AN AUTHOR NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND WHO THE AUDIENCE IS

Think about it, if you write stories to entertain children and the audience is a room full of nuclear scientists, you are probably not going to be received well. So with that in mind, within any venue an author needs to find who the audience is, what are they interested in, and will they like the kinds of things they are writing about. Sometimes if the audience isn't connecting the author can adapt, but other times, it is just better to find a new venue and an audience that appreciates what they are doing.

To answer the question about who Steemit authors are writing to I went to TRENDING TOPICS and copied the list of tags and associated data. I then pasted this information into a spreadsheet. I found there were 250 different tags, so I began to categorizes them into a more manageable number of groups. For example I called one group ART / PHOTOGRAPHY. This group included any tags that related to this topic. By doing this I was able to narrow the subjects down to 16 different groups. This of course is not an official study and someone else may have chosen to group things differently; but in-the-end, all I was trying to do was group data in order to draw some basic assumptions.

SO LETS LOOK AT THE DATA AND LEARN ABOUT STEEMIT AS AN AUDIENCE.

This first table shows which categories are most popular to post in and are ranked by number of POSTS made. This is probably a strong indication as to what the Steemit audience is interested in. You can see that the most popular topic is crypto-currency and I suppose that one could strategize to write for that area since there is interest; however, if you do, be sure you have expertise. No one wants to read an article that is out in left field. For myself I know my strengths, I post in literature, which is a much smaller audience, but one I relate to.

This second table shows which categories tend to be more profitable for authors and are ranked by AVERAGE PAYOUT. To determine AVERAGE PAYOUT I simply divided payouts by the number of posts. Once I had and sorted this data I asked myself why some categories did better than others and concluded its because those categories draw more of the professional and semi-professional authors. Let's face it, there are not many people who have the skill to write a good story or to put together a meaningful report about cryptocurrency, so when someone does it tends to get noticed. I also noticed that a lot of the categories with low payouts are categories that are easy to make a quick post in. Photography is one area that is often abused. Some will post any old photo hoping for a payout, when other more professional photographers have spent lots of time preparing for a shot or traveling great distances to find it. This is not meant to demean anyone posting in these categories, I often post in them myself, it is just meant as a general observation.

THANKS FOR READING, I HOPE AS YOU STUDY THESE TWO TABLES YOU WILL LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR STEEMIT AUDIENCE.