Blogging
Blogging to your Target Customers
Blogging can help build your visibility online. When you write a blog post, you want to speak to your target customer and need make the content relevant for them.
If your market is attracted to your blog, as they read and follow your new posts – they will learn more about your services and products. You want to have a content guideline so that you stay focused and on target with your content.
To stay on track it’s important that you first consider your target customers before proceeding with the series of content that you would like to post. Without proper thought, you might miss the real purpose of your blog, which is to catch the attention of your prospective customers. It’s okay to have blog posts interspersed that are not fully on target with the content, but overall you want to keep the focus to keep speaking to your target customers.
Web surfers are very diverse and they have different backgrounds, preferences, and lifestyle. Therefore, market segmentation is very important. Your target market will depend much on the products or services that you are selling, and you better know your products very well. It is your products that determine the demographic profile of your customers. Before deciding on the theme of your blog, it would be better if you have a definite profile of your ideal customer in mind.
This profile will represent your target market segment. The basic demographic profile includes age, gender, and social or economic status. The categories under each profile are as follows:
- Age. Does your target market consist of children, teenagers, adults, or senior citizens?
- Gender. Are your target customers male, female, or transgender?
- Economic Status. Do they belong in low income, middle income, affluent, or rich group?
- Location or address.
These profile or sets of traits should match the characteristics or features of the products or services that you are offering. Remember, however, that these classifications are still relatively broad and apply only to basic commodities where product differentiation by consumers is still not so distinct. Examples are medicines or medical services, foods, educational services, and others. Items everyone needs regardless of demographics.
For stricter market segmentation, you can differentiate your target markets or narrow them further according to customer temperaments, needs, goals, and fears. Specifically, you can distinguish them according to:
- Needs – sense of accomplishments, sense of belonging, self actualization • Goals – productivity, efficiency, savings, safety
- Temperaments – serious, happy go lucky, complacent
- Fears – old age, poverty, ill health, rejection
There are still more categories to further narrow your market segment such as educational attainment, lifestyle, mindset, family size, political views, etc. These are relevant if the products or services that you are offering are highly specialized or customized such as travel or vacation packages, luxury cars, high tech gadgets, and other such items.
Having a clear picture of the common characteristics of your target market when blogging for business will help you decide what theme or blog design to use, the appropriate mode or tone of your article, and the right images that you need to use.
These details may overwhelm you at first. But, you should realize that your purpose for blogging is to attract web users who are more likely to use your products or services and to influence them to buy and patronize what you offer. Keep this in mind as well that customers now are more discriminating, especially if the products are quite expensive. They scrutinize details and compare them with competing brands.
So to make your blog more effective, know your products well and create a profile of your target market based on your products’ characteristics and features. Then, post blog content that will appeal to your target market.
Remember, your business blog is created to ultimately generate sales; first having gained the trust of the blog readers. Keeping your focus will help you stop reduce wasted time and effort when blogging for business.
Do you think about your target customer when you write or oplan your blog content?
Blogging Topics to help you Write
Five Easy Ways To Get Traffic To Your Blog
Blog Commenting can increase your Website Traffic
Everyone wants to bring in more traffic to their website. A simple way is though other blogs - making comments on other blogs, especially those in your niche.
How does this work?
Commenting gives you backlinks to your site. Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Most blogsites have you enter your name, email and website link to post a comment, this allows other readers to click on your name and link and they will be directed to your website. Backlinks can also help your own SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Your ranking in search engines is increased with the more backlinks to your site. Better rankings, means better chances of being found in an internet search.
Making these comments also allows you to showcase your expertise on the topic to others reading the blog and comments. It offers and opportunity to get exposed you to an audience you may not otherwise have a connection to.
Choose wisely when picking what blogs to comment on. Go for a niche connected to your type of business and choose well ranked and respected sites. Making comments on sites like this means your name and backlink will also be published within another high ranking website. This helps your own online visibility. Finding blogs can be as easy as following main ones in your niche or setting up Google alerts for specific terms and watching for good blogs to comment on from these alert results.
In most cases the first person to comment will get the most clicks to their site. People tend to follow on the first few then the most valuable… so make it a good comment and one that people will remember.
For your own blog you should encourage readers to engage and post comments on your posts, and when they do; reply and acknowledge that they took the time to:
- Read your post
- Make a comment
Their comments are also an opportunity for you to go deeper when providing an answer – help them out by providing links to your services or products. Take what you posted in the blog and based on what their comment is, go into more detail to help them. Taking the time to do this will build your reputation and someone who is willing top lend a hand and go one step further when people ask questions. This helps build that KLT factor – Know, Like and Trust – so that people can visibly see why people do business with you and want to do the same.
Always have the option for blog readers to get blog updates via email or an RSS reader. If they can sign up it means they get an email every time you publish a new blog post, creating an opportunity for them to directly read your blog and make a comment.
How often do you look for other blogs to comment on? Is it a regular task you schedule in your weekly work – or simply a chance happening?
Here’s a challenge:
- Do a Google search on your name and see how many results are online.
- Setup a blog commenting time regularly over the next month.
- After the month is up, check your name search again and look at the results. Is there an increase in hits on your name?
I started this practice in late 2008, at that time there were about 1400 search results for my name (and they tend to all be me *benefits of a unique last name*). If I do a search today there are over 32,000 results. Yes all the social media content I do helps, but the blog commenting does as well.
Blog Tags and Categories
I was reading Denise Wakeman‘s Biz Tips Blog – one of my favourites to follow. She is always full of great info for us beginner bloggers.
Anyhow, this week she had a post in regards to an interview she will be doing with Paul Chaney and they opened up the comments so if you had a question regarding social media, you can ask it directly. I have been wondering lately what the best practice is with regards to making tags and categories on your blog.
I asked…wasn’t sure if it fit into the topic, and it was a bit off, so instead Denise took my question and turned it into a blog post on the Build a Better Blog by answering it. It was great. I got a full out explanation about tags and categories for blog posts.
I’m not sure how many of my readers wonder this as well so today’s topic is a link to the answer Denise posted. I hope it helps you all as much as it did me.
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