Aimed vs Random Content

[mollylayton]

When I was looking at my sales in anticipation of picking up my writing rate, I noticed something. I mentally divide my writing into two categories. "Aimed" is written with a specific market in mind. "Random" is written because I happened to be researching something, or just got an idea stuck in my head.

I have posted 19 "random" articles, 4 "aimed" articles for a request, and 17 "aimed" articles without requests. That gives me a total of 40 articles.

Of them, I have sold 13.

Random: 6
Requested: 2 (one sold to someone other than the person who requested it)
Aimed: 5

That gives me the following sales rates
Random: 31%
Requested: 50%
Aimed: 29%

I had expected the aimed rate to be much higher than the random rate, but that is not true. They're about the same. Of course, this doesn't take the amount of time it took to sell articles and my sample size is quite small.

Do the more experienced writers find this too? One of the things I like about Constant Content is that I can post on whatever topic I want. Because I get confused whenever I try to reverse-engineer buying habits, it's nice to know that whatever I write will have a 1 in 3 chance of selling.

[AnnaL]

For me, all of my writing is "random" in that it starts from a random idea I get in my head. However, as I'm writing I try to think about what kind of customer and reader would find value in the piece, and tailor my writing to them. For example, for a travel piece I imagine that my CC customer is maybe a travel agent or a travel blogger. The travel agent would likely want a piece that shows a destination they're promoting in a good light, while the travel blogger might want to be able to embed Viator referral links. I try to make my writing suitable for either.