“Make it for your audience’s audience.”

How to create things that help themselves get shared.

Eventually, if you write enough copy—or if you spend enough time wondering why people don’t read the copy that you’ve written, or notice that some copy you’ve written gets shared while other copy languishes silently, unloved and alone—you’ll come to this conclusion:

Your job is not to write for an audience. Your job is to write for your audience’s audience.

In other words, to speak through the people who read what you write and address those people’s friends.

This may seem like publishing pablum, or consultant woo woo, or an invitation to write clickbaity crap that is widely shared and ultimately regrettable — like that one Barenaked Ladies song, or herpes.

But, happily: no.

Writing for your audience’s audience is like following through on your swing, or like striking through the cue. It’s placing your ultimate intent beyond your immediate goal.

It’s creating a thing that helps itself get shared.

Done correctly, writing for your audience’s audience will get you shares, or retweets, or forwards to a friend, or whatever KPI you’re belaboring beneath the eye-dryingly drab halogen lights of your office. (Get a lamp.)