Writing For Your Reader
by Sheryl Sisk
You’ll hear a lot about “writing for your readers” if you do any digging around in blogging resources and how-to guides. What does this mean, exactly? I guess everyone might have their own ideas but here’s what it means to me:
- First and foremost: knowing who your audience is. If you can’t define the “target” reader for your blog right now, in one sentence, then you need to get to work figuring that out. Use metrics, use surveys, use informal tools like following comment links back to figure out who’s reading your blog.
- Next: knowing why that audience is reading your blog. What are they looking for? Do they want to hear your original thoughts on touchy subjects? Do they prefer how-to posts that lay out the steps to achieve a particular task? Are they revved up by roundups? Figure it out from your stats.
- Keep your posts relevant, timely, and responsive to the reader’s needs. You know now who they are and what they want. Give it to them! Make sure your posts communicate clearly (i.e., don’t ramble off into other topics), are succinct and well-written (i.e., make sure carefree approaches to grammar and spelling don’t get in the way of the message), and are based on the things your readers want to know.
A great tool for figuring out what your readers want to know: ask them! Open up a comment thread and solicit their thoughts. That ought to give you blog fodder for quite some time to come.
If your readers aren’t commenting (either your traffic isn’t that great yet, or you just can’t get them to speak up), that’s a different problem - and one I’ll address in Thursday’s post.
blogging, writing blog posts, blog tips
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April 24th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
I’m looking forward to Thursday’s article; thank you!