Targeting or Embracing your Readers?

I read quite a few "Blogging Advice" sites. Like this section of my site, these deal with site improvement suggestions, search engine optimization, advertising revenue and the like. One word that I often see is "targeting". I'm sure I've used it myself, but honestly, I don't like it.

I'm sure you can find thousands of blogging advice posts that talk about "targeting your readership". For a blogger, that means you should be writing the kinds of posts that your readers want to read. Pretty basic stuff, really.

One of the reasons I don't like that word is because this website is not well targeted. That is because my interests range across several different areas and I write about all of them. If you came here today because you like to read the Macintosh articles, you might be disappointed to find this "Blogging" post (don't be crushed though: there will be more Mac posts too).

But there's a far deeper reason. "Targeting" makes me feel like I'm hunting something, and hunting means deception and misdirection. "Targeting" means I don't care about the audience here, I only care what they can bring me: more revenue, more page rank, more Technorati stats, whatever.

And that's not the case. "Targeting" says you are writing at someone, that you set out to write what they want to hear. That's not what I do: I write for other people, to share (and receive) knowledge. For me, this website is like having you all over for beer and peanuts on the back porch.. we'll talk about whatever we want, right? The door is open to everyone, and we may get some folks who only want to talk about Macs or only want to talk about Linux.. well, that's why I have RSS feeds that will notify them only about those subjects, right?

I'm not targeting you. We're just having a conversation.

The posting that triggered this was How to Avoid Fool's Gold and Create Value-packed Content at Skelliewag.org.

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Mon Feb 18 14:54:53 2008:   TonyLawrence


I noticed that Seth Godin recently talked about this:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/citizens-1.html

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