Hi @barbc!

Here’s a post on hiding labels - http://blogger-dashboard.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-hide-labels-from-blogger-post.html

Targeting an audience is a whopper.  When writing your blog you have to think about who you’re writing for.  Who is your audience?  From what I’ve gathered from your posts, your audience might be grade school teachers and tutors of grade school children.  I really think you’re doing a great job so far because it seems like you already know who you’re writing for.  

The labels or tags are not what targets your audience.  It’s a way to organize your posts…they’re like topics.  For instance, if you use the tag “humorous teaching stories” for more than one post, when someone clicks on that label, they will be directed to a page that has all of the posts that were labeled with that “humorous teaching stories” tag.

If you have any questions, let me know.  I’m happy to explain or go into further detail.

BTW…”Dressing on the side” was hysterical. =)

~Nichole

@iamconsulting Nichole….you read it! Hysterical IS the word, huh?  Thank you for your comments as  I totally get the “topic” thing now.  Must go back and change my labels.”
@dianeaull  “This is probably more important with business/marketing blogs than for personal blogs”.  Yet I am speaking of business/marketing “targeting” an audience. But I’ll get the “targeting” part answered another place, day. 

To both of you……forever grateful!

Loved “Dressing On The Side!”

About targeting: when you say you want to target, does that mean you want to attract readers from search engines? 

Your content is targeted to its audience, I’d say. But it isn’t targeted to search engines. In other words, your content WILL appeal to your target audience. But it isn’t immediately obvious to a *machine* who you are targeting. This unfortunate situation is the reason that the web is loaded with literal, boring headlines–so that machines will know what is the topic of the story. Your headline is charming, intriguing, funny. But it doesn’t tell a machine what the story is going to be about  Search engines put a high priority on blog post titles/headlines.

Sooo, if you *are* asking about targeting for the purpose of getting traffic from the search engines, you will want to brush up on your basic search engine optimization. Your target audience will then be more likely to find you via the search engines.

If you wanted to modify your headline for search engines, you could just add something in parens like, “(Or How Teaching Taught Me Humility and Humor)”   — you get the idea. That way you have “teaching” and “humor” in your headline. I won’t go any further into SEO here, just in case that’s NOT what you were asking about! Ha!

@kristi-hines  Awesome strategy, Kristi. I’m learning so much off this thread of conversation, I finally opened a new folder and started a “BLOG STRATEGIES” LIST. I used to read teacher blogs on a consistent basis, always seeking that perfect teaching idea; clearly I’m going back, but for a new reason