The Results of My 2015 Reader Survey And What I Learned From You

Last month I launched my 2015 Reader Survey. This was the first time I decided to create a reader survey for my blog and I am so glad I did it.

Let me just start of by saying THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey.[featured-image size=”featured” single_newwindow=”true”]

This survey has helped me create a “reader profile” (it’s really the demographics of “most” of my readers). Now, by all means, this profile is not every reader but just how a typical reader might identify. Here are the results of the survey:

  • My typical reader is a female (62%) between the ages of 25-34 (75%).
  • She is highly educated with at least a college degree (12%) or Master’S degree (62%).
  • Her income is above $50,000 (60%).
  • She is active on multiple social media sites, including Facebook (88%), Twitter (88%), LinkedIn (88%), Instagram (62%), and Pinterest (50%).
  • She tends to be a business owner/entrepreneur (38%) or have a career in education (38%).
  • She’s most interested when I discuss and create content in the areas of personal development (100%), productivity (75%), and leadership (62%). The category of career received the lowest percentage at 38%.
  • The biggest challenges she faces are career advancement and not enough money. Career advancement was mentioned by close to 90% of those who answered this question on my survey.

What I’m Taking Away From My 1st Reader Survey

  1. Creating a survey was a GREAT idea and I wish I did it sooner. I gathered a lot of good information from the 10 questions I asked. I got to know who my audience is (I’ll go into this more in the next section), what they would like to accomplish over the next few years, and what their biggest challenges are. Again, I should have done this years ago. Oh well, live and learn. I will be surveying my audience on an annual basis from here on out.
  2. You don’t know your audience until you ask. My audience is different than what I thought. I guess I thought my audience was more like me. Stupid of me to just assume that. Often people start blogs because they have something to offer others and they write those blogs as if they were writing it to themselves (this goes for presentations, meetings, etc. as well). And I was totally doing this. I am not my audience. I am not my audience. Even though I just wrote that sentence twice, I was really saying it out loud to myself so I would actually get it. Now that I have a reader profile I can write and create content for you.[Tweet “You don’t know your audience until you ask.”]
  3. I still want to help you! I will continue to create content around the areas that are important to you, my readers. When I asked the question regarding  which topic do you enjoy on my blog the feedback was overwhelmingly personal development. This is great news since my blog is  all about elevating yourself and small incremental improvements. There was still strong interest in productivity and leadership.
  4. Surprise, surprise, surprise! Not only was I surprised by the reader profile but also that career help was dead last  with not a lot of interest. But when I asked “What are your biggest challenges?”all most all of the response had some relation to career advancement and how to get to a job you want or one that has more money. Who doesn’t want this? At this moment I am not sure what to do with this. I will need to dig a little deeper on this one with my audience.

After reading this blog post what are your thoughts on the survey results?

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