Defining Your Target Audience
The very first step you should take prior to designing any content or even the layout of your website is to figure out what your target audience is. It sounds like a simple thing to do doesn’t it? Not always. There are mountains of information out there to sift through on demographics that visit certain types of websites and a site owner often jumps to conclusions about who will be interested in a particular subject without doing any research at all. If you take the time and do the work to define your target audience it will help you build the foundation of your website accurately and give your site a better chance at success.
Most websites are cookie cutter built for a broad audience of visitors instead of being developed in a way that best suits your taget audience. While it might be appealing to develop a catch all site that works for eveyone, most often you will fail to build loyalty in your users. Loyalty is a true key to success, these users not only return to your website but they also tend to recomend your site to others, link to you, and share things they find on your site via social media. So before you grab a standard template and add some cool graphics to it take some time to find out who you are targeting and what other successful sites that cater to that demographic do.
A great way to find out what sort of audience to target is to take a look at some competitors, successful and non-successful, and check their Alexa statistics. This will show you the core demographics of these sites, how often they bounce, and the keywords that bring most visitors to their site. Compare what each does and try to find common themes on successful sites that lesser sites are missing and improve upon it.
