Marketing 101: Content Creation & Knowing Your Audience

I blog post a lot, and have been active enough for long enough to note trends. I hit upon about one topic per week that my audience clicks and shares on repeat until it gets a viral amount of traffic that I wonder both where it comes from and where it goes the next day. I’m sure there’s others up there who are better about making those reader peaks stay consistent on their own sites. I might add that I did post a few ways you can support content being created, as it does take a significant amount of time to keep generating posts and thinking of topics of the day. 

Part of it, though, is knowing your audience and delivering what they demand. As mentioned in my Marvel-related blogs, the comic industry really hasn’t been great about doing that as of late. I think there’s two things that are important: 1. catering to your audience, certainly but also 2. not being afraid to do what you want as an artist at the same time. I look at it business wise like the 80/20 rule. 80% of my attention should be delivering what my fans already crave (which I darn well hope is Steampunk because this book I’m about to drop is fricking awesome), and 20% experimenting with new things and just doing what I want.

That latter part is important and healthy to make sure art doesn’t get stale on my end, and i think that’s probably the same for most artists. That mix I think is important too, because the more you deviate from what the audience demands, the more you turn them off. There’s also a difference between “they don’t demand this” and “they are anti-this and demand the direct opposite of what you’re doing.” I don’t think I’ve ever fallen guilty to that latter part, and I’m sure my good friends would inform me if I were that far off the track.

For my blog posts, it looks like this traffic wise:

And that’s about how it goes. Even with that though, I don’t want to be ranting about politics all the time. It’s not honestly that fun to do. I try only to address real injustices within sci-fi and geek culture that directly affect the tide of where things are headed. If you want someone’s thoughts about the news topics of the day, you can visit a different blog for that.

But it’s also interesting when the readers evaporate. Every time I blog about baseball, for example, no one even bothers to click (I’m still gonna blog about baseball cuz I don’t care! You WILL like baseball.). Over all, in producing content, it’s interesting to look at, and interesting for artists to keep in mind in their content production.