Archive for November, 2008

Don’t know what content to serve? Start with Persona

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

I’ve been experimenting with a site that I created a while back.  My current goal is to study how to drive more traffic to the site.  In my quest to do this, I’ve been facing problems specifically in the area of what content to serve such that existing readers will be interested to stay on and new readers will be interested to join.

I’ve asked the readers themselves about what they want or need.  This results in several suggestions which are quite good and will be implemented soon.  However, the number of suggestions is not nearly enough and I need more.

Why the problem with finding good content to deliver ? After a little introspection, I think my problem stems from the fact that I’m not clear who my target audience is, my target persona. In order to be clear about what content you should deliver, the first thing you have to do is to define what persona you are after. In hindsight, this seems obvious.  However, it didn’t click until recently.

Persona for me means a representation of a particular segment of a market.  Thus, after doing your segmentation with whatever method, you would then define the persona.  You would make this representation come alive by giving it a name, a somewhat detailed description of what they do, where they live, what habits they have, etc.

This step of defining persona is crucial before you even think about what content to serve because different personas require different things and the content should be tailored to your target personas.  Once the target personas (I think it is possible to have more than one target personas) are defined, then it should be a lot easier to think about what they value and thus to think about what content to serve them.

Time for me to get going on my personas!

How Traffic Jam Forms For No Apparent Reasons

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

In the countless of hours that we’ve been stuck in traffic jams, have you ever got the funny feeling that there is really no reasons for a lot of the traffic jams that we had to suffer through ? You’d slow to a crawl at some point on the road and after cursing your way through the jam, it suddenly disappears.  What happened ?

Apparently traffic jams can be created out of thin air, and I presume this is what happen most of the time:  Check out this video I found on YouTube. (more…)

Your Messenger Buddy can steal your password !

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

Always think twice or three or four times before giving out your password anytime you visit a site through a link given to you from any type of source, be it email, messenger, sms, or anything.

I recently received an instant message from one of my messenger buddies asking me to check out some pictures… (duh… this should’ve been clue #1).  I would normally be extra cautious when I get these kinds of messages through emails. This time, however, the message comes from an instant message from a messenger buddy and I didn’t know you could get phished this way.

I didn’t think twice and clicked on the link.  (more…)

Going Full Mac (Part 1)

Sunday, November 16th, 2008
Switch to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com

Crossing over to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com)

With the release of the new MacBook, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go all mac.  I wasn’t sure that all the things that I used to be able to do can be replicated fully in the mac environment, but I got a little fed up with going back and forth using Mac and Windows. So here’s the story of me switching completely to mac, the problems I encounter, and whatever solutions I found to fix them.

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