Shortly after coming up with the semi-revelation that time really is money for blog readers, I quickly drew the conclusion that a blog is essentially a business in the time economy, and that readers are consumers in that economy.

For this reason, your blog should be managed like a business even if you have no intent of monetizing it.

Why viewing your blog as a business works

Simply put, viewing your blog as a business aligns your interests of developing a successful blog with the interests of readers. This naturally encourages you to provide content that readers value.

In a traditional business, most successful entrepreneurs attempt to understand the market they’re serving before they develop a product or service. They do this because they know that if they don’t, there’s a good chance that the market won’t find their offering valuable. Without offering value, you have no customers and no customers means you’re out of business.

The same thing is applicable to blogs. Just like a wise businessperson wouldn’t create a random product for an unknown market, you shouldn’t choose the topics of your blog content in a haphazard manner without first really analyzing the audience.

How you do it

First, you’ve got to zero in on exactly who you’re trying to target. Then you’re going to want to really understand what drives them by examining their passions and pain points.

Determine the niche

Do some careful thinking and write down a detailed description of the group of people you’re targeting with your blog. Be as specific as possible.

Ideally it should be a group that you’re already familiar with and understand well. You’ll be able to generate content more authoritatively and easily if you’re either an expert on the niche or are a member of the niche yourself so make sure you pick appropriately.

Create a reader profile consisting of their needs, wants and problems

Now that you know the niche, create a reader profile by asking yourself exactly what the problems, needs and wants are of the people in that niche.

These three elements are the underlying reasons that customers make purchases and these are also the reasons people will visit your site. The more specific you are with these hot button issues, the better.

Sort reader desires from high to low

Now that you have a list of things that your readers care about, assign each one a value of one to ten, with one being the least important and ten being the most.

The reason for doing this is to make sure that you’re always focused on what is most important to your readers.

Example reader profile

Niche description: Working women, in their late 30s, with young kids.

They want more time with the kids (9)
They want to ensure their children are being mentally and physically challenged (9)
They want a higher salary (8)
They want a promotion (8)
They want to be able to socialize with people with young children (7)
They want more time with hubby (6)
…

Forgive me if I have made gross generalizations about working women in their late 30′s with young children – I tried to make a decent effort based on my own wife’s complaints

Develop content that satisfies the desires

Now, for the most important part – devise ideas for future content that will satisfy the desires of readers. Do this through brainstorming or the use of techniques such as the creative provocation. If you know your subject matter well, you should be able to pop out quite a few ideas right from the get-go.

Articles

You should be able to create at least a couple articles and probably a lot more for each reader desire that you’ve identified.

Examples

Desire: Readers want more time with the kids
Content: Write articles about time management, how to have quality time with kids, etc…

Desire: Readers want to ensure their children are being mentally and physically challenged
Content: Create a series of articles that gives women ideas for learning activities they can perform with the children.

Articles topics pop out at you when you have a reader profile

If you think these examples are pretty obvious you’re right. Coming up with article ideas can be trivial once you’ve gone through the process of developing a reader profile.

Other content types

There are other types of content you may want to put on your blog besides articles of course. Sometimes reader desires can be addressed by adding new areas to your site or by providing other types of content.

Examples

Desire: Readers want to be able to socialize with people with young children
Content: Add a forum to the site

Desire: Readers want to ensure their children are being mentally and physically challenged
Content: Bundle up the learning activity articles that were discussed earlier into an e-book and sell on the site

Maintain focus for as long as the site is up

It’s important that after you’ve gone through the exercise of analyzing your reader and coming up with some good content ideas that you know how to maintain your focus on the reader and that you don’t slip back into old habits.

The reader profile needs constant tweaking

Your initial reader profile was a guesstimate and because of that and other reasons, the profile needs to be treated like a living document. Over time you’ll discover that while some issues you’ve identified are spot on, others may not be correct so you should periodically update the profile.

Note, it’s importantly to actively track and get feedback from customers. There are known techniques to do this, however these methods are beyond the scope of this article so I’ll address those issues in a future post.

The reader profile trumps general blogging advice

The reader profile and prioritized list of future content offer a clear roadmap for the direction of the blog. Remember the reader profile serves as your anchor for site content and allows you to maintain focus. You’re going to need that anchor because it’s incredibly easy to get off track given the amount of noise that’s out there.

The reader profile is more important than all the general blogging techniques you’ll encounter online like how to format your articles, what types of language to use and even how to market your blog. In the end, people visit your site to trade their time in exchange for the value you’ve generated by addressing their needs, wants and problems.

That’s not to say that a lot of the blogging tips you get on the net isn’t important. Marketing advice and ideas about article presentation can be quite valuable but they should never become the prime focus of the site.

Now go forth and create value

Of course the net result of all of this is that you should be able to write better, more focused content and have an easier time finding topics to write about. When you’re always thinking about what your readers may really want, article subjects pop out at you as do other ways of improving the site.

I’ve found that since going through the exercise of analyzing the target niche of Taming Life, finding good topics isn’t much of an issue any more. Rather than getting distracted by article format, article length, specific wording and other such things, I’m always asking myself if my readers would find a particular piece of content valuable – if I don’t think they will, I toss out the idea and move on to the next.

Now my biggest problem isn’t wracking my brain trying to come up with good topics, rather it’s trying to find enough time to implement all the ideas I have