Guest post by James Shotwell. This article originally appeared on Haulix

Building and retaining your audience begins with understanding who is clicking on your site.

Search the name of virtually any artist or group on social media, and you are bound to find people discussing that act. Opinions on music are a dime a dozen, and when it comes to bands, everyone already knows their value is worth even less that. Young music writers around the globe cut corners on a daily basis to be among the first to cover the latest news about the biggest acts in their area of interest. It doesn’t matter if their site has few to no visitors or if much larger publications beat them to the punch, they want to ensure that their readers learn the latest breaking news directly from them.

But who is the audience for the average blog, and who visits websites for news before scrolling social media?