who to write for

write for one person with a specific problem. that answer sounds too small, and that's the trick of it: a post written for one specific person gets found by thousands of people standing in the same spot.

why "everyone" produces nothing

a post aimed at everyone has to explain everything, assume nothing, and upset no one. what comes out reads like an encyclopedia entry, and nobody opens those for fun.

there's a harder problem than boredom. generic answers get served by ai on the results page now, before anyone clicks. the clicks that remain go to writing that sounds like one person talking to someone with the same problem.

the biggest blogs are built on exactly this. on smitten kitchen, deb perelman has cooked and photographed every recipe herself since 2006. her tagline names the reader outright - "fearless cooking from a tiny kitchen in new york city" - and three bestselling cookbooks came out of serving that one cook. julia evans writes for the programmer who finds the "hard" topics scary, says so in her own about page, and that reader turned her zines into a business.

the cheapest way to pick your reader

write for who you were before you learned the thing.

you already know that reader's questions, wrong turns, and half-right vocabulary, because they were yours. no amount of audience research buys that back.

if past-you doesn't fit the subject, borrow one real person: the friend who keeps asking about it, the coworker who wants in. write each post as if only that reader will open it.

describe your reader in one line

before drafting, finish this line and paste it at the top of the draft: this post is for ___, who ___, and wants ___.

• for someone whose houseplants keep dying, who suspects it's the watering, and wants to stop replacing them
• for a freelancer invoicing late every month, who dreads the money conversation, and wants to get paid on time
• for a runner coming back from injury, who fears re-tearing it, and wants a plan that holds

if anyone could fill the blanks, the post is for no one. keep tightening until a stranger could read your first paragraph and think: that's me. delete the line before publishing; it did its job.

use the reader's own words

your reader describes the problem in public every day. spend thirty minutes collecting before you write anything:

• search reddit for the subject, sort by top over the past year, and read the thread titles before anything else. a title is your reader phrasing the problem with nobody watching.
• read the 3-star amazon reviews of the popular books on the subject. a middling review is a list of what the book didn't answer.
• scroll the comments under the biggest youtube videos about it and note which questions keep repeating.
• paste every phrase that sounds like your person into one note, word for word, with the link it came from.

those phrases become titles, first lines, and faq questions - better than anything you'd invent, because they're already in the language your reader searches in. growing an audience without social media works the same places.

a keyword is a reader's question with the punctuation stripped. writing for search and for a person is the same job.

faq

how specific should the audience be?

specific enough that a reader thinks "that's me" in the first paragraph. describe one person well and thousands in the same spot recognize themselves; keep it vague and nobody does.

can a blog have two audiences?

yes, and it doubles the work: every post still gets written to one of them, and the site needs enough structure that both readers find their half. most blogs claiming two audiences serve neither.

do i need a niche?

you need a reader first. the niche is just the label that shows up once the blog clearly serves someone. how to start a blog handles everything after that.

once the reader is chosen, what to write about is the next decision.

more in the notes.