What Are Your Target Audience’s 5 Top Web Sites?

If you want to create content that engages readers, you have to know their online habits and interests. Yet how many of us scramble to post on a blog or upload a  video to YouTube without taking time to survey our target audience?

Here’s a quick list of survey questions for your target audience:

1. What are the five top web sites you visit frequently in your work?
2. What are your online reading habits, blogs, websites, articles, videos, podcasts?
3. Do you use social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
4. Do you access web content via RSS feeds?
5. Subscribe to e-newsletter and blogs?
6. Do you read web content from a smartphone?

You have about eight seconds to engage someone before they click away. Clever headlines will get them to click over to your content. But unless you know what your audience wants, you’re shooting in the dark. They won’t stay. Click and bye-bye.

Good content builds momentum and always has an objective, according to Ann Handley and CC Chapman in their book Content Rules. Therefore your content needs to trigger to action. That’s the way you engage readers to respond. Your content should be created with the end in mind: to further a relationship.

But you can’t build relationships with people you don’t know.

I’m interested in knowing your top 5 web sites you visit regularly for work (besides your own, of course). Here are mine:

1. Gmail, of course
2. My client’s blogs and sites where I manage their content marketing
3. Alltop blog aggregation site: My Alltop page
4. Harvard Business Review blogs
5. Neuromarketing blog and Neuromarketing social networking site on Ning
6. Tennis

Of course, this varies. Right now I’m not spending much time on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, and I know I should. But this doesn’t mean that I don’t use them. I feed information to them every day and respond to requests, even when I’m not actively marketing in person. I have invisible ninja’s who help me out when I’m busy.

What about you? Let me know which sites are tops in your book in the work you do… hit the comment link and submit.