The process of making a persona can be roughly divided into three distinct steps:
Research your audience using Google and social media analytics tools, collecting a wide range of relevant data, such as age, gender, language, spending pattern, etc.
Identify goals, pain points, and potential solutions – this will feed into the resulting personas you create. Based on the data, try to determine what your customers need or desire, what prevents them from attaining it, and how you could help them overcome whatever barriers are in their way.
Analyse the data that you’ve collected and write down any patterns that you see emerging from it. For example, you may notice a cohort of, say, young moms who are pursuing careers in business, own apartments downtown, and are looking for organic goods for their small children. This could be a persona. In most cases, the amount of information to include shouldn’t be very much more than a profile on, e.g., a dating site.