Poll Your Audience with Blogging

One of the things most authors don’t realize is that they have a means of “demographic research” right at their fingertips. That source of intelligence, that means of testing new ideas, that pipeline directly to what your audience thinks and feels about literally any question you want to ask them, is your blog.

Your blog gives you an immediate means of polling an audience. You can also use your audience to help you narrow down ideas when focusing on a new topic. For example, a writer friend uses his social media to poll his followers and ask them what they’d like to see covered. He used his audience to brainstorm topics, then recorded what they brainstormed and organized it. Using that organized flow of ideas, he was able to outline the book. The act of polling his audience allowed him to narrow down a very broad subject to a manageable outline.

In this same way, you can ask your blog audience for poll help for anything that involves “mass opinion.” Want to know what type of book your audience would be most interested in? That’s easy; just ask them and watch the responses come in. Interested in addressing multiple scenarios and want to know which ones are top of mind for your audience? Ask away and then see where the duplicates indicate the most interest.

The thing to remember is that people love answering questions. Have you ever felt a sense of satisfaction when, say, someone asked you for directions and you knew the answers? Have you ever been interviewed for a “person on the street” spot on television, and you were thrilled to get your opinion out there? The average person is usually pretty excited to share what they think with the rest of the world. This will work to your advantage. When you post a poll question, your audience will jump at the chance to answer.

“I won’t ask you to tell me who has spoken ill of me, but I would like to know who has spoken favorably.” – Santiago Roncagliolo, Red April

There are, however, a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when you poll your audience. These basically boil down to some general rules about statistics. You know that old saying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Well, data by itself doesn’t necessarily mean a lot; it’s the analysis of that data that helps you draw conclusions. You need to keep some general caveats in mind when you do that, or your blog polls might give you skewed ideas about what your audience does and doesn’t think.

First, make sure you understand your own biases. Are you asking a question hoping to get a specific type of answer? If that’s true, you might find you ignore answers that don’t fit what you’re looking for. The first step to overcoming that type of bias is knowing that it’s there and what it is. If you know you’re hoping for a certain answer but you’re not getting it, this might be cause for some reflection on why you hoped your poll would go that way.

Second, understand that correlation is not causation. Just because you get a lot of data doesn’t necessarily mean you can draw conclusions from it. One of the most famous examples of this is that in cities with more churches, there is more violence. Obviously, we can conclude statistically that churches cause violence, right? Obviously not — because this correlation doesn’t imply cause and effect. (The truth is that more churches are the result of larger populations, and larger populations tend to have more crime. See the difference?) When analyzing your poll data, keep this rule very much in mind.

Third, remember that your audience isn’t a “random sample.” Let’s say you have a horror blog. If you ask them something about the genre of horror, you’re going to get a specific answer that might or might not be shared by a more “general” audience of people for whom horror is not a topic interest. The same goes for literally any topic or focus. Your blog will come with built-in audience biases for this reason, so understand what they might be and interpret your blog poll results accordingly.

Finally, look for blind spots. We’re all human and we all have things we prefer not to believe or to see. Challenge yourself. When your blog polls poke at your blind spots, look harder at these areas and really push yourself to see them for what they are. This could be something as simple as a poll about a writing sample. If your audience keeps telling you they don’t like the sample, don’t let a blind spot where criticism is concerned prompt you to ignore the feedback. Take a good, hard look at information you don’t like when your blog audience shares it with you.

Never forget that your blog’s audience can accomplish a great deal for you. Polling your audience while blogging is just one of the ways you can leverage this to your advantage as an author.

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*This blog was written 100% by a human and contains no AI-generated written content.