It’s like I tell my husband: they’re the three little words every woman loves to hear. They are, of course…
“You were right.”
I read this great article yesterday, and I was like, whaddya know:
- SEO loopholes don’t work, good content does, so…
- You need to know who your audience/market is and
- Meet their needs with your content, and
- A persona will help you do this.
Which is pretty much everything I’ve been talking about for the past year, so let me give you a crash course on how to do these things in, oh… about 200 words.
SEO
SEO is not almighty, and it’s not static. It evolves, and its evolution is tied to delivering quality content to the people who search for it. Some massively popular blogs carry not a hint of SEO. I’m not saying don’t do it; I’m saying content first, SEO later.
AUDIENCE
So you don’t know who your audience is – OK. Don’t know who your audienceshould be? Not OK. Once you define who your audience should be, and you write for them, the content will attract the people you want, and the people who aren’t a fit will fall away. It is all part of the Circle of [Content] Life.
NEEDS
The easiest way to find out your audience’s needs is to listen to them. You can listen in three ways:
1) Direct feedback (shoutout to those of you who email me and reply to my blogs – thanks, guys!).
2) Listening to people’s concerns, either on the Internet, or real 3-D life.
3) Your numbers: what do the analytics say about your content? What performs well, and not so well?
PERSONA
Oh, hey, this one’s easy: I wrote a rather awesome white paper on this. If you don’t yet have a copy of The Secret to Writing Marketing Copy (and Everything Else), get on it, and I will set you up.
It isn’t rocket science, it’s connection. Sure: connection takes some effort, but making the effort sends a very clear message to your audience. It says, “You’re worth it.” And if you don’t think that an audience will respond to a “You’re worth it” message, you might as well go back to digging for loopholes.