A Content Writer’s Audience

Julia decided one day to be a content writer.  She thinks she can write.  She was once a winner in a national press conference contest when she was in high school.  Also, she has less than a thousand friends on Facebook, and she already has a few Twitter followers.

You might be thinking, “She already has an audience,” or “Well, she has the credentials.”  So it would seem but no.

A lot of people can write and maybe, that includes you.  Writing always matters as doing it right and good. Is content writing merely about writing well?

You might be thinking again, “That’s all there is to it! What more could it be?”  There is more to this than meets the eye. 

The Audience

In Frankie Madden’s Writing for the Web, she mentioned, “As a good content author, you shouldn’t assume the way you think is the way your readers think.”

Quite an eye-opener, isn’t it? Most of us, if not all, think that we deserve that special treatment because we write well. Being a content writer is not parallel to entitlement.  You need to earn the attention that your audience gives every day as Sonia Simone of Copyblogger puts it.

So who is the audience?

Anybody can be your audience based on the product or service you offer.  Your audience can be a male or a female. They can be from your neighborhood.  They can have a different culture, or they can be a high school drop-out.  They may have access to the internet or has a disability.

It can be anybody.  The good news is you can create that persona.

As the content writer and the voice of an organization, you have that responsibility to create that persona.  You have to understand who plans to buy what you offer, or who is a potential buyer, or who needs a solution to a problem, probably a person who heard from a Facebook user what a particular website is offering that can solve that audience’s problem.

Did I mention ‘problem’? Yes.  You need to be able to find solutions to particular problems.  Your audience skims through the internet with that intention to solve a problem, however trivial it may seem to you.  They will be delighted to find a gem among the many solutions.

Back to Julia. She can learn the skills to become a content writer and she has to know her audience first.