Finding your Audience (wherever they are)
Bringing in an audience remains a chunk of what writers need to do to succeed. Finding your audience where they live and read – rather than expecting them all to find you – is another new task for the entrepreneurial journalist.
“Audience,” here, refers to members of the community who read, respond to, or otherwise interact with your work; How do you get yourself in front of the people who are likely to participate in what you’re doing?
Syndication is one proven model: having the piece you’ve written for Publication X also appear in Pub Y and Pub Z is additional exposure. Publisher and journalist can work out syndication deals.
Becoming your own syndication vehicle – actively searching for and participating in conversations about your topic of interest across the web – is a proven way to get in front of potential audience.
Image by luc legay via Flickr
On True/Slant, Contributors can find who's talking about their Posts by looking for trackbacks in their comments. Contributors can also see who's linking to them from their account Dashboard.
Participating in those conversations is proven to bolster relationships and build audience.
Audience members can become vehicles of syndication, too, and with wider-reaching and more finely-tuned results than you alone:
- If Jim reads an article on your site
- and shares with his friends on Facebook
- it’s likely that one or more of Jim’s friends are interested in your piece, too
Finding affinities is a central tenet of social networking. Using your networks to help you find your audience – and to help your audience find you – is a huge part of the value of these networks.
Magazine publishers have had a great deal of success finding affinities and marketing to niches. Historically, it’s worked well for themselves, their writers, readers and advertisers. As usual, the web makes doing the same faster, cheaper and easier; publishers and social networks are looking to push this further:
Facebook is looking to get themselves in front of their audience even when that audience isn’t on facebook.com. The New York Times and The Guardian UK are opening themselves up with these ends in mind, too: they’re working to get beyond being a “destination” and get out to where the audience is.
By syndicating their content and their function – discussions, photos, user profiles – beyond their own borders, they’re working to actively find their audience rather than waiting for it to come to them.
We can take this a few steps further:
Think of our “Headline Grabs” – this is an easy way for you to let your audience know what you’ve been reading.
What if you could “carry that Headline Grab around” with you and allowed that “news preference” to interact with your activities across the web? e.g.
- The next time you visited Facebook, that Headline Grab became part of your Live Feed
- Going to Google News with that piece in tow would let Google work to find some other articles that might be of interest
- Going back to the site from which you’d originally grabbed the Headline could let that site show you other work by that author, other stories in that Topic, additional works deemed “relevant” by that publisher
What if members of your audience could opt to do the same with your articles? If your audience could carry a sign saying “I just read [Contributor]’s latest on True/Slant” as they went about the web, their people might become your people.
If it sounds a bit spooky, remember advertisers have been doing this for years without our explicit permission: Ad Networks place “cookies” in our browsers, look through the sites we’ve visited, and work to show us ads they think we’ll click as we browse the web.
As more of our life online moved around with us, we should be able to opt in, grant permission and get some value out of our preferences as consumers and creators of the news.
Making money from the syndication of content and function is a work in progress. Finding affinities and syndicating widely to find your audience, rather than expecting them all to find you, is certainly a part of where the entrepreneurial journalist needs to go.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
The piece missing is here is the financial compensation for all that work and time. When I write here, I’m happy that people find me but I can’t take extra time, after blogging, to go out and find more of them. When I write for print, I await a check and look for the next one. It’s clear and proven and, yes, the audience is ready and waiting. I’m fine with that.
One of the pieces that really does not track well is this notion we go out looking for an audience of people we think or hope might like our writing or wit or insights. Just because I write on women, often, doesn’t make me confidently assume that readers of Jezebel or Feministing will like my take on things. In fact, I doubt it. My sense is that people come to, and return to, bloggers for their tone/perspective as much as their content.
Whatever we “need to do” in this world is not, for the moment, that which also allows us to meet our current financial commitments.
Thanks, Caitlin.
Making money from the work and time spent building your audience is a work in progress. It’s like investing in Sales – if you’re looking to expand your business, you need to put up the resources, and there’s no guarantee of direct return on that investment.
Like papal or royal patronage, the part of the model where journalists (or musicians, photographers and other artists and craftspeople) can write a piece and wait for the check is fading: it won’t leave completely or all at once, but the openings are further between and the paychecks are getting smaller.
There’s a recent WSJ piece about musicians partaking the CMJ festival. Where previously musician participants looked for pay dirt in a major-label signing, that’s now just part of their plan. Working musicians need to create an act worth seeing, they need to promote and market themselves, they need merchandising. They no longer look to major labels to provide all this for them because the labels can’t and won’t.
The days of Annie Liebovitz’ $5MM / annum contracts with Condé Nast are no more.
These folks have to go out, find their audience and make their business happen if they’re looking to grow and prosper.
They needn’t do it all themselves – we’re doing great work here finding outlets and promotional opportunities for the work of our Contributors. That’s part of the equation, not the sum total – the rest is the “entrepreneurial” part.
In response to another comment. See in context »