Do Women Read Blogs

A lot has been made about the Blogads survey that showed 75% of the people reading blogs, albeit in a small, selected subset were men and the survey itself was not a scientific sample.  The survey was not a scientific one.

Couple that with a recent study by PR firm Ketchum that showed among other things

• women aged 25-54 have much more on their minds today than five years ago and little time to hear commercial messages
• they are more stressed than men, or any other group
• they are more likely to feel distracted and "pulled" in different directions
• 74% spend more time thinking about others' needs, than their own
• 59% rarely or never read a newspaper; 56% said the same for magazines

It seems as if they trust their family and friends (26%) just about as much as they trust experts (27%)

“What the survey makes very clear is that women ages 25 to 54 are ‘multi-minding’ today – they’re constantly physically and mentally juggling those multiple facets of their complex lives,” maintains Kelley Skoloda, Director of Ketchum’s Global Brand Marketing Practice.

Yet they shop online more than men (52%) and while they don't buy as many big ticket items, look to see the volume and variety of what they buy online to increase as they look to save time using the Internet as their vehicle of choice. 

Sounds like a natural way to market to these women is through blogs that connect women to each other, that connect family and friends in a personal web of trust, that encourage conversations and aren't focused on just selling but sharing and support. 

These are just some of the blogs written by women that I read on a regular basis.
Dooce.and Halley's Comment and Testosterhome and Seedlings & Sprouts and My Mom's Blog,  The Dawn Patrol and The Open Book and Time Goes By and The Anchoress and La Shawn Barber and Sandee and The Sheila Variations

Some are married, some parents,  others single;  some religious, others not, one fighting cancer, one the oldest blogger on the Internet, others young, some political, others not.    What they have in common is a distinctive voice that brings me back wanting to read more, wanting to find out what they are thinking about, wanting to learn what happened next.    We learn from the experiences of our friends and increasingly from the experiences of other bloggers we likely have never met.

My personal expert in marketing to women online and she should be yours is Yvonne DiVita at Lipsticking.  Listen in while she interviews Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing and they talk about women reading blogs (many more than you think), and some great tips for businesses to attract more women and not just through blogs.