When I was at BlogWorld, I moderated a really excellent panel with Dave Taylor of AskDaveTaylor.com along with Steve Hall of AdRants, David Peralty of Xfep and Lynn Truong of Wise Bread on how to sell advertising directly to advertisers on your blog. At one point I had a somewhat embarrassing ‘ah-ha’ moment in which I heard nearly every panelist talk about their site demographics gathered from a survey – and I realized I had never done that on Sparkplugging.
I had lots of great excuses as to why I hadn’t done it yet. ‘Time’ was the convenient one, but my perfectionistic tendencies were the real roadblock. I have friends that have made their careers in market research. I know how important it is to ask the right question in just the right way – but I now had to admit it was more important to ask the questions at all instead of waiting for the money to hire someone with 30 years of agency experience to write my questions for me.
Please Do a Demographic Survey!
Whatever my (or your) excuse is for not collecting demographics, it is just that – an excuse. Immediately when I got back from BlogWorld, I set about getting my survey up and running. All perfectionistic tendencies aside, I found the cheapest (free!) solution and went with it: 10 questions on Survey Monkey.
As data started coming in I had a OMFG moment. I had NO IDEA of the gold mine I was sitting on – and I already thought I was sitting on a gold mine.
Here’s what I found. Sparkplugging readers are:
70% Female
63% 26-45 Years old
69% Married
80% Parents
78% Business owners
88% College educated
69% Come to us for home business/lifestyle advice or to read our opinion articles
98% Shop online
71% Read other blogs
–> and 90% of our readers create content online.
So why is this important to a web publishing business?
While some of these stats I already knew (I was spot on with gender and parenting percentages of our readers), some of these things I didn’t know. This kind of information is critical as I create future plans for content expansion. But most of all, this is my bargaining chip with direct advertisers.
Sometimes I get down on myself for not having the traffic numbers I wish we had – and to be fair, I will probably feel that way no matter what our traffic numbers are. But when I can tell advertisers that our readers are some of the most vocal people on the internet and we are influencing the influencers, suddenly every one visitor could be worth hundreds of visitors. And I’m in a much sweeter position as a business owner than I thought I was before I did this survey.
So here is where I beg you as a fellow web publisher to go out and do a survey. I don’t care if you have 10 visitors a day – those ten people could be the exact ten people that ‘Advertiser X’ wants to know. And this data can drastically change your advertising strategy and impact your bottom line.
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Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow). 
Easton Ellsworth is owner of 
You are right on the money when you noted how valuable demographics are. As a former radio ad exec I understand the need to know your audience. Please share a site you have used to determine your demo. Thx.
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and 90% of our readers create content online.
No. 90% of the people who took time out of their day to take the poll have blogs. That is unlikely to be a representative sampling of the actual percentage of visitors. Those who are likely to respond to a request to take an online poll are more likely to be bloggers than silent lurkers, search visitors, or subscribers. The rest of the poll may have been representative, but that portion of it is definitely skewed.
The difficulty for many small Internet business is in finding the tools and resources to complete a survey. How one would perform a survey isn’t obvious to me. We do track the volume of visitors to our site, but we don’t have access to a web tool that would enable visitors to complete a survey and then compile the data. We have about 4,000 visitors to our site every day and manually compiling responses to a survey is beyond our personnel resources.
Excellent post and exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!