Want Killer Stats…? Then Know Your Audience

If you write for yourself, your stats are doomed. Write for your audience, however, the sky’s the limit.

Last week I submitted an article to Coffee Times that was a considerable risk.

There was nothing wrong with the structure or composition of the article. It was well-written and (to me) very interesting with a video embedded and a few neat photos.

The problem was this:

It was about bagpipes.

And guess how many people on Medium are interested in bagpipes?

You guessed it, not many. The tag for bagpipes in Medium has less than ten members.

Here’s the bagpiping article link for those of you who are interested:

https://readmedium.com/how-to-improve-your-mental-health-playing-the-bagpipes-a20d45b78da0

The problem

So, here’s a problem: you have an article you have poured your heart and soul into, and you find fascinating, but the likelihood is that no-one else does.

What’s going to happen to your piece? Well, I can practically guarantee you that, even if it’s written like Shakespeare, it’s going to sink without trace.

You will sit there with your head in your hands wondering why the world hasn’t appreciated the brilliance of your writing.

The problem is that it is crucial you write for your audience.

Ayodeji Awosika emphasises in his Medium Blogging Course that no-one wants to hear your musings on your life and your stream of consciousness verbiage about how you have achieved this or that against the adversities in your life. At least, not until you have learned to structure it in a particular way.

Instead, what you must do is write for an audience, even if it is an audience within a niche.

When I heard that, I immediately experimented and wrote a couple of pieces about my cats and submitted them to Medium publications called Catness and Petness. To my surprise they did quite well.

Here’s a link to the one that was published in Catness:

https://readmedium.com/why-i-dare-to-adore-my-cats-99edf507b777

Indeed, speaking against my argument, even my bagpiping article did okay eventually, but that was mostly thanks to a shout out by Ashley in the Coffee Times Entertainment column.

Defining your audience

But here’s another problem.

How do you know who your audience is?

Well, there are a number of ways to determine that:

• Define your niches with reference to the Medium tags
• Read a lot around your niches taking particular note of effective headlines and the nature and structure of content
• Visualise your audience and what you think they might want to read and how they are likely to be reading it.

Visualisation is a particularly powerful tool that I developed as a screenwriter.

When writing screenplays it’s fundamental that you play out and project the movie you are writing visually in your mind. In the same way, you can visualise what your audience wants, create an avatar who is a typical member of your audience, and imagine them lapping up your content.

The problem with my bagpiping piece was that I couldn’t really imagine the typical readership of that article fitting within my typical Medium audience avatar. It’s a miracle, then, the article did even as well as it did.

Final thoughts

Know your audience and give yourself a head start.

Once you’ve established yourself you can lean towards some of those more esoteric pieces.

Stick to the game plan, and the game plan will look after you.