It sounds like strange question for a business blogger, but many business bloggers don’t know who their ideal customers are. Not knowing your ideal customer can lead you to make serious errors in your blog marketing strategy, and can cause all kinds of grief in the long term.

Knowing your ideal customer will help you fine-tune your material to connect – really connect – with him or her. That connection to your ideal customers is worth far more than a link, or ten links or one hundred links. When you connect with your ideal customer, you build a relationship that can last for years, and the relationship is what you’re after.

Knowing your ideal customer helps you to focus not only your material but also your business on meeting that customer’s needs. The real value of your business blog is the precision with which it can locate and attract your ideal customers. Those ideal customers are looking for you, and your business blog can act like a homing beacon, if you produce it properly and position it where they’re likely to look.

Ideal customers are attracted to your blog when it’s more about them and less about you. When your blog provides real value, in the way of opinion, commentary, useful information, product comparisons, how-to tips, and the benefit of your experience, you fill a need that your ideal customer has. Your blog, your site, and your business become indispensable to them. They value what you have to say and what you do, and for that, they’ll reward you by being loyal customers, and by returning to your site again and again.

In today’s commoditized world, loyalty is hard to come by. When you use your blog to distinguish yourself, and to add value to your product or service, you step out of the “commodity provider” category and into a partnership with your customers. As long as you treat your partnership correctly, your customers will be yours for life.

Photo Credit: Paul Kempin