Target audience

The first week's assignment asked you to consider your readers – and nutshell your demographic in 25 words or less (a la elevator pitch). As the course continues, keep refining that concept. Whom are you talking to? Are you venting and pondering at friends? Showing peers how to savor life and explore new horizons? Sharing advice on a specific medical condition? Exciting customers about a business?

Pulitzer-winner and famed author-coach Jacqui Banaszynski stresses: "Writing is personal. Direct. It needs to be from me to you." She elaborated at the National Writers Workshop in 2007: "When I'm writing a story, I'm really writing a letter I'm getting in [readers'] heads and thinking, 'what do they need to know to understand this, what education do they need to understand the moment of emotion?'" .

As a newspaper reporter, Banaszynski went down to the circulation department and picked up a handful of reader profiles. "I matched them to people in my life. I put pictures of them in my cubicle. My five people kept me honest, when I got too involved with my sources or too in love with my own prose."

Blogging is no different. Anyone may stumble across your open letters to the world, but they will only resonate for some. Make them sing, shimmy and play jazz for that cohort.

Know your readers. Maybe even befriend them – or at least interact via comments. Make your blog a conversation, not a monologue, and its chance of success will soar.