(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Writing is a tricky business. It’s an incredibly solitary activity that generates an inherently social finished product. In fact, you can fairly judge any given piece of writing by how well it performs socially.

It doesn’t matter how great the ideas are, how perfect the rhetorical structure or how clever the turns of phrase. Nothing you write matters until someone reads it, and it only matters inasmuch as your readers understand it.

To a lot of writers, especially creative writers, that aspect of writing seems deeply unfair. To all of us bloggers, though, it should make perfect sense. From day one, we’re writing to establish connections with our audience.

Connecting with Readers

Those connections don’t happen by accident. Reaching a reader requires a process called Audience Analysis. Some of us do it unconsciously, in the background. Many of us do it once, when we first decide to start a blog, and then leave it at that.

If you want to build your blog, though — if you want to improve the quality of your content and enhance the social aspect of your site — you should make Audience Analysis a conscious process. Make it a part of every blog post you write.

What is Audience Analysis? It’s thinking like a reader in your audience– like your reader, to be more precise. Take off your writing hat, and think about what you have to say from your audience’s perspective.

Which parts are going to be difficult? Which parts are going to be dull? How technical should the information be? How long should a post be? There’s no such thing as a “right answer” to those questions, because they all depend deeply on exactly who it is you’re writing to.

Getting to Know Your Audience

Creative writers have a handy trick for keeping Audience Analysis at the front of our minds without getting bogged down in checklists and tedious research. We construct an imaginary friend called the Ideal Reader.

You can read all about the Ideal Reader at Unstressed Syllables, but in short it’s a representation of the perfect audience for whatever it is you’re writing. Think of the kind of people you’re trying to reach with your blog, and make up the absolute dream reader.

And don’t just think, “My dream reader.” Get to know that person. Fill in all the details, and take the time to write it right.

That’s where the Audience Analysis comes in. Is your Ideal Reader male or female? How old is your Ideal Reader? How educated is your Ideal Reader? Is your Ideal Reader browsing the web for entertainment, or searching for specific information? Does your Ideal Reader want to make a new friend, or get in and get out, clean and easy?

Does your imaginary friend follow Twitter? What about Facebook? Does he or she shop for web services and pore over product reviews?

Like I said, many of those are things you considered back when you first launched your website, but how often do you consider them when you sit down to write a post?

Do it now, if only just once more. Think about your current audience, and the audience you desire. Find the perfect target, somewhere in the midst of them all.

Writing to an Ideal Reader

When that’s done, you’re finished writing blind. Forever. From now on, every post you write is a private message from you to your Ideal Writer.

Explain the things he would stumble over. Say things in ways that would make her grin in delight or nod in agreement.

Connect, one-on-one, with your imaginary friend every time you write.

You will be amazed to discover how many real people respond.

Go ahead and start now. Go back to the questions I asked above, and give a gut-reaction answer. Tell us in the comments who you think your Ideal Reader is. Maybe you’ll find some resonance with the other commenters here.

If nothing else, describing your audience on paper often makes it a lot easier for you to spot strengths and weaknesses, and it’ll get you moving in the right direction.

Tell us about your ideal reader!

Aaron Pogue is the creator of Unstressed Syllables, a general writing advice site featuring interesting, useful articles on topics ranging from business to storytelling. His decades of experience in creative and technical writing makes good writing easy for you.

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

When I was a kid, we lived on a little farm that my parents had bought as a hobby project. We had a couple acres of garden, a coop full of chickens, some geese and ducks, and always a herd of dumb-ass sheep.

I remember a chilly Saturday morning when I was nine or ten. Dad sent my sisters and me out to gather firewood, while he turned the sheep loose to graze for an hour or so. I picked my way among the trees, following some of my favorite paths, looking for branches small enough that I could drag, but large enough to be worth bringing back up the hill to our house.

Then a scream split the still morning, and right behind it shouts of fear. I sprinted up the hill, looking for the source of the cries, and spotted my sisters dodging among the trees at a full sprint, running for their lives from the biggest, meanest, nastiest ram you’ve ever heard of. We all hated that animal.

It had fire in its eyes, too, and smoke pouring from its nostrils. My older sister scampered up onto a low-hanging limb and heaved my younger sister up after her, but he wasn’t going to give up so easily. The beast hesitated for a moment, then charged at full speed and slammed its head against the trunk of the tree they were in. The whole tree shuddered, their branch creaking ominously, and my sisters screamed.

That animal was mean, and for whatever reason it had murder in its eyes. It was fast, and strong, and probably weighed twice as much as I did, but it was trying to kill my sisters. I had a club in my hand — three feet of weathered maple that I hadn’t dropped on my sprint uphill — and I had to do something. I set my jaw, tightened my grip on that pitiful branch, and took a step forward to deal with the monster.

What Stories Are

Last time we spoke, I told you to figure out a standard blog post structure that will work for you. I told you about mine, too, which always starts with a story.

I’m a storyteller, so that’s pretty natural for me. It’s a really effective blogging tool, because people respond powerfully to stories. There’s something about the traditional story arc, something about conflict and climax and resolution that just appeals to readers on a primal level.

Why Stories Work

At the most basic level, interesting conflict happens when a character’s life gets disrupted, and story grows out of the character’s efforts to resolve that disruption and get back to normal. There’s something deep in human nature that compels us to connect with characters, to sympathize with a protagonist’s frustrations and cheer him on in his attempts at resolution.

In other words, stories engage readers. If you’re writing a blog that’s all technical product reviews or programming best practices (or boring ol’ writing advice), it can be awfully difficult to engage readers with that information — even if it’s valuable information that your readers want.

How Stories Help

Incorporating stories into your blog helps you to catch your readers’ attention. It also gives you a chance to establish your voice, to differentiate yourself from all the other people out there repeating the same technical information you are.

It doesn’t need to be creative writing. Forget about fiction. Tell the story of your experience with a product — not just its features and why you liked it, but the whole story of the afternoon  you spent trying it out. If you’re offering a valuable time-saving tip, tell the story of the time you learned that trick (or, better yet, the time before you learned that trick when you wasted a whole weekend because you didn’t yet know it).

A good story doesn’t just catch your readers’ attention, it sticks in their minds. It becomes an anchor, a trigger in the memory that you’ve personally connected to the message you had to offer. Think about that next time you see a picture of a sheep, or spot a child dangling from a low-hanging branch.

Oh, I left that on a bit of a cliffhanger, didn’t I? Well, long story short…I ended up in the tree, too, all three of us certain we were going to die, until Dad finally showed up to save us all.

Do you have any stories like that you could share? Give it a practice. Tell a tale in the comments. If you can connect it to your blog somehow, you might even end up with a permanent advertisement hiding in the memories of everyone reading this story. How’s that for a productive assignment?

Aaron Pogue is the creator of Unstressed Syllables, a general writing advice site featuring interesting, useful articles on topics ranging from business to storytelling. His decades of experience in creative and technical writing makes good writing easy for you.