How to Nurture a More Engaged Audience for Your Writing

A more engaged audience will help your career a great deal

It’s hard enough to write an okay article. And it’s heartbreaking when there’s no audience to engage with what you’ve written.

It’s even more disappointing when you’ve given your all — several rounds of editing and proofing, massive promotions, etc. but get no engagement from your audience.

The little random engagement you get can go a long way in getting even more people to read what you’ve written. The wider the reach, the bigger the doors that could open. And the better the benefits.

You’ll stand a higher chance of enjoying this engagement when you have that engaged audience. Yes, random visitors may engage with your work if it speaks to them.

But that’s more likely to happen when your work goes viral on a platform. Short of that, you’ll have to rely on an engaged audience to help make that possible.

Here’s how to nurture that engaged audience.

Show them you respect them as humans first

Your audience is likelier to engage with your content if you show them you respect them as humans first.

While you may be writing from your point of view and expressing your feelings, you want to have the audience in the picture somewhere.

Beyond the solid arguments, little points like formatting, sentence variation, and even mere punctuation show how much thought a writer puts into making things more reader-friendly.

And when your audience picks up these tiny gestures, don’t you think they’re more likely to engage with your writing more often?

Segment your audience and address each with targeted content

It’s hard to prepare a one-size-fits-all message for your audience. You could, but it’ll be doubly hard to get any meaningful engagement from your readers.

Yet, across many media and platforms, writer after writer keeps going that route.

You’ll get more engagement from your audience when you give them content that matters to them. And that’s where it pays to segment your audience.

While it’s much easier to do in emails, it may not be as straightforward with your blog posts. But no challenge is insurmountable.

You can always write words you specifically target at your different audience segments. You can build these segments based on the topics you write about.

If you’ve been writing online for some time, you should start seeing patterns with your audience.

For example, knowing I’m targeting this article at writers, I’ve overtly hinted at it in my headline. When I’m writing for my side-hustling audience, I mention that too.

Hit the emotional high and low points

At the core of content that drives audience engagement is emotion. Where possible, you want your content to flirt with the emotional highs and lows of your audience.

Speak to their fears and frustrations, their ambitions and aspirations. Points along these lines almost always hit close to home.

You can also make things easier when you learn to build anticipation, tell stories, and share experiences in your writings. These things may not always come off, though. But they’re always worth it.

For a long-term strategy, you want to make emotional connection one of your goals.

Ask for the engagement. But give reasons first

You don’t get what you don’t ask for.

Sure, an audience will naturally engage with your work if they love it. Further, your words naturally elicit engagement if you make some points that hit painfully close to home, even if your readers disagree.

But you won’t hurt yourself by explicitly asking for that engagement. A more effective way to ask for that action is by giving reasons you desire that action. Don’t be ashamed to show how it benefits you.

But the best is outlining how it’ll benefit the individual reader who takes the action you require of them.

For example, if you want your audience to share your work on overcoming anxiety, a reason could be: “It’ll help that struggling friend find a painless cure to their anxiety.”

It may not seem like much to you, but how many people want to play the content curator who brings remedies to their struggling friend? A lot.

Building an engaged audience is the dream

When you have an engaged audience, writing will feel less lonely. But nurturing an engaged audience takes time. You’ll have to invest hundreds of hours writing and testing to find just the content your audience loves.

And that’s making no mention of the changing tastes of your audience by the day. None of that should discourage you, though. The effort to nurture an audience will pay you off handsomely in a few years, or sooner for some.

That’s why building an engaged audience should feature in your many writing goals.

If you found what you just read useful, can you support my work by buying me a cup of coffee here? You can also grab my free writing guide here.