ProBlogger: Writing for a Diverse Audience, Part 2

Posted: 07 Oct 2012 07:07 AM PDT

Last week’s post on writing for a diverse audience sparked a great discussion, with some really interesting thoughts contributed by bloggers at all stages of building a blog, and from a range of markets and niches.

One thing that really struck me about these conversations was that bloggers seem to feel a bit of a conflict between audiences and niches. I wanted to clarify that today.

Audiences, niches, and topics demystified

I have a pretty simple way to differentiate between an audience and a niche.

I think about an audience as being a group of people.

To me, a niche is like a market “space,” including other blogs, other offerings, other sites and services (all of which may also serve other niches), as well as readers.

And a topic is an area or item of interest. It’s relevant to particular audiences, and probably relates to more than a few niches.

Let’s see how this works in practice.

DPS: topic, niche, and audience

To explain this most clearly, I’m going to reverse the order in which we consider these concepts because I think that’s a more intuitive way to grasp them.

On DPS the:

topic is photography
niche is DIY amateur photography education
audience is English-speaking amateur photographers who want to teach themselves more about photography, typically for a specific purpose: travel photos, family snaps, portraits, and so on. These people have various characteristics—age, gender, purchasing power, previous experience with my brand, degree of photographic skill, interests, and so on—that I can use to unite them into different audience segments.

From this little explanation, you can see that the topic is a big umbrella. The niche fits under that umbrella, with a lot of others. There are lots of other niches in the field of photography: professional photography services, photography equipment and software sales and reviews, photographer profiles, folios and galleries—the list goes on and on, and the niches overlap.

Finally, the audience is the group of people who are engaged with or interested in that niche. They might also be interested in other niches under that umbrella, too—which is why DPS provides reviews and offers on equipment, shows off reader photos in galleries, and so on.

In fact, that’s an example of writing for a diverse audience.

Planning content for a diverse audience

A diverse audience might contain groups of readers with clearly differentiated needs or interests, but most commonly, the truth is that different audience members may move between audience segments, or have a range of “niche” interests that vary over time.

On DPS, I have readers who just want to get better at taking photos with their phone cameras. This is their key need. Then I have readers who are interested in developing a range of professional-level skills as a photographer, without any interest in establishing themselves as pro photographers.

Both these audience segments might be interested in content on taking images of people, provided the information focused on their common needs. What are those needs? Off the top of my head, I’d guess content on either portraits and/or action-shots of people could be made to appeal to both these segments.

Importantly, to meet the needs of these diverse segments, the content would need to give advice that wasn’t equipment-specific, or, alternatively, it would need to give equal attention to the different equipment these readers would be using.

Article ideas that met the needs of these diverse audience segments might include:

the basics of photographing people in motion
how to spot a good action shot, any time, any place
tips for better nighttime photography of people
post-processing tips for portraits.

These article ideas are all on the same topic—photography. They address the same niche—self-education for amateur photographers. Within that, they look at the sub-topic of photographing people. And in so doing, they target users from diverse audience segments: camera-phone junkies and high-level amateur photographers who want to develop pro skills.

Show us how you meet the needs of your diverse audience segments

Hopefully this has made the idea of audience segments a bit clearer, and provides a helpful roadmap for your own review and analysis of your own readers and content.

If you’re writing for diverse audience segments on your blog, why not show us how? Point us to a post that meets the needs of multiple segments, and explain how it works—and whose needs it meets—in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Writing for a Diverse Audience, Part 2

ProBlogger: Essential HTML for Bloggers Part 2

Essential HTML for Bloggers Part 2

Posted: 06 Oct 2012 07:09 AM PDT

This guest post is by Matt Setter of MaltBlue.com.

If you were with us yesterday, Part 1 of this series will have put you in very good stead for making sure the code of your blog posts is perfect HTML!

As you’ll recall, yesterday we looked at:

What is a tag?
Formatting
Alignment
Lists.

Today, we’re focusing on the final important aspect of our Introduction to HTML, and that’s links.

Links

Adding links is one of the most common and essential operations that we can do in publishing blog posts. Whether we're citing references in our work, linking to other blog posts, articles, and videos, or making email addresses available so that we or others can be contacted, links are essential.

Have a look at the screenshot above, from a recent post here on Problogger.net. It has seven links—and that's just the first part of the article. The remainder of the article has 31 more.

In the WordPress visual editor, there are two buttons for managing links. One to add them, and one to remove them. In your editor, past in a few paragraphs of text from yours or another blog and then select some of it and click the add link button.

When you do this, you'll see the link editor window, below, open with two fields available: link and title. When you fill out these fields and click add link, your text becomes a link.

Let's say that you were linking to an article here on Problogger.net, Blogging for Startups: 10 Essential Tips to Make it Work. You put the name in the title field and the link in the URL field.

What does it look like in the source code of the page? Here it is.

<a    title="Blogging for Startups: 10 Essential Tips to Make it Work"    href="http://www.problogger.net/archives/2012/09/05/blogging-  for-startups-10-essential-tips-to-make-it-work/"    >Blogging for Startups: 10 Essential Tips to Make it Work    </a>

The code above is what it would look like, if the article name was also the text that was linking to the article. It's been formatted for easier reading. You see that the text is surrounded first in what's referred to as a tag, or in this case <a> and </a>.

Then, inside of these, there's two further parts, called title and href. The title is what is displayed if you hold the mouse over the link for a second or more, and href contains the link that will be opened when you click on it. That’s nice, straightforward, and simple, yes?

In your editor, click on the HTML tab in the upper right and have a look at the link that you've just created. Play around with the text inside the tag and the text in the elements in the opening tag, in the title and href areas. Then switch back to the visual editor and see what's changed. Hold your mouse over the link and click on the link. You see how easy it is?

Now there are a series of other options that you can add in, besides title and href, but on the whole, the majority of them are not used that often and are likely not needed that much in the context of blogging. There's a few more things we can do with links, though.

Internal links

So far we've looked at external links—by external, I mean any document that's not the one we're currently reading. What about linking within our document? Let's say that half-way down our document, we had a list of the most to least highly populated states in Australia.

Let's say that we linked to it right at the start of our post so that readers could skip right down to it without needing to read the text in between. How would we do this?

In your editor, in visual mode, copy in a few paragraphs of text from another website. Give it a heading "Australian States" and then add the text "Most Popular Australian States" right at the top of the document.

In the heading, "Australian States" create a link, but don't give it a URL. Change to HTML mode and make it look like the code below:

<a name="australian-states">Australian States</a>

You see that in the href field, we've filled out a name field? This is now what's called a named anchor. Now create a link around the text at the top of the page and set the URL to be #australian-states. When you preview the post, you'll be able to click on the link and go straight down to the link in the document.

Here is an example of the HTML:

<h1>Australian States</h1>    <a href="#australian-states">to australian states</a>    <p>Die Hypovereinsbank wirbt Kunden für das Sparkonto HVB PlusSparen Top-Sparzins   mit einer Zinsbindung von drei Jahren. Lässt der Sparer das Geld dort 36 Monate   liegen, erhält er 2,25 Prozent Zinsen pro Jahr. Muss der Sparer aber vorher an sein   Geld, gibt es nur sehr bescheidene Zinsen. test.de sagt, was das Sparangebot   taugt.</p>    <p>Die Hypovereinsbank wirbt Kunden für das Sparkonto HVB PlusSparen Top-Sparzins   mit einer Zinsbindung von drei Jahren. Lässt der Sparer das Geld dort 36 Monate liegen,   erhält er 2,25 Prozent Zinsen pro Jahr. Muss der Sparer aber vorher an sein Geld, gibt   es nur sehr bescheidene Zinsen. test.de sagt, was das Sparangebot taugt.</p>    <a name="australian-states">Australian States</a>    <ul>    <li>Queensland</li>    <li>New South Wales</li>    <li>Victoria</li>    <li>South Australia</li>    <li>Western Australia</li>    <li>...</li>    </ul>

Here is an example of what the page would look like:

Not that much to it, is there? You can now link to external documents and within an existing document.

Essential HTML for bloggers

Well, there you have it. We've now gone through a fairly gentle, yet firm, introduction to HTML so that, as bloggers, we are able to be more hands on when crafting our posts, with the WordPress editor.

We've looked at basic formatting, alignment, links and lists and have a better understanding of the changes that are made when we click or un-click the respective buttons.

From here on, though you may choose to keep using an editor for managing your posts and I wouldn't blame you if you do, you've now got the knowledge to step beyond it. I hope that you enjoyed this basic HTML for Bloggers and are able to feel more empowered than you did before.

If you want to know more, leave us a note in the comments and we'll see what we can do.

Matthew Setter is a freelance writer, technical editor and proofreader. His mission is to help businesses present their online message in an engaging and compelling way so they're noticed and remembered.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Essential HTML for Bloggers Part 2