Teen attracting blog, or not?

I received some very good advice on my first blogging assignment from the Blogging 101 professor. Essentially, the feedback was that what I'm currently blogging about is not directed toward my ideal audience.

I identified that I am starting a blog to build my author platform and attract potential readers. The books I am writing are YA, so my ideal audience is teens (in my case, late teens, early twenties). Thus far my blog has mostly been about my journey to becoming a writer, including learning how to blog - and it has been SUCH A BLAST! What I thought would feel like homework has grown to be my favorite hobby!

SO I have a dilemma. My ideal audience for this blog should be the people that will most likely buy my book (and, as the professor pointed out, my current blog is directed toward aspiring writers who may buy my book out of support but will most likely not be fans of my work). So I have a choice here with a few different options.

1. Continue the blog as I have been, because I really really like what I've been writing about and it has been incredibly satisfying and FUN. BUT, I may not gain much of a relevant audience, amounting to not a whole lot of help to my author platform.

2. Completely revamp the blog, focusing on completely different topics. This is great advice and I do really appreciate it...but....it just sounds soooo boring to me. I devoted a couple of hours to research on the subject though. It DOES make sense, it is very good advice, and I'm at least going to consider it.

So, if I'm a teen who loves to read, what blogs am I looking at? I personally was a teen who loved to read and I didn't really look at blogs. BUT IF I DID, I think one of them would have been a book review site of YA novels. I wasn't really interested in makeup advice or boy advice (some stuff you just have to experience - not read about). I was also really interested in my future - college, financial aid, what careers make good money, how to invest my money, etc. But I'm going to take a shot in the dark and ASSUME (I know, I know) that other teen girls will not be as interested in this.

That's basically my dilemma, do I write about things that I'm not passionate about only to build a platform? If I did, would I be able to pull it off as genuine? Would I still be as committed to this if I didn't like, and was not particularly interested in, what I was writing about? I'm not so sure...

Part of the advice the professor gave me was to include parents and librarians (and the like) in my ideal audience. So what do I need to write about to interest parents and librarians? Not that the group of people is completely foreign to me. I mean, I have parents. And I've...met librarians. I'm picturing my dad picking books out for me, he generally picked books out that he found interesting. No research, just what he found in the bookstore that sounded interesting. So I don't really have any good examples of what parents look for when they're buying their teens books.

Furthermore, I looked at some of the blogs of my favorite (and also some lesser known) YA authors. They blog mainly about new events around their books. I could see doing this once I actually accomplished anything with my books, but (like my blog states), I'm just learning the ropes over here, I am years away from even hoping to be published!

3. Compromise. I need to find a way to do what I love and also build a relevant platform. I'm not sure if this is the right decision or not, but I am going to try and juggle both. I really love writing about learning how to write and learning how to blog. To reach out to my ideal audience, though, I will write short stories appropriate for young adults and book reviews on mostly YA novels.

I'm not sure if I put enough thought into this, or if it appears that I'm doing this because I don't want to put the work in to find out what is important to teens. But it feel right, so I'm going to do it.

And then if it doesn't work out, I'm going to bitch and whine and complain that no one told me it would fail...