Tips for conducting a survey of your blog readers

Everyone’s telling you to take a blog demographics survey – you need to know who’s reading your blog and why so that you can tell advertisers just who your audience is!  But it tends to be one of those things that gets pushed down on the priority list and just never gets done.

I finally sat down and created a survey this week, and can’t believe I hadn’t done it before! I used Google Docs and it was super easy – the survey responses are automatically fed into a pretty little chart with percentages and graphs. I didn’t even have to take the survey results and set up special formulas to calculate totals – Google Docs did it for me.

As I’ve been watching the results of the survey roll in, I’ve had lots of thoughts as to what to do with the results, things I should have done differently, etc. So, here’s what I’ve learned thus far:

Know why you’re doing the survey – then you’ll know what questions to ask.  A buzzword among bloggers in “influence”… we’re supposed to prove to advertisers that we’re influential so that they want us to be influential for them! I’ve wondered for a long time how to prove this, and then it hit me – ask my readers if my site is influential!

So, I asked my readers if they’d ever tried a new brand or company because it was mentioned on Springs Bargains. I also asked them to rate how influential my site is in their purchasing decisions (with the options of very influential, somewhat influenctial, a little influential, and not at all influential).

And, my readers are helping me prove my influence! I can now quote percentages to advertisers that prove my site is actually spurring people to try new products and companies. I’m excited to have concrete evidence that I am just as influential (or more?) than a TV ad or radio commercial.

What are you going to actually do with the survey results?  Will you be using the data to sell advertising?  Think of the companies you want to target and try to think of what information they will want to know.  Know the answers you want so that you know what questions you need to ask.

Don’t ask too many questions. There’s not a perfect number of questions, but you want people to actually finish the survey, not get tired and quit halfway through. If you don’t need to know the occupation of your readers, skip that question.  Just because it’s on a list of “suggested things to ask in a demographics survey” doesn’t mean you need to use it.  Again, keep the goals for your survey in mind – know what you are going to do with the results of every single question.

Ask open-ended questions, but take the results with a grain of salt. I asked what my readers would like to see more of and what they enjoy the most.  I also asked what they don’t like to see or what they’d like to see less of.  Whew, I don’t even want to read the column of answers about what they don’t like.  Only about 10% of survey respondents even put an answer in that section, but those tend to be the ones I take to heart the most!

It’s important to ask open-ended questions or have somewhere they can add comments about whatever they want.  It can be a great source of ideas, and often your readers may suggest something that makes you think “DUH!  I can’t believe I haven’t done that before!“

But, it’s hard not to take negative comments personally.  I suggest taking a look at the percentage of people with the same dislike – is it one out of 100?  That’s 1% of your audience.  Think about the frequency with which they see the type of content they dislike – is it once a week?  It may be as little as 1-2% of your content if you’re a deal blog and post often.  Will they really stop reading if you don’t change to their preferences?

Just make sure you look rationally at the negative comments.  If you see the same answers several times, there may be something you need to change.  If it’s just a few people, consider if it’s something you can easily change and if that change would make sense for your blog and for your other readers, too.

Embed the survey right in your blog so it doesn’t require an extra click.  I have no scientific data on this, but I know that I am much more likely to complete a survey that is right in front of me – if it requires a click to another page, I’m about 50% less likely to take the survey.

I embedded my Google Doc right in the blog post, which make it easy to take from the website, but also from RSS or email.  I also recommending making it a one-page survey with all the questions on one page rather than a “click to go to the next question” format – when people can’t tell how long the survey is, they’re much less likely to complete it.

I’m so much more excited about creating a media kit after doing a blog reader survey!  Not only do I now have no-effort fancy little charts and graphs, I can now quote actual numbers and statistics instead of spending hours trying to figure out how to communicate the influence of my site to advertisers.

If you haven’t done a reader survey yet, start thinking about what types of things you want and need to learn about your audience.  Once you have the questions, it could take as little as 10 minutes to set up a survey in Google Docs and then you can see the exciting results pour in!

Have you done a survey?  What were the most surprising results to you? What did you learn you needed to grow in the most?  I’ve seen that I need to do a push to spread the word more to gain new readers – I don’t have as many “new” readers as I expected.

Carrie Isaac blogs at Springs Bargains, in the niche-within-a-niche of local deal blogging.  She also does internet marketing for her husband, Jeremy, a Colorado Springs Realtor.

Tagged as: demographics, media kit, survey