Silvino Mills' Blog: Community Discussion: How Do You Survey Your Readers?

As the end of the year nears, you might be thinking about plans for your blogging in 2018.

One thing that will help inform that is a reader survey. On both ProBlogger and Digital Photography school I do an annual survey, usually around November.

As we plan our surveys, I thought I’d share some of the types of questions you can ask and give you a chance to share some of the survey techniques that have been successful for you too.

Types of questions you could ask:

Demographics: find out your readers’ gender, age, income, and interests. You can compare this with the analytics you get from Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

Content: What types of content do your readers like? Practical, inspirational, case studies? What length of blog post do they prefer, and how often do they like reading?

Products: If you’re planning new products you can test out some ideas and price points in your survey.

Problems: Some of the most useful information you can find out is the kinds of problems your readers want solved – the keystone to creating engaging content.

Another area you may want to include is any questions that regular advertisers/sponsors may want to know, or information you can use to attract regular advertisers and sponsors.

A good example of this is finding out the intentions of your readers. If you have a travel blog, and know that 50% of your readers are planning international travel in the next three months, you can use that information to show the relevance of your blog to overseas destinations or maybe insurance providers.

Maybe you’re wondering about how to implement a survey. We use SurveyMonkey for our surveys, but you could also use Google Forms. Typeform is another survey tool we’ve checked out. The main thing is to use something that will let you ask succinct questions and get aggregated answers that can easily be viewed and analysed as data and graphs.

If you’ve got some tips on how you run readers surveys, please leave them in the comments below so we can create a more detailed post in the future.

Image Credit: Emily Morter

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