Before you start writing your travel guide you should confirm who you’re writing it for. If you try and write for “everyone” you’ll end up pleasing “no-one.” The more specifically you define your target audience, the easier it will be to reach them.

Visualize your audience as an audience of one to make your writing approachable and personable. Then define what you want your book to deliver. The best way to do this is to set a primary objective. This not only helps you meet your audience’s needs, it makes you book a whole lot easier to write.

What Are You Delivering?

One of the steps towards defining your target audience is to confirm what you’re delivering to them. We’re not talking about specifics just yet—but broad strokes.

Here are some possible audience objectives. Do you want to: 

• Amuse them?
• Assure them?
• Encourage them?
• Educate them?
• Entertain them?
• Inspire them?
• Influence them?
• Motivate or stimulate them?

The book you’re planning will probably span multiple objectives, but you should establish at least one primary objective.

After you’ve set your primary objective you can select one or more secondary objectives, and then add clarifying details to support them. This exercise helps solidify the direction of your writing and define the scope of your guide.

TIP: If you feel your writing is meandering without a clear intent, refer back to the objectives to assess what steps you need to do to get it back on track. You will have to decide whether to adjust your content scope, or spend time evaluating and revising your objectives.

To help you with the objective setting for your book, take a look at how I approached the process for one of my travel guides.

The Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide: Turkey’s Aegean Delight

Primary Objective

The primary objective I set for my Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide was to encourage my readers to get off the beaten track by providing them with enough information so they had the confidence to explore on their own.

Secondary Objectives

My secondary objectives were to assure, educate, inspire and motivate.

As you can see, the primary objective is pretty broad. It sets the overall intent of my book and has enough clarity to keep my book focused. But I added clarifying details to make my objective more specific:

• Provide a summary of each destination on the Bodrum Peninsula (encourage and educate them about the local towns and villages within easy reach of their destination).
• Focus on pastimes and activities with information about opening times and prices (encourage them to do these things independently instead of signing up for organized excursions; inspire them to explore the local side of Turkey as opposed to the tourist side;  motivate them to get out and about instead of just bowling up in a resort and shielding themselves from the local culture).
• Provide as much public transport information as possible, with prices, destinations, distances and how the bus routes interconnect (encourage exploration, assure them about the ease of using public transport).
• Summarize local history in an easy to digest format (educate them about the diversity of the area, and inspire them to seek out more locally).
• Include a few off-the-beaten-track restaurants and shops (encourage them to get away from the tourist hubs where everyone speaks English and seek out local cafés and restaurants to get an authentic taste of Turkish cuisines—save money too).
• Provide details about local markets and how to get to them by using local transport (encourage them to visit as many different markets as possible, and educate them on when they occur and how to reach them).

During the writing process I double checked that the depth of information I provided was enough to encourage my readers to get off the beaten path. I used this primary objective as my litmus test, to ensure my content would meet my reader’s needs.

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series

I’m putting the finishing touches on my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide Series, which details a step by step approach for writing and producing your own travel guide. It’s part of a four-part series aimed at helping travel bloggers achieve passive income based on their passions and existing content.

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