Every business wants more visitors to their blog, whether you’re a big-name company or just starting out on your business journey. Finding out how to get traffic to your blog naturally is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face. Your content may be solid, but often you’ll find that the “build it and they will come” adage isn’t panning out.
It turns out that, in order to attract the “they” in “they will come”, you first have to define who “they” are. This can be done with a little thing called “marketing personas”. Who are you hoping will read your content? What do you really know about them? Has your knowledge of your audience shaped how to get traffic to your blog?
I know what you’re thinking – “One-Click Lindsey, I know my readers. Will making these persona things really help, or will I just be wasting time?” I’m sure everyone who’s heard of marketing personas has thought the same thing at least once. Don’t worry – the time you put into crafting these marketing personas will pay dividends.
You want to learn how to get traffic to your blog, while keeping it simple and natural? Marketing personas are the way to go. Let’s walk through how you can start to making your own.
What Are Marketing Personas?
First things first: marketing personas (also known as “buyer personas” or “marketing avatars”) are outlines of fictional characters that make up your intended audience. Think of marketing personas as crafting an imaginary friend, only in this case they’re an imaginary reader!
As content creators, we often tend to default to talking about the subjects we know and care about the most. This means we may end up with content focused on what WE want, instead of what our readers want. Crafting targeted content based on what your specific readers want will help you learn how to get traffic to your blog.
There’s one key aspect to buyer personas: make sure you can empathize with them. You want to be able to step into the shoes of your reader with ease. Empathy will be made easier by adding specific (and accurate) details to each profile.
Don’t stop at just one – in order to be effective, you’ll want a handful of different, varied buyer personas. After all, you’ll likely want to draw more than just one type of person to your blog! Be ready to imagine at least 3-4 different marketing personas to get you started, as each will help you learn how to get traffic to your blog.
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Craft a Buyer Persona Template
Two words: be specific. Give your persona a realistic name, an age (not an age range), a gender that they identify with (if any), and a job title. What are some of the most important aspects in their life? What sort of roles/hobbies/activities do they consider to be an identifying part of themselves? What would be a list of their daily goals?
Make sure that the fine details of each avatar are completely different from the others. The most useful element of these buyer personas is their differences. Marketing personas are there to help you broaden the scope of your content, while also being very specific about your readers needs.
Creating buyer personas should be done with a bit of intuition and as much raw data as you can get your hands on. Google Analytics is your best friend here – you can get a good chunk of info just from this resource. Google Analytics is particularly useful if you’re just learning how to get traffic to your blog, and don’t have many readers.
If your blog is more established, you may be able to reach out and ask direct questions of your readers. Start up a poll or quiz, ask your questions, and see where your readers lean. A quiz can give you specific answers to use in some of your marketing personas, and help you learn how to get traffic to your blog.
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Marketing Personas and Content
Once you know a few of the “people” you’re writing your blog for, you can start to tailor content to them individually. This helps more than you’d realize! Knowing exactly who you’re shaping your content for can help you decide if your content is or isn’t working for any given reader.
Let’s use an example: we’ve created the marketing avatars of Jasmine, Noah, and Brooklyn for a blog. Jasmine is 32 year’s old – she’s visiting our blog to read, but she’s primarily a visual learner. Noah, on the other hand, is 52 – he’s still a bit uncomfortable with internet browsing. Lastly, Brooklyn is 26, and prefers social media blurbs to full-length blog posts due to her packed schedule.
How will you use this to learn how to get traffic to your blog? Consider how you’d shape your blog posts to cater to each of these marketing personas. Could you craft some shorter posts for Brooklyn, or connect via social media? What sort of visual aids could you use to help Jasmine absorb the information in your posts? How can you make your blog easier to navigate for Noah?
Once you start crafting particular personalities for each of your marketing personas, you can start to learn how to get traffic to your blog quickly and easily. If you’re able to identify why your personas are on your blog, you can craft your content to supply what they want.
How Do Buyer Personas Attract Traffic?
Supplying specific needs via your blog attracts readers with specific wants. The more detail-filled you can get with your buyer personas, the more likely you are to create content that your readers can’t find elsewhere. If there’s one thing that reliably drives readers to your site, it’s exclusive content.
This is where you can start getting incredibly deep with your questions. Once any of your buyer personas has gotten some meat on it’s bones, you can really start to dive into it. What kind of social media would Jasmine prefer? Would Noah prefer to read your blog on a computer or a mobile device? How often would Brooklyn be able to check your blog for updates, and at what times of day?
Not only will this shape your content, but it can shape the layout of your entire site. Part of learning how to get traffic to your blog is learning how your audience connects with your blog. How would the different buyer personas find out about your blog? Would Brooklyn discover it via social media? Noah through a friend? Jasmine via a guest blog you wrote? How can you accommodate for all of these methods of discovery?
Learning How to Get Traffic to Your Blog is Simple with the Help of Personas
In the end, the adage of “build it and they will come” isn’t entirely flawed, but it needs to be more specific to be useful. “Build what they want and they will come” might be more appropriate!
Marketing personas/buyer personas can help you hone in on the most crucial part of any blog: the readers. While it might seem like a pointless endeavor, once you dig in to the nitty-gritty, you might find yourself excited to learn more about the “people” within each of the buyer personas. I know I did!
In the end, learning how to get traffic to your blog isn’t really about learning how to get traffic to your blog: it’s about learning what your readers want, and finding new and interesting ways to give it to them.
