Feel free to leave any notes or comments here on this page, and I’ll get a reply back. Happy to help with any questions about writing, content, marketing, or most anything else you’re keen to ask.
I’m also around via email at hello at kevanlee dot com, and I’d be very happy to connect on Twitter or via the newsletter mailing list.
Hi! We’re trying to get our blog off the ground. We don’t really know what our readers want except from GA data. We were advised to perform audience research. Have you done this? Any suggestions here? I was thinking of finding blog subscribers who work in SF and taking them out for coffee or lunch.
Audience research can be a great first step indeed. I came onto the Buffer team after the blog was already a bit established, so I can’t speak with too much confidence to how it was in the early days. I will say that audience research has been valuable in a couple of ways for us as we’ve continued to grow and learn. Specifically:
> We get great ideas via customer support and social media engagement. We can learn a bit about which content resonates with the audience and which problems they’d like help with by studying the types of questions that come into HelpScout (particularly the ones where our Heroes don’t have a blog post to share with the customer for an answer) and by noticing the topics that get the most clicks, shares, etc. when shared to social.
> We also gained a good deal of insight from a reader survey that we emailed to an engaged segment of our RSS list. Here’s the survey and the questions. Feel free to copy all this if you think it might be helpful. :)
There’s also this really amazing blog post I read recently from Anam Hussein (from Sidekick/HubSpot) that touches on the strategy to build a blog. The audience insight part really stood out to me:
> Contact at least 10 people in your target audience. This can be done by pulling current users in your database or even just searching LinkedIn for people with job titles that match your desired customer.
> Schedule 1-hour interviews.
> Ask them five sets of questions: