Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
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?
Being on Time says a lot about your Work Ethics
Backlinks on your website explained …
How do you Build Links to Your Site?
Seems everyone is always asking, what’s the best way to build links to your site? This is an easy one to answer. Hands down, the absolute best way to get others to link to your website is to offer them quality content that’s worth linking to.
Link building is a valuable way to increase your page ranking, website or blog exposure and help increase your traffic, sales and business. However, not all back links are created equally and therefore it is important to decide what your goals are and how you will achieve them.
Quality content can vary depending on what your niche is and your target audience. But it will almost always include fresh and original content on various aspects of your niche, resources to help those who are looking for what you have to offer and information that website visitors want.
Quality content—the kind that encourages others to link to your website—is relevant to your topic, offers value to your visitors and potential customers, fits within the overall industry of the topic of your site (such as related products or services), and provides value to your site visitors.
Building links involves offering your website visitors what they want and that’s what quality content is all about. It’s the old WIIFM thing… (What’s In It For Me?). If you can answer that question with your website visitor in mind, and create content aimed at that visitor, you’ve just provided quality content. The odds of your visitors linking to that content will increase tremendously.
If your website deals with cocker spaniels, there will be some competition there, that’s probably not one of the most popular topics online. It should be relatively easy to create original content to build links to your site.
What if your niche is more common and your competition is stiffer? What if your site focuses on Internet Marketing? You can still create quality content to build links to your site. For instance, your content could include original reviews of Internet Marketing (IM) products that you write yourself or have someone write for you. You can include resource lists of software products, eBooks and websites that are truly useful to other Internet Marketers. It could include original articles and tutorials on every aspect of Internet Marketing.
The idea—regardless of your niche—is to create a site with content that is just a little different, or just a little better than anyone else is offering. Content that others will say, I need to tell my contacts about this. When people ask me what’s the BEST way to build links to your site, my response is Quality Content, without a doubt.
If you want to establish yourself and your business for the long haul, then offering quality content and encouraging your readers to link to it is by far the best and most effective strategy.
The other social media channel – Your Blog
Social Media
Well, today was quite a day… as a social media virtual assistant, I had a very hairy day as Twitter and Facebook both succumbed to Denial of Service Attacks, which appeared to be coordinated attacks too. Their systems in effect were shut down and people could not sign in nor post any updates.
It meant that several items of work done for clients and also to do for clients could not happen. It also was a wakeup call to me, and hopefully many others, that you should not keep all your social networking eggs in one basket. Read the rest of this entry »
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