Engaging Your Audience – Part Five – Keeping and Growing Your Audience

Engaging Your Audience – Part Five – Keeping and Growing Your Audience

Conflict #4: How do I keep them coming back?

The answers are brief, but the practice is essential.

1. Identify your Audience 
2. Stay Productive (Substance) 
3. Keep Relevant (Style) 

Identify your Audience.

Who are you working for? If you don't know, stop what you're doing and figure it out. There should be a clear image in your mind of the type of person you need to reach. They're out there, whoever they are, but you need to know before you waste days (years?) of energy and hundreds (thousands?) of dollars reaching them. Teachers have an easier time with this, since their audience is generated for them each year. Writers should do a quick internet search of your genre. Find threads and forums and figure out what needs are not being currently met.


Stay Productive.

Audiences are insatiable. They crave entertainment and information and if you are not continually producing, then they will move on to a new source. Don't take this personally. The audience certainly doesn't.

Imagine yourself an educator who attempts to teach the same lesson day after day or a writer who posts the same blog verbatim. Your audience would (and should) drop you in an instant.

Teachers are repeatedly tested professionals, who are forced to produce something new each day under threat of student riots and the supervision of curricular demands. By design, this focuses instructional development and improves the delivery of content.

Writers aren't so rigidly structured. As a rule, writers should blog between books. Not only does this keep you working until a new book idea develops, it helps maintain good writing habits.


Keep Relevant.

Social media is critical. Marketing yourself poorly is almost as bad as not having anything to promote.

This is the second-most important skill-set of any self-published writer. Authors need a website and a smattering of accounts on Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, Pinterest, or Linkedin. Without these steps, your work may never get discovered.

Unfortunately, teachers are insulated in a system that doesn't require them to be relevant. That doesn't mean that many pioneers haven't taken it up on themselves to do so anyway. www.Edmodo.com is the classroom's Facebook. This username and password protected site allows for discussion and assignment posting as well as a quiz generator, gradebook, and class calendar. It is the current primary and secondary school answer to the university-level site, Blackboard.


Final Thoughts.

Audiences are the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins. Since we breathe and pump blood on reflex, we often forget how critical these systems are to our survival until they are threatened. Consider your audience carefully or risk throttling your efforts before they have a chance to thrive.