How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers

If you want to have a blog that makes a difference in the lives of those who read it, I would highly recommend getting clarity around these three simple (yet powerful) questions:

Who are your readers?
What do they need?
How will they change as a result of reading your blog?

Mid-last year I wrote very briefly about these questions and suggested that they might be a great way to come up with a purpose statement for a blog.

Since that time I’ve had conversations with four ProBlogger readers who took these questions and applied them to their own blogs – and in doing so saw marked improvements in their blogging.

So today I want to emphasise them again.

Lets tackle the first two together and then look at the third.

Who Are Your Readers? And What Do They Need?

Understanding who reads your blog (or at least who you want to read your blog) and what their needs are is so important because it will inform:

what kind of content you should create (topics, style of writing etc)
how to attract readers to your blog
how you can engage with your readers and build community on your blog
how you monetise your blog (if this is a goal for you)

Understanding your reader also informs things like design, what social media networks you should be engaging in, what subscription methods you should use, how frequently you should publish, and much more.

I’ve previously published an exercise in building a reader profile or persona to help you get clarity around this.

Ultimately – knowing who is reading enables you to take a big step towards producing a useful blog.

Without this clarity you’ll be stumbling around in the dark!

How will your reader change as a result of reading your blog?

Over the years I’d focused very heavily upon understanding readers needs, but it has only been the last year that I’ve taken things to the next step and doing thinking about how to ‘change‘ readers.

Knowing who is reading is one thing, but if you want to build a blog that is epic, your blog needs to leave an impact upon people.

I recently spoke about this idea at a conference and shared the following slide. While I didn’t spend a heap of time unpacking the idea, this was the most tweeted quote of the talk I gave.

Blogs that change people are blogs that those people will keep returning to.

Blogs that change people are blogs that build trust and relationship with their readership.

Blogs that change people are blogs that their readers share with their networks.

I’ve always know this – it’s not really rocket science – but for some reason I never actually identified the change I wanted to bring to my readers!

As a result, some of my blog posts hit the mark with readers – but many did not.

Why leave it to chance as to what change we want to bring to our readers? Why not define where they are and where we want to take them?

Name the Change and Then Break It Down

Lets take a look at my main blog, Digital Photography School, as an example.

My answers to the above three questions are not really that complicated:

My readers are camera-owners
My readers are not using their cameras to their full potential
My readers will gain creative control over their cameras as a result of reading dPS

I know if dPS can give camera owners creative control over their cameras, they will start taking images that help create amazing memories for their families, start capturing magical moments in the trips they take, and that they’ll start creating art and ways to express themselves creatively.

These are tangible benefits and outcomes of reading our site and enhance the lives of our readers.

So once we’ve defined the change we want to bring to readers, then we can begin to make more informed decisions about the content we create by simply breaking that down.

What does having creative control over a camera look like? There are many parts of bringing about that change. Some would include:

Obviously this is just a few of the things a camera owner needs to grasp, but you can see here that we’ve already identified a number of topics to explore that help to bring about the overarching goal of the site.

By doing this exercise, we end up with a content and community strategy that is much more intentional that simply sitting at the keyboard each day and asking what we feel like writing about.

By being intentional, we’re creating content that moves people through a process and takes them to an outcome that changes their life in some tangible way.