Medium.com – Writing 101: Know your audience Journey Rhodes, November 30, 2023November 30, 2023 Writing 101: Know your audience Journey RhodesWriter, Publisher, Marketing Before beginning to take writing seriously it’s wise to do a little research. Especially if you plan to turn it into a lucrative venture. I am going to break down the steps I have learned along the way in multiple articles. Just reading a checklist doesn’t do the due diligence justice. If you want to do this right, it’s going to take some work.Firstly, (I hate this word tbh) who are you writing to? For your writing to be truly effective, you will need to know your audience. Are they relatable? Can you empathize with them? Do you know their struggle? What can your writing do for them? Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur on Unsplash At the end of the day, readers are consumers and you are the commodity. How can you add value to their life? After all, they are trading pieces of their life to read what you have written. Let it be worth it. I use a visualization technique to get a better idea of who I’m trying to reach. Some may think of masses of people but I paint a picture in my mind of just one person. I truly believe in the power of one. If what I write can benefit one person then I have been successful. Don’t get me wrong, my goal is to reach much bigger audiences, but you get the idea.Speaking of..I’m a little neurospicy..so forgive me for jumping around. If you glean anything helpful from this article, please interact with it so others will come across it as well. Thank you in advance! That was a side stream, back to the river as they say..In my case, my passion is to share my experiences to bring healing to women who’ve had similar life circumstances and obstacles. I’ve learned a lot in my 43 years around the sun. Might as well share it. I close my eyes, I see a woman whose sun-kissed skin tells her story. Her laugh lines created from the joys in life. The furrowed brow of confusion or strain from her dimming eyesight. She has tiny freckles on her cheeks more beautiful than Orion’s belt in the sky. She walks with her head held high and her shoulders back, just as Mama used to bark at her when she was a child. She’s a sight to see as she shimmies across the room.Only she doesn’t know it. She regally carries herself but she also carries with it shame, unworthiness, wounds of abandonment, and pain she’s never sorted through. She sees areas of herself and her life that she wishes could be undone.Perhaps she has opened Pandora’s box of trauma before and sifted through some of the wreckage but soon grew weary from the heaviness of trauma and the demands of life. Maybe she’s only approached her healing journey but hasn’t mustered the courage to take the first step. She’s lonely, very very lonely. Even with those she loves all around her. Her mom groups, her church group, her PTO groups, even so-she is still lonely. She longs for community deeper than the superficial that saves face. She wants to love and be loved. Loved as her true self. The one she’s not sure she knows or loves at all. She is on this journey to find her though. She will be the hero of her own story. She will own her story. She will tell it from the mountain in triumph if she wants to. She is taking back her power. She’s not whitewashing it anymore. She will let it all crumble to the ground if she has to but she refuses to live one more fucking day in this miserable, exhausting existence.But she does.She gets up, wipes her face, fixes the kids breakfast. Kisses the spouse she hasn’t known in 5 years yet sees every day. She goes to work, plays nice, bites her tongue, gets yelled at or touched inappropriately by the boss in passing, she clocks out, gets in her car, sits there to get her five minutes of peace and sanity, gets the kids, goes home, starts dinner and stares into the pot of boiling water wondering yet again if this is all there is.. She courageously decides that she will devour anything and everything on the internet that might help. Thus, she starts her hero’s journey and lands on a page just like this. She feels seen. She feels safe. She feels supported. And so she is..She is me. I know her well.After years of being on road to becoming my best and highest self — I know the way out.Come along with me. I’ll tell you everything I know! Blog Content Creation Published Articles