Knowing Your Audience

Whether you’re writing a book, running a blog like this one, or uploading to YouTube, it’s important to know your target audience.

Your target audience is whoever is interested in your content. So, this is why I have two separate blog pages on my site. One to help self-published authors, and one to blog about my books and my personal life.

I know that my target audience for this blog and my personal blog are not the same.

It’s important to know your target audience for a number of reasons ranging from how you focus your promotion efforts to the content of your projects to the word usage, all the way down to the time you post on your social media.

You can’t just assume your work is perfect for everyone because the truth is, it’s not. Not everyone likes queer YA fantasy, and I know that. So, for my next few books, my target audience is people who enjoy queer YA fantasy.

When you know your audience, it makes it much easier to find them. You can’t exactly find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

But, knowing what I know about my particular audience means that I can use hashtags related to my subject matter. I can research the number of people who read that genre, their age, their demographics. And, I can post accordingly.

So, how can you determine your target audience?

If you’re running a blog, it’s as simple as, “who do I think will read this?”

If you’re writing a book, your target audience is those who read your genre. Which helps greatly if you’ve determined a sub genre.

If you’re running a YT channel, well, that one can be more complicated unless you’re focusing on a certain niche. Which, up until now, I’ve not really done.

Once you know your target audience, what do you do about it?

Grow it. Spend an hour a day finding out what your audience is interested in, and post accordingly. This takes getting to know them, not just growing follower numbers. You want a genuine connection with your audience, otherwise there’s no point.

100 genuine connections are much better than 10,000 random numbers.

Ask them questions. Actually respond. Be genuine. When they comment, comment back.

Don’t be afraid to follow back the people you’re interested in getting to know, and avoid the follow/unfollow technique as this is not only rude, but a terrible way to make genuine connections.

What have you learned about your target audience lately?