subject: Article Marketing Success: Learning To Write For A Real Audience [print this page] How do you feel about writing for an audience of people who you will probably never meet in person? For a lot of people who write articles for article marketing, it can be a little disorienting.
Nowadays, we're rather used to communicating through the written word, via email, skype, texting, etc. Even though we feel comfortable communicating in a non face-to-face manner, it doesn't mean that we are truly grasping that this person on the other end of our email is a living breathing human being. As easy as it is to connect technologically, it is that much harder to make a real personal connection when communicating with words with an unseen person.
There are all sorts of stumbling blocks to writing for real people online. Since you're marketing your website, you've probably learned that you're trying to get the attention of search engines. You may also have learned to think of your potential customers as your "target readers" or "target audience".
It's important to know who you're writing for, what Google is looking for when it "sees" your articles, and also the types of things that your overall audience wants to learn from your articles, but it's even more important to keep in mind that individual people will be reading your articles.
How can you accomplish this?
I want you to think about authors who write hard copy books--you know, the types of books that you find in your neighborhood bookstore.
These professional authors have the same writing situation as you:
They have a demographic of people that they write for, they may never (or rarely) get to meet any of their readers in person, and they also have a publisher who is not necessarily in their target demographic who they need to please as well.
How do these authors manage to create books that when we read them make us feel as if they were written just for us?
Have you ever felt that before? I have! Many times as I'm reading a good book I feel as if I know the characters and perhaps would even like to know the author of the book. Somehow, the author is able to make a connection with me, even though he or she has never met me.
Here are some tricks for learning to do that with your free reprint articles:
1 - Write for one person, instead of for a general target market or for a search engine.
This person could be someone you've met in real life who asked you some compelling questions about your niche. This person may also be one of your customers who you communicated with about a topic in your niche. Consider writing an article that simply answers a question that one person brought to you, and write the article as if you were just writing for that one person.
2 - Imagine the person you're writing for when you're creating your article.
Picture the person's face. If you've been communicating with them via email and have never seen the person's face, come up with some mental image of how the person looks. Imagine how they react to what you're writing. Imagine any questions that they might have about what you've written.
3 - Forget about the search engines (Google, etc).
It's a touchy situation--you know that in order to write articles that will get the most attention in Google that you need to know what your keywords are, and you should incorporate those keywords into your article (in a natural way of course).
When you're first learning to do this, it is hard to think of both Google and this person that you're writing for at the same time. Usually, you'll focus on one at the expense of the other.
If that is the case with you, I would encourage you to determine a topic for your article based on your keyword research, but then to write the article with a specific person in mind (rather than Google). In the course of writing the article on this topic, your keyword phrase(s) should naturally come up without too much effort.
In learning how to write effective and useful articles that engage your readers, it's crucial to remember that you're writing for a real audience. This is a skill that all authors, both online and offline, need to cultivate. Your goal is to have a person read your article and come away thinking, "I feel like that article was written just for me."
