A Guide to Rebranding Your Blog to Suit Your New Audience
You’ve just had a baby and now want your blog to document your motherhood journey. From being the go-to source for fashion and leisure tips, you’re now eager to provide more parenting tips and advice, particularly to first-time moms like you.
But if your blog’s audience has always been teens and young adults, how will they react to your new content? Loyal followers won’t likely be a problem, but those who follow your blog solely for your old content might be tempted to press the “unfollow” button after two or so more posts about motherhood.
Changing the target audience of a blog is a risk, especially if you’re earning money from it. A drop in followers could mean a decreased engagement, which would undoubtedly affect your traffic. In other words, your rebranding project may result in a spectacular failure if you didn’t do it right!
Thankfully, doing it properly isn’t rocket science. Just think back to the strategies you employed when you’re only starting because you’d need to use them again to change your audience. However, you have to increase your efforts this time, because you couldn’t abandon your audience for your new one.
Below are the ways to change your target audience while maintaining your existing ones:
- Network With Other Mommy Bloggers
Since you’re now focusing your content on parenting tips and advice, you have to network with other mommy bloggers to gain momentum. Although you’ve made your followers aware of your pregnancy and birth, the engagement coming from them alone won’t suffice in making your new content stand out. Hence, gaining a larger audience from networking with other blogs similar to yours is a practical move.
- Contribute Guest Posts to Top Blogs
To attract the audience of top parenting blogs, contribute content to their site. Ensure that your chosen blog targets the niche you want to attract, then contact the site’s owner to make your pitch. If they allow you to make a guest post, don’t hold back in supplying great content, even if you wish you’re doing that on your own blog instead. Sometimes, giving grants you bigger rewards, so give your guest post your best shot!
- Tell Unfiltered Stories
The better you are at telling stories, the more engaging your content will become. Create a tell-all post on your site about your pregnancy and birth experience. Include details that you won’t usually see in official magazines and other sugarcoated sites. The raw quality and authenticity you’ll exhibit will have the potential to make your post viral and thus reach your new target audience fast.
- Understand the Technical Aspects of Attracting Audiences
If you want your new target audience to discover your site quickly, you have to understand a few technical aspects of driving traffic. One of them is SEO, which is commonly adopted by online marketers and bloggers as well. But apart from that, a basic to a thorough understanding of web design and development may benefit you significantly, too. After all, optimizing your site also involves improving its design and functionality.
- Showcase How You Deliver What Your Audiences Want
Now that you’ll have at least two different types of audiences, you may need to adjust your persona depending on whom you’re addressing. But since you’re a person and not a business entity, you need not observe drastic measures to tailor your messaging. Just make yourself feel available to all your followers, assuring them that being a mom hasn’t changed who you are, and you’re still the same blogger that they knew years ago.
- Limit the Number of Share Buttons
Aren’t bloggers taught to make as many share options as possible available? It turns out, however, that giving your readers more options would only make them not want to choose. Indeed, imagine yourself in a restaurant, reading a very long menu. Though the generous offerings are delightful, they also make choosing annoyingly tricky and time-consuming.
Therefore, priorities only the social networks that your audience is on when creating share buttons. If most of them are on Facebook and Instagram, then don’t bother adding a Twitter and Tumblrshare buttons.
- Stay Consistent With Content
If you’ve decided to add parenting-related content to your site, stay consistent, and don’t suddenly write about the pleasures of having no kids or anything similar.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should no longer write about the topics you used to specialize in before being a mother. Your goal is to gain a new audience while maintaining your existing ones, so whatever you were focusing on before motherhood, feel free to talk about them occasionally.
Making an engaging blog site all boils down to being yourself. When your content reflects who you are from the get-go, no matter how many milestones and changes occur in your life, your audience will always multiply.
