Personas should be created as early as possible in the content development process, and kept in mind as you develop and refine your content. If you have a project team, involve everyone on the team in developing personas, so everyone can refer to them as the content and structure are developed.

You can create personas just by thinking about the possible characteristics of your audiences, but it is better to back up your personas with data. You can look at:

• information from existing user resources, such as mailing lists and blog subscribers

• statistics from sources such as Alexa and Google Analytics (site traffic, specific keywords)

• qualitative assessments of sites such as forum discussions on relevant topics (seeing what topics were popular and sparked discussion)

• gathering information about your audiences using surveys, social media and focus groups.

Personas should encompass any characteristics that would inform the reader’s relationship with the content. Some details are relevant in some contexts but not others (eg a persona for exercise-related content would have a certain level of fitness, but this would not be relevant for financial advice).

Just as for audience profiles, you should look for:

• demographic information – what are your reader’s life circumstances (eg age, gender, income, geographic location, cultural environment, ethnicity, language background, literacy level, educational level)?

• psychographic information – what are your reader’s aspirations and priorities (eg personal and career goals, values, interests, lifestyle choices)?

• behavioural information – how might your reader prefer to engage with your content, including format, length, frequency, static versus interactive, time of day, location and preferred sources (eg experts, data, personal anecdotes)? What technological constraints must be considered? How will the reader be likely to find, use and share the information? What kind of audience is your reader: primary (receives the information directly) or secondary (receives the information through someone else)?

It is a good idea to create more than 1 persona to capture the variety of audiences for your content. Multiple personas allow you to design your content for readers with varying requirements, backgrounds and behaviours. It is more useful to have several simple personas with different needs than to have a single more complex persona covering several needs.

It is also a good idea to include people with special needs when you are creating your personas, to ensure that you meet their needs (see Audiences with special needs for more information):