The Golden Rule/Holy Grail/Platinum Plasma Gun of marketing is one thing: Know Your Customer. If you know your customer you know what they want. When you give people what they want, success happens. Lots of people try to make this more complicated; its not.

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.