Determine Who Your Customers Are

Guest blogging isn’t going to help you very much until you know who your audience is. How can you hit a target if you don’t know where to aim?

Are you looking for grandmas living in Florida? Teenagers applying for colleges? Small business owners who want more customers? Take some time to think about who would find the most value from your content, products, or services. Remember, if you try to write for .(Open Link in new window)

Determine Where Your Customers Are

After you’ve determined who your customers are, you’ve got to figure out where your target audience is. Where do they “hang out” online? What do they read?

You want to figure out what sites your customers visit and which are relevant to your products, services, and content. Here are a few ways to figure out what your customers are reading.

Customer Development Interviews

Sometimes it’s as simple as just asking your customers. Asking your customers what they read is a great way to figure out where to guest blog. Here are some I have asked to figure out what people read: What are your favorite blogs? What are your favorite news sites? What sites do you read for news and educational content related to your industry?

Search on Google

Search for the words your customers are likely to be searching for. For example, if your customers are content marketers, you could search “content marketing” or “content marketing blog.” You could also search for the specific topic(s) of your article, such as  email marketing, public relations, etc. Because Google is pretty good at its job, these sites are likely to be the best, and because they are ranking high when you search, they are likely to have a lot of traffic.

Before you search, make sure you’re searching the right terms—the terms that are being searched by your audience. You might be surprised by what you find. I thought that “startup ideas” would be a common search term, but it turned out that “business ideas” was about ten times more common.

Start with 


 to determine those common search keywords and phrases. Enter in some ideas, and the tool will show you how much search volume it gets and make suggestions for other relevant and popular search terms.

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