June 26th, 2008
Understanding Your Audience - How to Write a Blog Post!
Now, if you have been blogging for awhile now, you probably understand that majority of your readers are people who use simple English.
What do I mean?
Well, on all my blogs, more than 30-50% of my traffic comes from international countries other than English speaking countries.
Why is this?
Well, people from those international countries who can speak/read English, are very interested in English written blogs. But do not assume that those audience can understand your perfect, complex English.
How do I write a blog post?
You need to simply 5 sentences to 1 sentence. You need to use words that even a 4th grader can understand.
In other words, write short and simple, while taking the trouble not to use big words such as “eponymous”, “advocate”, or any words that might usually be used on an SAT exam but not in real life.
Sure, you are a professor and you need to use big words but do understand if people in the world can’t understand you, you won’t be very popular.
If you are trying to make money online, keep it simpler. If you are simply blogging for fun, ignore anything I say in this blog.
A lot of the bigger blogs out there “are” targetting English users only but you can differ and get more readership through using simple words and sentences.
Even for me, English is second language, and I can understand that it’s frustrating to look up the dictionary when I don’t understand a word. (Of course, I SHOULD look up the dictionary but we are not blogging to educate people, we are blogging to provide good information, FAST!)
Do you know why there are so many 13 year olds who blog nowdays and are more successful than most 20 year olds?
Answer is simple. People in general (as in the Internet population), cannot understand college-level English as they come from all over the world.
Heck, next time you read some of the comments in your blog and you will see that a lot of your readers cannot even write correct English.
Do not worry as this is great if you can get your message across. Just stay away from becoming an English teacher and do use simpler words.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at icanhascheezburger.com, even their domain name is spelled wrong. (Btw, the blog grew from nothing to like top 100 within less than a year!)
