Did you know that 22 of the top 100 Web sites in the world are blogs?

Amazing, but true!

If your target audience does not consist of online users, blogging might not be the best strategy for your marketing. However, most businesses can derive great benefit from using a blog.

And as consumers continue to get more “search savvy,” it becomes increasingly important to create and publish online content that is relevant to your target audience and easy to find.

Who reads blogs? Consider the following:

• Currently, there are more than 70 million blogs on the Internet, with 120,000 new blogs being created daily. Each day, people add 1.5 million new posts to their existing blogs.
• A recent survey indicates that 75 percent of blog readers are over the age of 30. So it’s not just teenagers or kids in college with too much time on their hands.
• Research also indicates that the median income for blog readers tops $90K per year. Blog readers are more affluent and organized, and they know how to research purchasing decisions online.

Blogging is quickly evolving into the medium of choice for mature online users who make a lot of money. The majority of blog readers are people with money to burn who are looking for reliable information about products and services.

Connect with your ideal customer

Growing a business requires identifying your ideal customer, understanding how they make their buying decisions, and aligning your business with their decision-making process.

Blogging allows you to quickly connect with your ideal customers and insert yourself into their decision-making process. But only if you blog about what they are looking for.

The key is understanding how people search on the Internet.

In general, people search for the problem on their mind. For example, if someone suffers from migraine headaches, they will type in queries like “getting rid of a bad headache” or “how to get rid of a migraine.”

Once you figure out what your target audience is searching for, you can build content and websites that begin to address their problems. By testing different blogs, you can learn what your ideal customers talk about, what they type in when they go to the search box, and what they think about when considering your product or service.

Then you can start talking in their jargon instead of yours. There’s no better way to reach a prospect than to offer a solution to a problem in the language they’re thinking and talking in.

Blogging also provides an excellent platform for reaching out to the media. In today’s business world, you can’t just focus on clients and prospects. You must also cultivate media contacts who can help communicate your difference in the marketplace. Increasingly, journalists are turning to blogs as credible sources of information and as a way to make their jobs easier.

Bottom line: if you want to reach mature consumers with plenty of disposable income, you can’t do it faster, easier or more effectively than with a blog.

Next in this series: How to make money with your blog

This post is the third in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with award-winning blogger Andy Wibbels, author of “Blog Wild.” You can see his blog here.