Today I am responding to a question from Rory of “A Guy Called Bloke” about blogging. It’s always interesting to look into how and why we blog and why other people do it the way they do. Here is the question but it might help to follow the link and read the background in Rory’s post first.

Have you ever given any serious thought to who your ideal reader is and if so what did you take into consideration to identify them and if not, who are you thinking will be reading your words if not you? [as in the type of reader]

I have to admit that when started to blog I really didn’t know who would read it. Well, obviously with the doll blog I figured it would be other doll collectors. This blog was started later because I wanted to write off topic and I thought that it would be better to keep the general topics separate from the doll stuff.

I didn’t have a set plan for this blog. I wrote about the things I knew about, places I’d been, cricket and motor racing, rants about things that annoyed me, memories and my daily life. I had no idea who would be interested in reading those posts and I didn’t try to tailor them to a particular audience. I just wrote.

I did know that I would write about Tasmania and share photos. I’m aware that many people who live outside Australia don’t know a lot about it. Some are not even too sure if it is part of Australia so those posts were for them especially and for people who love to travel. However, I didn’t sit down and think “Oh such and such post was popular. If I write more like that I’ll get more readers.” I know some content makers do this and if you plan to make money from what you create I guess you have to. I recently watched a YouTuber explaining exactly that on one of his videos. That his main audience was in America and those people wanted to see him reacting to American things and places. That was what made his figures go up. As I’d started watching him because he was making videos about Scotland where he lives that was a bit disappointing to me but he is doing his vlog as a business venture. I am a hobby blogger and I can please myself.

Of the real people who read and comment on this blog I think that quite a lot of them are older people like myself, nearly all of them are animal lovers and have cats, dogs or both.There are keen photographers and people who love to tell stories about their lives. I think most have similar values to me. Sometimes when I check my stats and see that someone has read one of my older posts I reread it myself. Usually I still like them so perhaps my ideal reader is someone like me.