly what I wanted to talk about today. 

I want to suggest two questions to ask yourself before you go hunting for readers. I think if you ask these questions, you'll be in a much better position to be effective in finding readers for your blog. The techniques I talk about in the next few episodes will convert much better if you've asked these questions first. 

The first question is this, who do you want to read your blog? When I started blogging,

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