How To Be a Successful Blogger Among Women Readers

There’s no doubt that women play a powerful role in the economy. In fact, over 20 trillion in spending worldwide is controlled by women. That’s a very reasonable to want to appeal to them in your social media efforts. One particularly useful platform for reaching out to women is by blogging. Unfortunately, many bloggers attempt to do this, but their efforts fall flat. Rather than appealing to women readers their efforts often patronize and condescend.

Are you interested in targeting women with your blogging efforts? If so, keep reading. Here are some great strategies for successfully blogging female audiences.

1. Stop Trying to Appeal to Women

Wait! What? It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Women don’t walk and think in lockstep. They don’t share the same beliefs. They don’t have the same interests. Even in areas where there is much common interest or concern, there are still distinct differences in needs and in values.

Drill down deeper. Who are the women you really want as subscribers? What do you want to talk about, and how can you make it interesting to them. Expand on the question ‘How do I attract women to my blog?’ For example:

• How do I attract women of faith to my blog?
• How do I attract working mothers to my blog?
• How do I get women who are travel enthusiasts to subscribe to my blog?
• What can I do to get women who are gaming enthusiasts interested in my blog?
• How do I reach women over fifty with my blog posts?

Trying to appeal simply to women as a whole makes no more sense than starting a blog with the intention of writing for ‘people’.

2. Identify What Might be Keeping Women Away

If your blog is up and running, but you’re failing to get women to subscribe, take a look at the posts you’ve published. Be on the lookout for posts that may fall in one of the following categories.

• Posts that may be offensive to women whether it’s intentional or not.
• Posts that don’t contain content that is relevant to women.
• Posts that solely consider the male perspective.

Posts that fall into the first category simply have no place. Get rid of them. As for the second two categories, you have a few options. You can leave them as they are. You can give them an upgrade by modifying them to appeal to both men and women. You might also create new blog posts revisiting those topics with a focus on appealing to women.

3. Encourage Engagement

Women are significantly more likely to engage on social media than men. If you offer them compelling content, they are sure to comment and share. They’ll even engage with one another. Your job is to take part in the conversation as well and to create a safe place for those conversations to happen.

Consider using a comment moderation tool to enable commenting on your blog posts. Not only will your audience members be able to discuss your posts and share their thoughts, you’ll be able to manage and track comments as well. This will help you to keep unsavory comments and commenters out of your blog. Many of these tools also provide upvote and downvote features and allow you to identify top commenters by quantity as well as quality.

Finally, if you aren’t already doing so, add social share buttons to your blog. This gives readers a quick and easy way to pass posts that interest them along to their own social media audience.

4. Establish Trust

As a group women tend to be cautious about online fraud. Because of this, establishing trust is very important. Here are a few things you can do to foster a sense of trust within your target audience:

• Write factual posts that are backed by data and case studies.
• Use relevant trust badges.
• Include customer testimonials.
• Share authentic stories about yourself and your brand.
• Focus on informational and educational content more than promotional content.

Not only will establishing trust attract women as followers, it increases the chance of them moving further the down the sales funnel progressing from subscriber to potential customer.

5. Get to Know The Women You’re Trying to Attract

It’s time to do a little market research. You don’t simply want to attract women, you want to attract women who are interested in what you have to say, your brand, and your products. To do that, you need to know their needs, values, interests, and concerns.

You can start with the people you know. Who is already following your blog? Who is already shown an interest in your brand? What is their demographics? Where do they spend time on the internet? What interests and concerns they have expressed to you?

A bit competitive analysis can help too. Check out other blogs in your niche. If they’re managing to get women to subscribe, pay attention. Which of their posts is getting the most attention from women? If women are commenting and sharing, what are they saying?

6. Be Useful

Once you understand who your audience is, find ways to be useful to them. Focus on content that help make their lives easier in some way, and that they can take action on. Think in terms of informing and instructing. As you write, ask yourself, ‘what will women reading this be able to take and apply to their own lives?’

It can help to make a list of questions, concerns, or problems women in your audience may be having as it relates to your niche. Then, plan posts that address those in helpful ways. For example, let’s say your blog is focused on car repair. Based on the feedback you’ve received, you’ve discovered that many women don’t believe they have enough physical strength to do most car maintenance. So, you plan some posts to address that concern. You can write about:

• Women who are professional mechanics or part of professional pit crews
• Tips and tools that make car repair easier for those with smaller builds
• Women who have successfully fixed and restored cars

Linking out to other useful information in your blogs can also help. For example, if you have a travel business don’t simply focus on your company. Think in terms of things women who travel may need. If you write a post on tips for traveling abroad, link to other articles or websites that can help, such as established translation sites or restaurant guides

7. Focus on Quality Content

Don’t become so focused on appealing to women or any other demographic group that quality becomes a secondary consideration. Obviously, your content should be well-written and accurate. However, you should also pay close attention to your overall writing style and mechanics. Women do tend to be detail oriented, and this is the kind of thing they notice. It can have an impact on their overall impression of your blog.

8. Be Visual

71% of pinterest users are women. Clearly visual content has a real appeal for women. Take advantage of this by posting plenty of visual content. Share photographs, infographics, videos, and other similar content. Of course, you shouldn’t forget that sharing visual content is also appealing. Invite your audience to share their own pictures and videos. There’s a good chance that many of those who respond will be women.

9. Don’t Pander or Stereotype

Don’t play into cloying stereotypes, even if they do happen to favor women. First, the idea is to attract women who are interested in your products or services. It isn’t to alienate your male audience. Even if you truly want to create a blog that only caters to the needs and interests of women, the man as boorish, unhelpful slob is schtick that doesn’t have much-staying power.

Be wary of pandering and stereotyping the women in your audience as well. Obviously, you would never engage in negative stereotyping, but if you aren’t careful you could engage in other forms of stereotyping. This could result in some women not feeling as if your blogging community for them.

You can avoid unintentional stereotyping by curbing your use of statements painting all women with a broad brush. Remember that not all women love to drink wine, covet jewelry, watch romantic movies, etc. Focus on creating a blog that appeals to the genuine interests of individual women, not a caricature.

10. Stay Focused

Don’t diminish the purpose and personality of your blog by focusing too much on the goal of getting women to subscribe. Whatever it is that you blog about should always be the priority. Stay current on events in your industry. Work to establish thought leadership. Post content frequently to keep your blog active.

11. Address Women When You Promote Your Content

Presumably, you’re already promoting your blog posts on your social media pages. If you’re interested in attracting women, consider addressing them directly. Before you promote a post, identify why it might appeal to women in your audience. Then, write up a few promotional posts about that.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the key to appealing to women is the same as it is with any other demographic. Offer quality, relevant content, encourage engagement, and treat your audience with respect. Do these things along with finding what draws women to your niche, and you’ll build a strong following among women.