Yahoo! Style Guide Helps You Research Your Audience

You can be excellent at SEO and have all the search engines giving your articles a high rank, but it won't do you any good if nobody wants to read it! The Yahoo! Style Guide has excellent tips in regards to researching your audience - after all, these are the people who are going to read your articles.

The Yahoo! Style Guide suggests getting qualitative and quantitative information to create a profile of your target user. This is incredibly useful when you sit down to write. Quantitative information is the demographic information. If you know your audience is comprised of teen girls who love teen movies, you probably wouldn't want to write your article like it's an English lit paper - it would turn off your target audience. Qualititative information is the answer to why people are reading what you write. What is it that you offer to people that makes them want to come to you?

This is the information I use when I sit down to write. I think about who my audience is, and what it is they'll get out of what I have to offer them. If I wish to inform my audience about an important issue, I'm probably not going to use the same kind style as I would to entertain them, for example. If my audience were recent grad students, I might not write as if they were still in high school. Knowing your audience and their purpose can be extremely helpful in writing, and the tips for identifying your audience found in the Yahoo! Style Guide are invaluable.

Source:

Writing for the Web - Research Your Audience. Yahoo! Style Guide