A Quick Guide To Creating A User Persona For Your Blog

Do you know your customers well?

One of the biggest mistakes of blog owners is not developing a deep understanding of their customer’s needs.

Designing your content shouldn’t be based on your interests alone. It should be a standard to collate your research and create the patterns in your data and combine it with what we call a user persona.

These user personas add a human touch to your data, which will then allow you to develop your content with a specific purpose for specific people.

You can leverage your understanding of your audience to create a better experience on your blog.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a character that has the qualities based on your current or ideal customers.

User personas are created to mimic how your customers react and feel on certain aspects of your blog.

By knowing the demographics and psychographics of your blog’s data, you can construct various personas to make it easier for you to market your blog.

When you have a blog, you need to be able to determine what kind of content will be the most relevant and useful to your readers. These characters that you build are instrumental in growing and improving your content.

What should a user persona include

A user persona allows you to paint a picture of what your audience looks like. When you create one for your blog, make sure that it answers these questions:

Who are they?
What are their goals?
What hinders them from achieving their goals?
What are their pain points?

Even though your users may be reading the same content you produce, they still have their preferences on specific topics.

If you dive deeper into what their motivations are, every decision you make for your blog will be a little easier.

How to create a user persona

The problem with a lot of personas created is that they are based on irrelevant data or pure guesswork.

Creating a user persona shouldn’t be based on your assumptions on who your audience is.

Instead, it should be based on data-driven research using your blog’s analytics and insights to reveal your reader’s needs and wants.

You may also need multiple layers of sources to understand your audience’s motivations and desires to drive them to your blog instead of your competitor’s.

Usually, making three or more personas to represent your audience is enough, but a few more won’t hurt and can help you cover all the bases of some of the small yet valuable types of audience your blog has.

Here are some easy ways to capture information for your user persona.

Survey questions

Ask your readers questions using a tool like Hotjar. You can easily create a bunch of questions and let your visitors directly answer for you.

You can get a few ideas on what’s the right questions to ask your users here.

Check your site analytics

Google Analytics helps you dive deep into who your audience is and enhances your process of creating a user persona.

You can see various information from location and age to what pages and how long they stay on your site.

Research on social media

Social media sites like Facebook provide data about the followers of your page. Aside from checking out your Facebook Analytics, you can also post and ask your followers specific questions for your research.

After having sufficient data, eliminate what you think is irrelevant and capture only what is best for your business goals. You can even spend time to add a few details to each of your persona’s wants since the data can also give you an insight into each of their perspectives.

The next step after you have your data is to plot them and create a character.

Give them a name and a face as well as add a job that best describes them and the ones that they like to read the most. You can also include the brands they love the most.

Refine all these user personas you created so you’ll be able to quickly digest the information you created that you will use to guide you in improving your blog and content.

Conclusion

Understanding who your blog users are is vital in the success of your blog.

Before you can see success on your blog, you must understand who your audience is and what they like.

Use your user persona as a tool to create your content with a specific target user in mind rather than making one for everyone.

This information will help you control what type of content you will create and what kind of content will be successful.

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Christopher Jan Benitez

Freelance writer for hire by day. Heavy sleeper at night. Dreams of non-existent brass rings. Writer by trade. Pro wrestling fan by choice (It's still real to me, damnit!). Family man all the time.