Ep#4-Who is my reader?

Welcome to the Writer Groupie podcast. I’m Kim Smith the writing guru bringing you discussions, insights, and insider details on how to plan, produce, promote and profit as a writer.

Reading
my readerpedrosimoes7 / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

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SHOW NOTES

Who is my reader?

While I’m having my morning coffee, I read a fabulous article from Copyblogger about how to create better blog posts. And by the way, if you are not following Copyblogger, you should be. So much wonderful information on that site to help us all be better bloggers. And if you don’t have a blog, get one for free at Blogger, and WordPress.com.

Back to my ruminating.

The article stressed that we need to know who is reading our blog. How can we write post after post for a faceless audience and ever expect to become a site anyone wants to follow?

So we need to figure out who we are writing for.

Copyblogger suggests focusing on one person. Just one. That one special person who reads what we write. That person who loves our informative, constant stream of blog posts daily, weekly, monthly. The one who subscribes to our newsletter, our site so that they get the emails to let them know it’s been updated.

This idea of writing to ONE reader, clicked. I began to seriously consider my blog posts and realized I didn’t have a clue as to who I was writing for. So because I am a pretty visual person, and images motivate me, I began this ‘find your reader’ journey at iStockphoto.

I searched for a picture that resonated with who I perceived my actual reader to look like. By doing this, I discovered she is a female, between 20-30 years old, and a huge reader. She loves books, loves to read anything, fantasy, romance, mystery. And she aspires to write. Maybe she already started one-or has outlined one. I found her image on the photo site and studied her until she was engraved on my mind. I asked her about her reading habits, what she liked, what kind of posts made her tap her chin and say HM.

And this exercise in visualizing and questioning has really changed how I will approach blogging in the future.

So let me say, thanks. Thanks to this special follower for being so approachable during this experiment. And I hope you will try this out for your own blog. I think my reader might have a blog too. She blogs, she reads, she writes, she wears blue jeans and flip flops and string bracelets. She might have a kid or two. And she is a HUGE dreamer. And she loves books. Did I tell you that?

And so it goes…

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