Before you start off with a blog you need to be quite sure about what kind of people you will be targeting. It is never advisable to start off your blog or sell your product before you actually have a defined audience for it.

Some niches define themselves by name and the audience is automatically targeted while visiting. For example, the visitor on a golf blog would definitely be interested in golf if he sticks around. This would not be the case if the blog would be a blog about all sorts of sports.

However, the case is separate when you have a very general niche. For example, the niche of my blog is the very famous and now saturated ‘Make money online‘ niche. Me and my fellow bloggers in this niche are interested in teaching people how they can make money on the internet sitting at home.

However, now we cannot define our audience in a very accurate manner. For example, readers for my blog are ranging from the age group of 10 - 60+ and they come from all sorts of backgrounds and interests. It is very general and making money off a targeted audience is much more profitable and easier.

So, if you’re starting your blog in a very general niche then define your audience with the type of people your blog is for. You can target bloggers, newcomers / newbies, webmasters, internet marketers, etc. and I have seen many blogs in my niche which are targeting different audiences.

This is the catch, you actually don’t realize it but if you have trouble in understanding some posts on a blog then you can understand that the blog owner is not targeting audience like you. Before this little theory gets any criticism. For example, if you go on a blog about making money online and the first article reads something like: ‘How I used ABC to double my income from PPC advertising’, it clearly shows that this blogger is targeting all the internet marketers and definitely not newbies.

There is nothing complicated in this, neither is there any problem if you don’t have a look into this matter. It’s just that, if you define your audience at anytime after you start your blog (preferably earlier) or even before that, you will have a more clearer angle whom you’re talking to when you write posts.

Is This All Theory, Or Does It Have Any Benefit?

Well, I suppose the benefit will be quite clear. When you try to capture leads and want to create visitor loyalty on your blog you need to make sure that you’re communicating with your target visitor in an easy and understandable manner. The only way that your blog will be easy and understandable better to the user is when you have it more targeted.

On my blog, I am mainly targeting newbies. I know that majority people are newbies by the sources of my traffic and the number of emails that I get everyday. Most of them don’t even have blogs so I try to be as understandable for first-timers as possible.

Once again, this is not a must for bloggers. My intentions were not to increase your complications. Instead, I’m just helping you communicate with your readers in a more efficient manner. I know I didn’t put in much examples, I’ll leave them to you in the comments.

In the past I have made several attempts of making a blogging routine and sticking to it. But the fact is, I have not been able to actually stick to one. The result isn’t too satisfactory.

I haven’t achieved the goals that I had planned to achieve a few months ago. My referral traffic has seen a little downturn although direct and organic traffic has increased. I have also been letting hundreds of daily visitors go away.

Before writing this article and actually sat down and thought to myself: What do I want to do with this blog in the future? Why did I start it? I’m not here apologizing to my readers for not blogging for a while like many other bloggers.

That is very lame, because after all it is our own blog. Blogging is meant to be for fun, not a punishment. But I’ve been noticing that maybe I’m not the type of guy you’ll find blogging 24×7. I’m better off with doing stuff other than writing maybe because I’m not that comfortable with it.

Does that mean that I’ll stop blogging?

No sir. Everybody has problems and they need to be solved. Likewise, procrastination is a big problem with me which is hindering me from making a lot more money that I actually am making right now. The first thing that I need to do is stick to a posting frequency.

But like the previous time when I decided to stick to a posting frequency, why did I not continue with it. Harsh goals are always short term no matter how smart they are. I am guilty of making those types of goals which are the least achievable.

So, I’ll be making a single goal right now. The only thing I need to do is stick a minimum posts per month rule for myself. I’ll be catching up shortly with the rest but to start off and make it a lot more achievable, I’ll start with 15 articles a month.

That’s right, 1 article every two days. That’s pretty achievable and I guess I can stick to it to some extent. My test month for this starts today, and yes I will start posting my ramblings like the other bloggers because blogging something is better than blogging nothing.

Wish me luck and if anyone else who was procastrinating and wants to join me in maintaing this posting frequency, you are most welcome to do so. So, stick around to find some good posts in the coming days.

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post and I thought of doing a follow-up to an old post about stop copying others. However, this time I thought of writing on a different perspective. You can guess from the title of the post that it brings forward a different view.

When I entered the make money niche in 2007, I was a complete noob. Where you might be today, I was there 2 years ago. My introduction wasn’t very clear as compared to people now. For example, there were not sites like 3arn.Net in 2007 and all I found in the search engines was spammy websites and scams.

I did not even know that there was something other than paid to click websites that could be used to make money. So I read around about blogs and decided to create one for promoting the websites with my referral ID.

I still remember, my posts were crammed up. Some lines were all capitals others were full of slang and grammatical mistakes. I knew I needed a head-start. Accidentally, I happened to read somewhere about making money with adsense and I was quick to act and put it on my sucky little blog.

I happened to visit my blog almost 20 times a day and happened to come across an ad that read ‘Your blog’s a money-maker’ and I was curious to find out. I clicked the ad and landed on John Chow’s blog.

Even John had just started out with make money blogging and soon I found myself reading similar blogs. You can’t be unique all the time, so I had to copy the way these blogs were running when I created this one.

So, we come back to the topic of copying. Basically, copying ideas and styles is not a bad thing. But when you actually copy steal content, that is when things go wrong. You might be thinking that how would the things go wrong, but it’s much simpler than you think.

Let’s involve a reputable blog in my niche on my level. I will not name it, but I actually really enveyed the blog because it seemed very good. It was until I found out a post on it which was a mere copy of a post that I read on John Chow’s blog.

My first impression on it got bad, real bad. I never tried to steal other people’s content. People always mix up stealing and copying. Here’s how I describe them:

• Copying ideas: Imitating ideas but putting them forward in one’s own way.
• Stealing ideas: Using the same idea, the same title, the same text with only changing a few words on the post.

So in the second case, you’re not just saying that you’re a reader of that big blog but you’re also trying to merely copy a whole post saying that it is yours. I wouldn’t say that it is a very nice way of gaining exposure nor authority.

Whatever authority that I have today in my niche is because I wrote unique and quality content. I did copy other big bloggers (Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start). By copying, I mean that I tried to have a design like John Chow (I dropped that soon).

So the main thing in this post is that you may want to be like other bloggers and you imitate some of the things that led them to success. That is perfectly normal, but if you steal their content and put it on your blog, that’s not cool.

Someday, someone will find out and point it out. Trust me, no one wants to read an article which is just another copycat. It is no different than other spam blogs with automatic posters. So, what are your views on this matter of stealing and copying?