How to Serve Your Niche in Blog Marketing
When you are marketing your business through your blog, it is important to serve your niche with your posts. Basically, all that means is that you should stay on the general subject of your industry. It may sound like a no-brainer, but many bloggers have fallen into the trap of commenting on anything and everything, whether it pertains to their business or not. Stay true to your niche, and your readers and subscribers will appreciate your consistency.
One way to do this is to get organized. If you have several general subjects under the main heading of your business and industry, you might set up a rotation of these subjects to make sure you cover them all. It is better to shift focus within your niche than to get sidetracked altogether out of boredom.
It is important to stay excited about your industry. You will be a better blogger if you keep up with educational opportunities in your business niche. If you run a small business that has a larger parent company, you might get that education at a convention or company school.
If you are an independent small business, you might go to local classes or meetings on your type of business to renew your interest. An Internet business can always find online resources for learning more about their business. The more you know, the more you will want to share.
Stay focused on the overall theme of your blog. It is one thing to educate your audience on your products and services. It is quite another to slip into discussions of subjects that have nothing to do with your business. For example, the theme of your blog might be about tools, how to use tools and where to find tools. You could make a very interesting blog about that subject, especially if your business was selling tools and you knew all the tips and tricks of the trade.
However, your tool blog is not the place to rant and rave about political issues, legal matters or anything else outside of tools that is on your mind. If you want to run a weblog that is filled with your observations about life in general, make it a separate blog. For your business blog, stay on the subject of your industry. Your readers and subscribers come to your blog to profit from your expertise on your subject, not to get your take on unrelated matters. Serve your niche for more faithful followers.
Start Keyword Research Only After First Clarifying Your Marketing Objectives
It is important to do keyword research before you attempt search engine optimization of your website, blog, articles or other content. Without knowing what people are looking for, you will not know what keywords to supply. However, there is one step to Internet marketing you need to do even before you take on keyword research. That is clarifying the purpose of your marketing campaign.
You need to determine what you want your customers or potential customers to do when they get your marketing message before you will know how to construct it. Some of the possibilities are visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing one or several of your products, sharing your company information with others, opting-in for marketing materials and subscribing to your blog by RSS feed.
Your keyword research will revolve around the choices you make in establishing the motives for your marketing campaign. For example, if you want to do campaigns for the purpose of getting people to interact with you over a long period, you would lean towards keywords that have staying power over a long period of time. If you just want to run a blast campaign to get people to buy a product to boost sales over the short run, the focus would be on the latest keyword trends instead.
Your objectives might be best suited for a particular age range in terms of keyword research as well. If you want to get people to sign up for a newsletter, you might be more likely targeting people in an older group than those who would sign up for an RSS feed, for example. When you do keyword research, you can break it down to age and other demographic groups in some cases, to get an idea of what different people type into the search engines as opposed to people in other groups.
Use everything you know about your intentions relating to your marketing campaign when you go to the keyword research sites and software. You will come up with the most winning words and phrases to reach your objectives if you take some time to think ahead before you get to those helpful tools.
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Grouping Your Customers for Better Internet Marketing Campaigns
You already know that one of the best ways to succeed in an Internet marketing campaign is to have a highly targeted audience. You want to reach the people who are going to buy without hesitation because you strike a chord with them. One of the best ways to find these people is to group your present and potential customers into natural sets of consumers.
Some easy groupings can be done when you keep lists of the customers who buy different types of products. For example, you might sell two products – weight loss and bodybuilding supplements. Sort your customers by which of your two products they prefer to buy. Then, when you get a new product in either line, you will know which group to target with that marketing campaign.
If you are an Internet based business, or you ship products to faraway places, you might group people by location. You might sell the same things in different places, but your approach may not be the same from one place to another. A Midwest location might respond well to a marketing campaign highlighting traditional values, while a West Coast location might feel better about a campaign featuring earth-friendly values.
Another way to group your customers is by the way they interact with you. Are they a Facebook group, a Twitter following or do they actually come into your place of business? The ways you talk to them will determine how you approach them to get your sales message across. It will determine whether you are going to launch an information-based campaign or a more directly sales-oriented communication, as well as where you meet up with them in real or cyber space.
You can group potential customers by how they find you. Analytics software can show you how they get to your website, whether they came from another website or what search term they used if they came by search. Once you learn how they reached you, you can get an idea of their interests.
For the theoretical weight loss and bodybuilding supplement company listed above, they might notice that most of their traffic is coming from weightlifting sites. They could use that information one of two ways. Either they could focus on that group of customers and target them more heavily with the bodybuilding products, or they could put forth a renewed effort to get more action on the weight loss side of the business.
No matter how you group your customers or potential customers, there are many ways to use the lists and information. One thing is certain. The more you know about the people who might buy your products, the more products you stand to sell.
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What You Can Accomplish with Mobile Marketing Opt-In Lists
There are several ways to accumulate a mobile marketing opt-in list. You can collect permissions and mobile numbers on your website. You can announce on your Facebook page that anyone sending a text to your SMS number will be included in company offers and information. You can even ask for permissions and numbers through a print media campaign. The bigger question is what do you do when you get the lists? Here are a few ideas.
1. Offer coupons and discounts.
You can send a barcode on a mobile device now, so that customers can simply hand their mobile over to the cashier at a local store and have it scanned as a coupon. This not only makes them happy by saving them money, but it also satisfies their desire to use new technology. The novelty of digital coupons will not last forever, but the savings will go on and on.
For discounts or coupons, all you really need to do is send a text that says, “Show this text for [X] % off [X Service or Product].” Customers who are interested will have no problem redeeming their discount, because most people carry their mobile devices with them at all times. You have just made the process much more convenient for them than if they had to clip a coupon and bring it into the store.
2. Announce events.
If you have a grand opening or a special sale, it is a nice idea to send a message with the specific details to your mobile marketing opt-in list. An even better idea is to have a VIP sale, and invite your opt-in list customers to a special sale held only for them. If you have a big enough opt-in list, this can be well worth your time and investment.
3. Introduce products.
Use your mobile marketing opt-in list to send a short announcement when you introduce a new product. This is only effective if it does not happen frequently. If you are sending out too many new product notifications, people will soon opt-out on you unless they are very loyal customers in the first place. Yet, if you use good judgment, you can send out the occasional message on a new product and your customers will thank you for the information.
4. Get feedback.
Your mobile customers will be interested in giving you feedback if you do not push the matter too far. If you make a pest of yourself, your customers will be turned off. However, if you once in awhile ask them to vote on their favorite among your products or give a simple response as to whether they liked your service or not, you may get some information that will be useful to your company. More important than that, you will let your customers know that their input is important to you as well, and you will have the chance to develop some in depth consumer-seller relationships.
Photo: Mobile Phone by Anna Cervova