The first paragraph of the article can be summarized as follows: Understanding your audience is crucial for any business or website. However, getting valuable feedback from your visitors or subscribers can be challenging. This article provides strategies to increase feedback and evaluate the input, helping you to better understand your audience and tailor your content to their needs.
Polls can be an effective way to gather insights about your audience. The key to a successful poll is asking a question that everyone has an opinion about and wants to share. For instance, a poll on my website about using HTML in business emails didn't generate much response, indicating that this topic isn't of much interest to my audience. This information is valuable as it guides me on what content to produce. If you're interested in creating a poll, you can use free scripts like the one available on Site Tips and Tricks.
Surveys can provide more detailed information than polls. However, getting a significant response can be challenging as it requires time and effort from the respondents. One way to encourage participation is by hosting the survey on your website. Services like SurveyMonkey make this process easy. Remember, the more engaging the topic, the more responses you'll get.
It's important to remember that the people who respond to your polls or surveys may not be representative of your entire audience. They might be more assertive or may have been influenced by the way you phrased your questions. Crafting questions that are clear and unbiased is a challenge but crucial for accurate results.
If you receive a large number of responses, you can take the results more seriously. However, this is often not the case. In my experience, I consider each response as representing nine others who didn't participate. So, if you have 4000 subscribers and 100 respond to a survey, you can draw conclusions about 1000 subscribers, but not the remaining 3000.
Requiring an email address or offering a freebie can skew your results. Those who are unwilling to provide an email or those who participate just for the freebie can distort the randomness of your sample, making the results less reliable.
Forums, bulletin boards, and chats can also provide valuable insights. However, they require sufficient traffic and careful moderation to be effective. You can also gain insights by examining the search terms used on your site using tools like AtomZ.
Email is an effective tool for building an audience profile. Inviting comments and questions allows you to establish a connection with your audience and gain a better understanding of their needs and interests.
Evaluating the input you receive can be challenging. It often involves making educated guesses about your audience's characteristics and needs. However, this process is crucial for understanding your audience and tailoring your content to their needs.
You should already have a clear idea of your niche and target market. Disregard any feedback that doesn't align with this. Your goal is to continually refine your understanding of your audience and narrow your focus.
Write your content with your ideal customer in mind. Over time, those who don't fit within your target audience will stop visiting your site, leaving you with an audience that is genuinely interested in your niche.
Never, Ever Release Any Of Your Rights To Anyone
One of the grandest scams on the Web, which goes largelyunnoticed, is for a web-based bookseller or publisher to requiresome rights to your work in exchange for the service to beprovided. Many demand the electronic rights, for example.
How Well Do You Know Your Perfect Customer?
Your Perfect Customer is real only in your mind. He or sheis the one individual most representative of your target. Theone to whom you always speak one-on-one in your newsletter andon your site.
Does Search Engine Traffic Matter?
The short answer is, "Sure." And it likely always will.But the amount of free traffic search engines now deliver tomany small online businesses doesn't amount to much. And whatthere is of it continues to decline in importance. Pay-for-submission models are rapidly eliminating free options.
