Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

What Problems Are They Facing?

When you understand the core challenges faced by your reader base, you can easily draw people to your company simply by helping them solve their problems.

For example, when I started SocialMediaExaminer.com, I knew that marketers were struggling to figure out how to use the nonintuitive social media tools of the day. I also knew that the constant innovation among social media sites made it hard for people to keep up with the changes.

Armed with this knowledge, I developed content that met the immediate needs of my base.

What problems is your reader base facing? Can you help them solve some of their issues?

By the way, if you're not sure what your readers' problems are, why not simply ask them? A simple survey can go a long way toward rounding out a great profile.

Go back to your description of your base and write down a list of their problems.

What's the Nature of the People I Want to Reach?

This is a very important question to ask. Are these people very busy? Are they actively seeking new ideas?

If they're busy, you're going to have to get to the point rapidly with your content—and you're going to have to respect their lack of time. If they're actively seeking new ideas, it means your reader base is going to want richer content.

Here's another question you might want to ask: “Are these people naturally skeptical?” If your base is full of skeptics, you're going to need to try to provide more evidence in your content. Skeptics need proof. This means ...