Do “Mainstream” People Read SEO Blogs & Tweets?

Probably not! However, if they do, they, most likely only read blogs written by other “mainstream” people, for example, restaurant or movie reviews. And if they are on Twitter, they probably keep up with Oprah, Ashton, or Shaq, and tweet a lot about what they’re having for lunch and dinner.

Why I even raise such questions is simply because sometimes it’s difficult to justify all the time and effort that goes into maintaining a blog, when you’re not really sure whether “mainstream” people, or more specifically, small business owners, even read them.

In other words, if the service you offer is search engine optimization and your target market is small business owners, if those small business owners don’t read blogs, well, you can see where I’m going with this.

The Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy defines a small business as an independent business having fewer than 500 employees. If 500 employees is a small business, I’d hate to hear how many it would take to classify as large, which I guess would be 501.

Fortunately, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if small business owners do read blogs, assuming, of course, that the subject matter is of some interest to them.

If I had to venture a guess regarding who reads blogs, I’d probably come up with beginning bloggers, marketing bloggers, seo bloggers, and even other small business bloggers. The key phrase here, however, is other bloggers.

So in actuality if what we have on Twitter is SEO and affiliate marketers essentially marketing to each other, then what we have with blogs is bloggers essentially blogging for other bloggers!

Although the only stats I could find were really old, according to Clickz back in July of 2003, “blogs seem to be read mostly by men (60 percent vs. 40 percent women), in homes where the total income is more than $60,000 per year (61 percent) and the majority (73 percent) of blog readers have been online for more than 5 years.

And here’s what else we know. Again according to Clickz in August of 2005, “blog readers spend more time and money online than other web users who don’t read them.”

“Fifty million Americans, or 30 percent of all American Internet users, visited a blog in the first quarter of 2005.”

“The average blog reader viewed 77 percent more pages than the average Internet user who doesn’t read blogs and blog readers average 23 hours online per week, compared with the overall Web user’s average of 13 hours.”

Of course, bloggers and tweeters, themselves, could easily do 13 hours in one day!

“Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000.

More recent, but still older stats from the Pew Research Center tell us that only 11% of Internet users in US read blogs on a typical day while 42% claim to have read blogs at least once.

After all those stats, we still don’t know whether or not small business owners read blogs and tweets.