DAY FOUR | A SECRET BLOGMAS 2025

“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.” 

Rumi

Welcome to A Secret Blogmas 2025!

Today is Day Four and this fourth post is all about the benefits and impact of, as an Influencer or Blogger, understanding what your audience or followers like the most in your content creation. There’ll be a ton of tips and advice on how to gain this understanding in the first place and all the keys to using it in the best way possible for your content and your platform. Keep reading to find out why understanding what your audience likes can impact the success and popularity of your content and/or your platform…

1. Analytics & Insights

• Platform analytics (Instagram Insights, TikTok Analytics, YouTube Studio, etc.) show you:
• Which posts got the most likes, comments, shares, and saves.
• Watch time and drop-off points on videos.
• Audience demographics (age, gender, location, active times).
• Tracking these patterns helps you identify which topics, formats, or styles perform best.

2. Engagement & Feedback

• Ask directly through polls, Q&A, or “what do you want to see next?” posts.
• Monitor comment sections and DMs for repeated questions or interests.
• Pay attention to which content sparks conversations vs. passive likes.

3. Experimentation

• Test different formats (stories, carousels, reels, long-form, memes).
• Try varying tones (educational, entertaining, personal storytelling).
• Note what consistently gets positive engagement—and what falls flat.

4. Community Listening

• Follow trending hashtags and look at what other influencers in your niche post.
• Join forums, groups, or Discords where your audience hangs out.
• Spot emerging trends and adapt them to your style.

5. Surveys & Giveaways

• Use surveys or entry forms (for a giveaway, for example) to ask what followers enjoy most.
• This gives structured data instead of just assumptions.

6. Long-term Tracking

• Keep a simple spreadsheet of your top-performing posts and note the theme, format, time posted, and engagement metrics.
• Over time, you’ll see clear patterns in what your audience values.

1. Builds Trust & Loyalty
• When you deliver what your audience wants, they feel understood and valued.
• Loyal followers are more likely to keep engaging, recommending you to others, and sticking with you long-term.
2. Increases Engagement
• Likes, comments, shares, saves, and watch time all rise when people genuinely enjoy your content.
• Engagement signals to platforms that your content is valuable → leading to more reach through algorithms.
3. Drives Growth
• Happy followers share your content with friends or tag others.
• This creates organic growth, helping you expand your audience without always relying on paid ads or collaborations.
4. Strengthens Community
• Content people resonate with encourages discussion, interaction, and a sense of belonging.
• This creates not just “followers” but a community around your brand.

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Benefits You Get as an Influencer

1. Algorithm Boost
• Platforms reward content with high engagement by pushing it to more people (Explore, For You Page, suggested feeds).
2. Brand Opportunities & Sponsorships
• Brands want to partner with influencers who can prove they know their audience.
• Strong engagement rates and loyal followers make you more attractive for collaborations.
3. Authority in Your Niche
• By consistently giving your audience value, you position yourself as a go-to voice in your space.
• This can lead to speaking gigs, features, or leadership in your niche.
4. Monetization Potential
• Loyal audiences are more likely to buy your merch, sign up for your courses, or use your affiliate links.
• It’s not just about reach—it’s about conversion, and people convert when they like your content.
5. Sustainable Career
• Creating content your followers love ensures you’re not just chasing trends that fade.
• Instead, you build a lasting brand with a dedicated community that sticks with you.

Authenticity & Personal Brand Strength

·         When you post what excites you, your passion shows—and audiences can feel it.

·         Authenticity builds stronger trust than just following trends.

Creative Fulfilment

·         Making content you love keeps you motivated and prevents burnout.

·         If you only create “what works” for followers, content creation can start to feel like a chore.

Differentiation

·         Following your creative instincts helps you stand out in a crowded niche.

·         Original ideas (instead of just replicating audience favourites) make you memorable.

Longevity & Sustainability

·         Building a brand around your true interests ensures you won’t get tired of your own content.

·         This makes it easier to stay consistent over months and years.

Training Your Audience’s Taste

·         When you consistently create what you love, you slowly shape your audience’s preferences.

·         Your followers learn to enjoy new formats, topics, or styles because they connect with you, not just the content type.

Attracting the Right Followers

·         By making content aligned with your genuine interests, you attract people who actually vibe with your personality and values.

·         This leads to a more engaged and loyal community, not just big numbers.

Freedom & Flexibility

·         Influencer work becomes less about chasing algorithms and more about expressing yourself.

·         You stay in control of your brand, instead of being trapped by trends.

1. Find the Overlap

• Think of it like a Venn diagram:
• Circle A = content you enjoy creating.
• Circle B = content your audience loves consuming.
• The magic is in the intersection—themes, formats, or tones that energize you and get traction.

2. Use Audience Favourites as a Gateway

• If your audience loves a certain type of content (say tutorials), but you prefer storytelling, try blending them:
• Teach through storytelling.
• Add your personality, humour, or style into “fan favourites.”
• This way, you’re not abandoning what works, just adapting it.

3. Segment Your Content

• Use a content mix strategy:
• 70%: proven content your audience consistently loves.
• 20%: experimental content that blends your creativity with audience interest.
• 10%: passion projects—content you post for yourself (sometimes these unexpectedly resonate).

4. Train Your Audience’s Taste

• If you introduce your personal favourite content consistently, your audience can learn to love it too.
• Example: If you love behind-the-scenes content but your audience mainly follows for tutorials, start sprinkling BTS clips into tutorials until they become a natural part of your brand.

5. Check Energy vs. ROI

Ask yourself two things before committing to a content type:

• Does this give me energy (I enjoy making it)?
• Does this give me ROI (audience engagement, growth, or opportunities)?
  If it checks both, it’s gold. If it only checks one, use it sparingly.

6. Give Yourself Creative Outlets

• Some influencers create a secondary channel/page (or use stories) for passion projects that don’t fit their main content.
• That way, you don’t dilute your main brand but still keep the fun alive.

It may be surprising that even after twelve (the blog will be thirteen on January 6^th) years, I’m still finding that I don’t always enjoy creating the content that my audience seem to prefer. I say that might be ‘surprising’ to hear because I wonder whether people might think that I wouldn’t have been blogging so long if I wasn’t thoroughly enjoying every single piece of content, I create…

I don’t want people to think I’m being ungrateful for my blog’s popularity and success though, or that I’m in some way moaning and complaining about something which is actually completely and utterly optional! Like, I could choose to just never create the content that I don’t massively enjoy putting together. But hopefully, as you’ll have seen in the one list above regarding why an Influencer should create content their followers like, it’s not about it being optional; it’s about still recognising that there are benefits to doing so. And it’s about weighing up whether those positives, make creating the content, worthy. Whether you think that what you might get in return makes it worth spending your time doing something you don’t massively enjoy.

I feel that I’m NOT Disordered’s readers seem to favour (in terms of the number of views it receives) the content which is far more in-depth about one issue – and that typically seems to be when it’s about self-harm or suicide, to be honest. As an example, one of my most viewed posts of all-time (across the entire past twelve years!) was: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK INTO AN OVERDOSE | WHAT I THOUGHT, HOW I FELT, & WHAT HAPPENED | I'm NOT Disordered. And, I’d like to think readers like this content for three main reasons (which are dependent upon the individual):

1.       For others who have struggled with similar thoughts, feelings, and experiences to feel less alone and to gain hope in seeing my recovery from those moments.

2.       For services and professionals to see what helps and what doesn’t help with a view to learning that, helps to change policies and procedures.

3.       For loved ones of those who have struggled in a similar way, to gain insight and a better understanding of what that person is going through.

With these reasons in mind, I feel that this renders that content helpful in a variety of ways and for a variety of different people who would all fall into my blog’s target audience. This thought (that it’s helping others in some way), provides me with a great amount of encouragement and motivation to continue to create that content. And why do I not enjoy writing it? Well, that might be slightly obvious now that you have that example – like, why would anyone enjoy writing in depth about feeling suicidal or having an instance of self-harm?!

For anyone wondering ‘well, what does she enjoy doing?’ the answer is the far lighter-hearted content like wish lists, gift guides, and mostly anything that’s more about the creative visuals, graphics, and imagery than writing/typing a whole ton of copy! However, I won’t deny that I do find writing therapeutic and that creating content about my experiences of trauma, suicide, mental illness, and self-harm can sometimes be helpful for my own mental health and emotional wellbeing too. And so, this provides me with the motivation to balance the two sorts of content and create both the fun posts and the deeper content. To help me in the balancing act, I tend to rely upon the timing in terms of not only my own, current experiences, but also general topics up for discussion in society according to the current news and I also massively utilise Awareness Dates for this too.

At the end of the day, balance is key because, as a content creator, it’s important that you’re benefiting from what you’re doing as much as your followers are because as rewarding as it is to help others to make them happy, it's essential that you're happy too!