Ignoring your audience may go against the ‘Know Your Audience’ convention. But when in doubt, make yourself your own target audience. 

Start sharing something you will come back to read and say ‘I wanted to hear this. Would you give yourself bad freelance advice? No. 

Are you following a trend in your industry obsessively? Share it as a reminder to yourself. 

People don’t notice but a good percentage of my posts on LinkedIn (where I have an audience of 36,200+ followers) are just a reminder to myself. I do that on X and doing it on Medium. 

Most of the time I treat LinkedIn as my note-taking app, dumping thoughts from my daily learnings. When I write; “If you come from a low-income country or a poor family, make sure you earn in dollars on the internet”. This is me advising myself. I come from a poor country with a weak currency against the US dollar. You just happened to relate to the message. 

Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, resists “the idea that a writer represents”. “I write for me”, he says. If you hear an echo in your own experience, that’s great. 

But he did not set out to represent society, person, or country.

Let’s hear some wisdom from Lang Leav an Australian novelist and poet. On what to write, she says:

You want to write for the world but you can’t figure out what the world wants. If you write for a trend, it will be over before you can get a word out. If you write for fame and fortune, your work will lack authenticity. So, remember, writing is a journey inward, not out. Write for yourself. That is what the world wants.

Lang Leav

Jordan B. Peterson once said that there’s no such thing as an audience. An argument I explained in this piece; you only talk to one person.

So whenever you find yourself struggling with “topics” to write. Whenever in doubt. Make yourself your own target audience. It works.