The other day I wrote about what really matters in blogging.

It’s a great priority list for anyone looking to get started with business blogging, but today I realized I left out another important piece.

We’ve touched on the subject of audience on GBW before. The original post was – A Common Issue with Business Blogs is Understanding the Reader.

In that post I discussed an issue most people have with writing blogs and that is figuring out who the correct target reader is. This is tricky because when you’re blog is new you’re likely going to have a few readers that you didn’t intend to have on your site. If you follow the analytics and get caught up in some of the traffic trends you might end of blogging for the wrong reader.

I want to expand on this topic today because I feel it’s important especially for new business bloggers.

The Reader That Really Matters

Something that happens to almost every blog is an influx of readers that aren’t really the people you want reading your blog. It’s not that you want to kick these people out of your blog, but they just really bring nothing to the table in terms of your business.

If you start your business blog the first few months are going to be critical. You’ll start getting traffic little by little. You follow the analytics and as more readers visit you’ll get excited. This is a critical point in the life of your blog because you’ll start focusing on metrics and the metrics you choose to follow will be important for your business success.

And that’s an important point.

Readers that are good for blog traffic might be completely different from readers that are good for your business. You want the latter in nearly every case. You want people that are actually going to pay you money for your product or service. The people that just read your blog post and leave comments are great. They kind of build you up as you write your posts, but if you get caught up in that kind of attention you’ll soon be writing to please the people that will never pay you a dime.

So how do you know who the right readers are?

These are the people that are already your clients. They are the people that contact you via your website and the ones that look at the services pages and actually call and contact you. They are the people that become clients and customers. These are the only people that really matter for your blog.

One thing I do to track what clients actually read is with the client email newsletter I send. I track the articles clients click and read from the email analytics. This way I know what my clients are interested in reading. I can then figure out topics for future posts based on what my clients are interested in. I obviously want more clients so tracking what my current clients are reading helps me understand what that type of person is interested in.

Now, there is always going to be a trace of experimentation in the posts I write. I want to do different things. I make calculated assumptions about what I think my future clients will like to read. It’s a mix of doing what you know your clients like reading and trying to stay one step ahead of them.

Writing for the person that really matters is something nearly every blogger will struggle with. It’s important in the early days of your blog to make sure you’re writing for the right people; the ones that actually pay you money.

The others don’t really matter.