NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to share and twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/34v4s9 . Thanks, I appreciate it!

Watch out Easter Bunny - There’s a new Hare-raising VeggieTail in town!

Oh, the looks of excitement in children’s eyes as their fevered imagination conjures up visions of:

• Chocolate eggs!
• Chocolate bunnies!
• Marshmallow Peeps!
• Crunchy stalks of broccoli!

Hey wait a sec, who said anything about Crunchy stalks of broccoli?  Well, keep this hush-hush to yourself…but the Easter bunny has a new hiney-kicking rival in town:

Enter…The Blissful Broccoli Bunny!

How did such a fantastical imaginary beastie come into play, I hear you ask?  Well, it started a few years ago in the Ling family.  My kids were babbling gently discoursing about the Easter Bunny, when I decided to introduce his decidely maverick second distantly-related cousin, the Blissful Broccoli Bunny.  This erudite, educated creature shuns anything that tastes delicious and instead cavorts across the land, flinging crisp yummy stalks of broccoli to all the deserving boys and girls.

Can you imagine anything more joy-sizzling to the imagination?  Anything more wondrous for eager young minds to comprehend?

As you can imagine, alas, my kids’ reactions were similar to a petrified deer in the headlights.    For some strange inexplicable reason, visions of dancing broccoli left them colder than a freezer unit buried in the Ice Age.  I know, I know, kids are lacking taste; it truly aggrieves me as well.  Such are the traumas of parenting.

Which brings me to the point of this post! 

If your kids were expecting the Easter Bunny and instead encountered the Blissful Broccoli Bunny, their expectations would be dashed faster than an unruly school of piranha devouring 37 Big Macs.  We’re talking smashed hope, utter dismay, and all-around soul-searing agony!

So here’s my question to you - does reading your blog give visitors the same kind of reaction?

Do your fans have a comprehensive set of expectations in place that are blown to smithereens after only reading the first two paragraphs?

Hmmm?

Managing your blog visitor’s expectations is a very important part of developing a successful blog, following, and all-around thriving business model.  Thus, for this week, I will be writing a 5 part series on tips for providing your visitors the best possible interactive experience imaginable.

With that decidedly not-exactly-short introduction, let us commence.

There are many factors that go into managing your blog fan’s expectations.  I’d like to concentrate upon the following 5:

• Quality to your targeted audience
• Information
• Gaining the edge
• Photos
• Checklist

Today, let’s examine:

• Quality to your TARGETED audience.

What does ‘quality’ mean to you?

Well, that’s actually secondary.  The first question you should answer is,

What does ‘quality’ mean to your visitors?

After all, you could write the most glittering post of your lifetime,replete with gems of brilliance…but if it fails to connect with your reader’s emotions, your efforts were slightly less useful than a pair of chop-sticks being used to remove the sand flung on your patio steps by beach-going family members.

‘Quality’ means different things to different audiences. If you’re writing to a teenage audience, say, proper grammar is less important than cutting-edge chat-speak.  Wouldn’t you agree?

If your audience instead consists of devout telephone insulator collectors, being able to discourse learnedly on drip points and Ohio Twiggs glass insulators are more important than knowing how to teach the installation of the latest social networking software. 

If perhaps your audience lives for Jon Bon Jovi, excessive references to Barry Manilow will probably be received slightly less well than fascinating trivia facts like his parents used to live in Holmdel, NJ, off of Takolusa Road (within 3 miles of where Bruce Springsteen owned a house with a barn in which he did several of his recordings).

QUALITY!  Once you’ve established your writing style and blog direction, your readers come to expect quality from your writings.  Lose the quality, lose your readers.

It’s that simple.

Now, everyone has their own definition of ‘quality’.  To find out what works best for your particular blog, ask yourself:

• "If I was a reader, what would make me stand up and take a second look at my blog?"

Well?  What would it be?  Would it be:

• Tons of resources I could explore
• Only 2-3 resources but those 2 or 3 are high-powered sites
• Gossip
• Pictures
• How-tos
• Lesson plans
• Product reviews
• Funny ha-has

If you’re drawing a bigger blank than a giant’s unused art pad, you can meander by a forum in which your topic is discussed, and READ.  Read read read, and then read some more!  Try to determine:

• What are the most popular questions being asked? 
• What discussions are generating the most heated responses? 

After you become part of the forum community, you can write your own introductory statement, introduce your blog, and ask for feedback on what targeted readers would like to see.  This is virtually a fool-proof way of ensuring your blog topics, at least, are perceived as quality information.

Hang on, what’s that I hear you ask?  How can you find targeted forums?

Ah, that’s easy!  Simply visit Google and search for

• niche forum

ie

• telephone insulator forum

You might eventually find:

• InsulatorsCanada.com Forum

’tis rather active for the hobby.

What about if your blog focuses upon RVing?  Search for

• RV forum

and you might see:

• RV Forum Community
• RV.net Open Roads Forum
• Trailer Life Forum

The answers to what your targeted audience will perceive to be quality will be laid out smack in front of your face. Talk about easy research!  You can then either create additional Wordpress categories for these themes, write up 5 day tutorials, etc.

Another excellent way of seeing what is being discussed in your niche is to visit BoardReader.com.    This super site will show you all the forums in which particular topics are being pummeled to the ground.  For example, perhaps you blog about cockatoos.  Search for

• cockatoos

You’ll find plenty of places to explore further.

Let’s now recap a bit and list what we’ve learned, shall we?

To infuse your blog with quality, consider:

Step 1.)  Research popular boards

Take down notes of the important questions/themes that keep reoccurring.

Step 2.)  Add these ideas to your categories

Let’s say that you blog about cooking and discovered that kitchen safety and cutlery is deemed of utmost importance.  You can add the two categories

• Kitchen Cleanliness
• Kitchen Cutlery

to your blog so your readers can immediately zoom to articles about that topic.

Step 3.)  Solidify your writing style.

Write right to your audience (and try to resist bad grammar puns as I’m so obviously incapable of doing)!  Choose your own unique blogging voice and then simply run with it. 

Some great resources for finding your blogging voice include:

• Getting slapped upside the headed courtesy of your pitifully dull blog writing voice
• Supercharge Your Content With Voice
• Does your writing have a voice, or are you just a mime, mimicking the shape of others?
• Finding your writing voice

When your writing style becomes one with your reader’s expectations…joy, happiness, and frolicking pink unicorns and dancing gleeful elves populate the emotions (gleeful elves being a popular topic amongst my children these days).  It’s a win-win!

Step 4.)  After a few weeks or months, post a questionnaire to your blog.

Ideally after a few weeks/months, you’ll see an increase of subscribers.   Once you have a score or 17, post the question:

• What ELSE would you like to see?

Obviously, you’d seque into that concept with more smoothness than jagged glass, of course, but the point still remains - just plain ASK.   You might be surprised at what you learn (what people appreciate the most, what you’ve neglected to include, etc.)

See?

With that, let me close Day 1 of Viva the Broccoli Bunny!  Managing your blog fan’s expectations.  Tomorrow I’ll tackle the aspect of quality blogging - that of the information you offer.  See you then!

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

---

#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners blogging tips:  Write in a way to which your TARGETED audience will relate

Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips:  Visit targeted forums and search for popular questions or discussions or fights etc.  Then resolve them in your own blog.

#END highlights of this blog writing post

---

ps - speaking of kitchen safety, check out why you should never throw water over a kitchen oil fire

pps - and if you’re looking for Easter goodies, consider:

Fatal error: Class ‘expKrc’ not found in /home/lingling/domains/php/eBay_cls.php on line 161

Related posts:

1. Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny - Day 5 of 5, Critical Blog Post Check List
2. Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Managing your blog readers’ expectations - Day 2 of 5
3. Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Gaining the Edge and Managing your blog audience’s expectations - Day 3 of 5
4. Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Gaining the Edge and Managing your blog audience’s expectations - Day 4 of 5
5. How to Recession-proof your blog and business today - Secrets revealed!

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Managing your blog fans’ expectations - Day 1 of 5", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

If you find this blog posting useful, please feel free to share it below. And do feel free to let your friends know about it as well....I very much appreciate your time!

Spread the Word!

del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit blogmarks Facebook Google Slashdot Spurl StumbleUpon Technorati Twitter