Posts Tagged ‘Secret-Blog-Weapon’
Being perceived as an expert in your niche can play a great part in generating buzz, momentum and ultimately profits from your marketing efforts. If you’re a small or medium business, being able to establish mindshare (the perception of yourself or your company as a player in your niche) is a key strategy for newer players. Here are 7 tips to achieving that goal.
Content: Identifying key issues, especially challenges and problems within your industry and offering a solution to those questions builds your reputation as a problem solver. Experts are those with expertise at solving problems.
It also builds goodwill and encourage reciprocity and a “pay it forward” mentality from those who have benefitted from your advice (which leads to a viral/linkbait effect if they distribute/syndicate your content).
Content was one of the major issues that I discussed with veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of Revenue magazine, Lisa Picarille, for this week’s Friday Podcast. It’ll appear on Friday.
One of the easiest ways to brand yourself is by starting a blog and start putting out quality content.
One major issue I have with bloggers, especially affiliate marketing/internet marketing bloggers is a tendency to excessively sell ad-space or run banners on their blog. If more than half the screen real-estate is dedicated to ads/banners, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Are you more interested in making money, or providing information.
Looking at your signal-to-noise ratio (content vs ads) and maintaining a 80% content : 20% ad ratio will create a great user experience. Going beyond a 50% content vs 50% ad ratio is pushing the limits.
Guest author and guest post: If you’ve established a reputation and are seen as credible, take the next step to approach the top 10 channels/outlets in your niche and offer to guest author on their site – whether it’s a news site, a content aggregator or a blog.
If you are known and the site publishes guest posts, you stand a good chance. If not, it’s back to step #1.
In the affiliate marketing context, specialist magazines like FeedFront which comprises an online and print edition can provide great visibility.
Public speaking: Speaking at industry-specific events and related events are (more…)
If blatantly taking a blog’s RSS and republishing on their domain, plastering the post with adsense wasn’t enough, sploggers (spam bloggers) have started using a new WordPress plugin to do their dirty work.
Enter the “Related Blogs” plugin, an otherwise somewhat useful plugin that works like a “Related Blog Posts” plugin, except that it will point outside the blog to other blogs in the blogosphere, attempting to fire off a trackback in the other blog’s comments section in the process.
While writing a content-filled post and looking for related blogs using relevant keywords/keyphrases can provide value to the reader and help create an inter-blog conversation, merely throwing in high traffic keywords into the plugin and accompanying that with little or no blog content does not create any value for your readers.
Take a look at these examples:
The example above shows the classical layout of a MFA (made-for-adsense) blog with a Google adsense block, followed by content below. In this case “content” was generated by doing (more…)
I’m in the process of developing websites in a couple of different niches and going through the process of building sites from scratch has been instructional, especially since the process has changed with the availability of new technologies, here’re a couple of steps to help accelerate your site development.
Choice of niche:
Obviously an important choice which will affect your daily/weekly routine for at least the next couple of months. It’s never a good idea to go into a vertical/industry solely by the perceived high payouts or bonuses you’re being offered.
Choosing a niche based on your affinity and interest seems to work for me, and I don’t feel that passing up on a number of “lucrative” niches has hurt me.
Working the Grind
Any vertical will have a period of “grinding” or what gamers refer to a period where you have to go through some repetitive, potentially painful effort. Any site will require more than (more…)
With the amount of publicity in old guard mainstream media (late night talk shows, old line newspapers), you’d think that Twitter was the best thing since sliced bread, which leaves some wondering if the death knell has been sounded for bloggers.
Take a look at the signs of the impending apocalypse, once proud A-Lister bloggerati have taken a hiatus, stopped blogging, or are pummelled over the twitterstream into irrelevance. Is blogging, once the circa 2006 golden boy of mainstream media, now it’s whipping boy?
More importantly, is anyone going to read more than the 140 character limit imposed by micro blogging platforms like Twitter?
Are we destined to become a SMS/text nation?
Gee… (more…)
I gave Shawn Collins some feedback about what I thought was some spam on one of his blogs and was trying to define what is clearly spam, and what treads the murky waters of spamdom.
Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”
That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).
What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.
I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?
If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?
Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?
Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.
Even if the blogger doesn’t (more…)
Affiliate network Market Leverage marketing manager Dina Riccobono invited me to come on their weekly video cast on Market Leverage TV last week to chat about blogging strategies and the panel I’ll be taking part in at Affiliate Summit West.
Here’s the episode of Market Leverage TV (3rd Nov 2008):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZTMddmvDk[/youtube]
Dina and I had an extended discussion on internet marketing strategies, including projects I’m working on:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCp123sdvHo[/youtube]
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