What are your visitors looking for? You already know...

- Web Publishing Blog: "1. What are my visitors really looking for? Read your stats. Pay close attention to the longgggg tail. Screw the overture search tool, you’ve got the best data on your servers already.

2. Who is coming to my site? Is my audience the technical elite or average single moms? If you have a forum or some other interactive area you can figure this out quickly. Here stereotypes are very useful.

3. What do I want them to do? Tie #1 and #2 together and create a path to action. Make it very easy for your visitors to bring their friends. Two sentence case study: Tagged.com is one of the fastest growing social networking site. Tagged asks new users to add their entire e-mail address book.

4. The best way to know your audience — be one of them. The difference between being and pretending is enjoyment. You can pay college kids to write thousands of articles for your site. When it comes time to make valuable contacts, or figure out the next “big” thing — your screwed."

Here's the bottom line: you've already created your product based on "scratching your own itch". You are already part of your own niche - and so intimately know your own part of the long tail.

If you want more research about phrases people use and what they are looking for - dig around on some forums which are interesting to you, in the realm of this particular product and what it does.

What you want them to do is to give you their email so you can have a more personal discussion with them. You also want them to tell their friends about your products.