Do you know who your ideal visitor is?

It’s important to be clear about just who your audience is by building a profile of your average user or visitor. One of the easiest ways to do this is to survey them. You could offer a bribe and in return they fill-in a simple questionnaire based form.

There are internet-based survey sites to help you achieve this. Survey sites, such as askdatabase and survey monkey are both excellent tools. They collect, collate and present the data to you in an easy to read format.

But what do you want to know about your visitors? Well here are some questions you need to ask,

• Why do people come to your site?
• Are they looking for information, downloads, links?
• How easy is it to find what they want on your site
• What sites do they visit regularly?
• Why would a visitor want to return to your site?
• What kind of computer, browser, internet connection do they use?
• What is their sex, occupation, income group

You will notice that some of these questions mean you must have a site already. So what if you haven’t built it yet? You could set up a simple google adwords campaign and pay for visitors, bribe them by giving away a free report that might be of interest and then direct them to your form questionnaire.

Then once you have some data, create a profile of your ideal visitor. This could include demographic data or simply their likes, dislikes, problems and desires. You can then visualise, in your mind’s eye, the person you are designing, writing or building your website for.

And they will thank you for this essential research by coming back to visit, time and time again, because your site has just what they are looking for.