People falling into this trap think that because what they offer can be used by most anyone, they’ll be limiting their income if they focus in on a segment of the market. And it seems to make sense. Maximize profits by marketing to as broad an audience as possible.

The trouble is, it doesn’t work that way.

The Problem

The trouble with trying to market to “everyone” is that the overwhelming majority of small businesses don’t have the resources to market to the entire broad marketplace effectively. As a result, they end up marketing ineffectively.

Typically they become a “Me Too!” organization that blends in with everyone else selling what they sell.

By trying to reach everyone they give no one a compelling reason to do business with them. Not only that, but their marketing costs end up being proportionally higher because their marketing efforts have smaller conversion rates.

Less is More

Even though it seems counter intuitive, the reality is a classic case of “Less is More.”

By focusing down on a segment of the marketplace and targeting your business at a specific niche you become the go-to resource in that target market. When you do that you can tailor your marketing to appeal directly to that niche.

That will reduce your costs because you can set aside anything that doesn’t appeal directly to your niche.

Even beyond the reduced costs, you will likely see increased income too. Because over time your business will break out and become the obvious choice for customers in that niche. Think about it. Look at the picture there.

The bulls eye in the center is worth more points than the outer rings of the target. Becoming the experts in servicing a specific niche might even allow you to charge more for the same service. If so, you’ll be earning more for the same volume of work.

Either way, when you lower costs while increasing revenue your business becomes much more profitable!

So how can you refine your target market to increase your bottom line?

Well here are some places you can go to find creative ideas for you blog content. The key is to take ideas you find and make them your own by filtering them for your audience and adding the perspective of your business.

Don’t Be Boring

A lot of times I see folks just slap up a link to a page with some interesting info, add a sentance of two about it and hit the publish button. Every once in a while that might be OK. But sites that make that a habit can get boring fast and see their audience begin to evaporate.

And boring is the bigest cardinal sin of content creation.

Instead present your own unique perspective. Filter your post with an eye toward your audience, or the audience you are looking to attract.

The List

Here are some sources to get your mind working whenever you find yourself stuck.

1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts will email you search results for keywords you enter. One thing you can do is set up alerts for each of your blog categories. Then you can have a steady stream of ideas flowing to your email. Whenever you get stuck you can go to your email and see what else is happening in the areas your site focuses on.

Oh, and as an aside you should set up google alerts for your business name and significant keywords so you know when people are talking about your business online.

2. LinkedIn Answers

The LinkedIn Answers section is a great place to find ideas. Do a quick search on your topic and find out what people are asking. Then you can write up a post that addresses that topic.

As an added bonus, if it happens to be a recent question you can then go back and post an answer with a link back to your post.

3. Yahoo Answers

You can do the same thing with Yahoo Answers as well.

4. Digg

If you are looking for ideas of topics that are trending right now you can go to Digg and search for your keywords. Not only can the titles help get your creative juices flowing but you can click through some of the popular posts to get a feel for what it takes to create content that will go viral on the web.

5. RSS Reader

You use an RSS feed reader to keep up with other blogs in your niche, don’t you? I use Google Reader myself. Since I’m a Mac guy I also use NewsNetWire and sync my laptop with my desktop. For those of you on Windows machines I hear FeedDemon also syncs with Google Reader.

As an added bonus you can get your Google Alerts in your feed reader so that you don’t clog up your email. Just select “feed” in the “Deliver to” option and then subscribe the the feed that is created.

6. Comments on Your Blog

Of course you pay close attention to the comments on your blog. (You do, don’t you?) Sometimes you can expand your reply to a comment or question into a whole post. When you do, be generous and link to the website of the commenter who stimulated the discussion.

7. Use PollDaddy

You can ask your audience what they are interested in. Poll Daddy makes it easy to set up polls and surveys. A poll or a survey is good for at least 2 posts – one where you ask the your audience the question plus the one where you give an answers. And, since the service is owned by the same company that created WordPress, it integrates with your WordPress site seamlessly.

8. Google Groups

Another place where people are asking questions and looking for answers is Google Groups. And, true to most Google services, Groups is very searchable which makes it easy to find on topic content ideas.

9. Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking site where people save links to web pages they want to be able to find later. Because the site uses tags to catalog the links it is easy to search for your relevant keywords and find lots of topic ideas for your blog. When you search for your keywords Delicious will give you the option to refine your search by popular tags. You can find a ton of ideas there.

10. Flickr

Believe it or not a photo sharing site can be a source for post ideas. Maybe it’s just that my mind works in weird ways. But I will sometimes go to Flickr and search for some of my keywords to see what images come up. Invariably I’ll get some new and creative post ideas.

11. YouTube

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google. Videos make great content for your site. Search for a keyword that relates to your site, find and interesting video, embed it in a post and add a little discussion about it. When you hit publish you’ve got a quick post with some great dynamic content. And it doesn’t take long at all!

12. Google Keyword Tool

Using the Google Keyword Tool is a bit of an advanced technique. For one thing I’m pretty sure you’ll need to have an AdWords account with Google to use it. But, if you do it can be a handy way to get post ideas.

When you put your keywords in to the tool it will kick out a ton of keyword ideas. Not only that, but it will show you the monthly search volume for those keywords. So using this tool can give you the added benefit of finding topics that you might not thought of to post about which will potentially bring more search traffic to your site.

13. Archive Content

Have you been posting to your blog for a while? If so, take a look through your website analytics program to see which of your posts are getting the most traffic. Try to think of ways to amplify and expand on those topics and ideas. Doing that periodically can help you focus on the most productive topics for your site.

And if you aren’t using any kind of analytics packages on your site you really need to be! You can’t manage what you don’t measure! There are lots of good analytics services out there. Google Analytics is pretty much the gold standard and I also use StatCounter to get “live” stats.

14. Competitor’s Websites

While I don’t think it’s a good idea to get too obsessed with what your competition is doing it is a good idea to keep an eye on them. If you’re stuck for content ideas, maybe a look at their sites can stimulate some content ideas for you.

15. Testimonials

Do you have customers and clients who are saying good things about you? Let everyone else know about it! Hopefully your business has some system for collecting these positive comments from folks. Going through those testimonial files may show you some things that your business does exceptionally well that can highlight. Sometimes these things may seem obvious to you, but if you don’t let the rest of the world know about them how will they know ‘em?

16. Ask Employees

Your employees can be a great source for content ideas. They are down in the trenches in your business day in and day out. They’ve probably got a good idea about what you do well and what your customers are saying. Ask them!

You might be surprised about some of the great ideas that they come up with.

17. Ask Vendors

On that same note, your vendors are dealing with other folks in your industry and they may have some ideas about trends in your industry. They can likely give you a different perspective about your business. If you ask them you might find some good content ideas for your website.

Mix It Up!

It’s not a good idea to fixate on any one source for your content topics. Don’t be lazy and always go to the same place for your ideas. If you do, it won’t take long for you to land in that same disastrous boring zone.

But if you mix it up you’ll never run out of interesting and relevant things to share. Over time publishing that kind of content will bring in a big audience, bring you new customers and add to your bottom line.

Regardless a whole bunch gets left out when just looking at words on a page. Or a screen.

If you’ve ever had an email exchange spin out of control because someone read something into your words that you completely didn’t intend to be there you’ve seen this in action. They attached different non-verbal cues to your email than you did. That can get messy.

One of my favorite exercises in acting class involves taking a line or little snippet of dialog and coming up with as may different ways, moods, and emotions to say it. Depending on how you use your face, voice and body when you say something can completely change what you mean.

Consider the phrase, “Yeah. Right.”

Depending on how you say it it could mean you completely agree, completely disagree, or some shade in between.

Enter Video

It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people on the web prefer to consume their content via video versus text, to the tune of nearly 90%! Combine that with the technology improvements going on and we begin to understand the huge increase in video sharing on the web these days.

That being the case, one great way to spice up your business blog is by adding video. It’s easier than you think.

For one thing you don’t even have to make your own videos. YouTube has tons of great business related  videos that you can embed right in your blog. When you find one that relates to your audience you can embed it as easy as copy/paste.

Even so I would encourage you to make you own videos. That’s far less complicated than you probably think too. And you don’t need a whole bunch of expensive equipment either.

One of the top selling electronic gadgets on Amazon.com right now is a Flip HD video camera. You can get it for less than $175 and be recording high definition video for your business right away.

But you don’t even need to get that “fancy.”

So far I’ve recorded all my videos on Chris Cree.TV using just the webcam on my laptop and a screen capture program. Since I’m on a Mac I use ScreenFlow. For Windows users I’ve heard good things about Camtasia.

Here’s an example of what you can put together that way. Remember, it doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective!

Business blog posts can be short and sweet!

I know exactly how that goes. My posting frequency here on SuccessCREEations has been erratic to say the least. I’ve gotten so “busy” with client work that I don’t post much at all. I would joke that “the cobbler’s kids have no shoes” and explain that’s why I neglect my own blogging.

Yet I tell my busy clients that blogging for their business is easy and there is time to do it because it’s an important part of their overall online marketing strategy. This weekend it occurred to me that I was being a bit, um, hypocritical telling business owners that they have time to blog if I’m not going to make it a priority myself!

The good news is, writing blog posts for your business blog doesn’t have to be some long, drawn out affair. They can be short and sweet.

I tell my clients that a business blog post only needs to be between 180 and 300 words to be effective. That means they only need to be a few short paragraphs, about the length of a typical email.

That means most business blog posts can be written in a few short minutes.

In fact, this post took me right at 10 minutes to write, including time to find the image and resize it, and is 329 words long, which puts it at the “long” end of a typical business blog post.

When posting to your business blog is made that easy, there really is time for it!

Between their Skinny Moose blog network and their US Hunting Today brand they have just over 100 websites in their community generating nearly a million page views a month.

As Community Development Director I will be working with the Skinny Moose bloggers and their readership to create a place that people can feel a part of where they want to belong. We have several initiatives that we’ve talked about and I’m exited to be joining such a dynamic group over there.

Longtime Relationship

I first met Steve Remington, the President and driving force behind Skinny Moose,  years ago over on Liz Strauss’ Successful-Blog. It was one of her Tuesday night Open Comment Nights in fact. (I even found that original connection.)

That was when he was just getting started putting a blog network together. And I was just looking at taking the step away from Blogger over to WordPress. In Steve’s world that was 2 kids ago (he’s got 6 now!)

Over the years we’ve tracked each others progress and kept in touch. Steve even asked me to come blog for him a couple times in the past but we never quite came together.

We did talk several times the past few months and then last month Steve made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The moral of that story is that it pays to network!

SuccessCREEations & Clients

What does this new turn mean for SuccessCREEations and our clients?

Ultimately they’ll see no change. We will still serve our existing clients. That was part of what made Steve’s offer so attractive to me.

Of course we will now have to be more selective on the new clients we take on in the future. But that will workout in everyone’s benefit as we will now be able to focus down even further on our core competencies here.

And in the end it may even free me up to once again blog more consistently here at SuccessCREEations. We’ll have to see how that works out.

Traffic Jam

There are two types of people who tend to know how to drive traffic on the internet. And the top players in both categories know how to drive massive traffic.

Interestingly enough historically there hasn’t been much of any crossover between the two groups. In fact, the two groups tend to look on one another with suspicion and disdain.

Internet Marketers

On the one hand you have the hard core internet marketers. These folks go by many different names such as SEO experts, search marketers, affiliate marketers, pay-per-click marketers, ect.

Their realm is that of the paid search results. They live in the land of the Sponsored Results that you see at the top and right side of the Google results pages.

Internet Marketers understand keywords and bidding processes. They know that it takes money to make money and they are perfectly willing to spend what it takes to drive traffic to their web sites because those web sites in turn make them money.

They tend to be really good with numbers and analysis. They use terms like click through rate, impressions, autoresponders, and squeeze pages. Sure they have word skills too.

But their interest in words often only carries as far as it takes to persuade people to take action, whether that is to click on the search ad or make a purchase after their target audience has clicked through to their website. And their websites often consist of a few landing pages designed specifically to convince people to make some purchase.

Good Internet Marketers are making a bunch of money. The best take in millions each year.

Bloggers

The other group that knows how to drive traffic to web sites is the bloggers. Their methods are very different from the Internet Marketers.

Bloggers are the word people, the relational ones. They are really good at generating original content and developing conversation. They network with other bloggers, spend time in the comment box.

For the most part bloggers completely ignore paid search all together. Some even cary that so far as to almost never click on ads or “sponsored results”. Often the only time they pay attention to paid search ads is when they check the few dollars they may earn a month from running Google ads on their blogs.

Instead bloggers live in the realm of organic search. They understand search engine optimization and assume that the only way to be good at it is to master the free side of the search results. They are self restricted from the paid side of the search engines.

Because most bloggers are completely broke.

Bridging the Gap

As I already mentioned there tends to be very little cross over between the two groups. The internet marketing folks are busy tweaking and adjusting their ad campaigns so that they are profitable to have time to generate lots of original content. They may even have a tough time understanding why someone would bother spending time on a website (or a blog) that wasn’t earning any money.

Bloggers have a tendency to be suspicious of anyone motivated by profit. They thrive on independent viewpoints and in their minds once moeny gets involved the independence flies out the window.

But here’s what I suspect. Something tells me that the folks who bridge that gap between the two biggest traffic generators on the web will be in a position to become very wealthy indeed.

As a longtime blogger I’ve recently been doing some heavy research on the internet marketing side of things. And I’m intrigued with what I’m learning.

New Projects

I started looking at paid search because I had an idea for a new project and, with everything else I have going on, that project needs to be profitable if I’m going to make it work. I’m thinking that paid search will play a significant role in that profitability, especially during the start up phase.

Not only will bridging the gap be useful for my own side project but it will allow me to help one of my clients directly. And beyond even that, the simple act of doing the research, gaining the knowledge, has opened the door for another new opportunity for me.

All that to say, expect some announcements in the next couple weeks. Things are happening here at SuccessCREEations!

Is KnowMoreMedia Finished?

This has been a sad week for the blogging world. KnowMoreMedia, a major blog network with over 100 blogs focused on the business world, effectively went out of business as of Thursday.

Well, they laid off all their employees anyway. I suppose technically that’s not exactly the same thing as going out of business.

But it might as well be for the folks who are no longer being paid.

Postmortem

I can’t imagine autopsies being fun.  Nor do I understand we’re so prone to slow way down when passing a highway accident to be sure we get a good look.

Yet we do slow down to get that good look. And I can’t help asking some questions as I look at the apparent downfall of one of the larger niche blogging networks out there.

And as an aside let me say that I completely admire what KnowMoreMedia did for blogging as a medium and for bloggers individually. I consider Easton Ellsworth, their now former Senior Editor and longtime author of BusinessBlogWire, a good friend.

I take no pleasure in their demise. But I do have lots of questions.

Too Many Questions

With the crazy way my mind works the questions that cross my brain are all over the map. For example,

Is the paid writer supported exclusively by advertising (often generated nearly overwhelmingly from Google’s AdSense) the best business online business model? Is it even a sustainable business model?

David Bullock pointed out a while back that a single marketing channel makes for bad business. I don’t know what KnowMoreMedia’s business model was. But any company that relies on revenue from Google’s AdSense while at the same time also depending on Google to send them tons of search traffic is looking for disaster.

One little algorithm change or policy modification and you’re sunk.

Wendy Piersall experienced exactly that in her early days as CEO of Sparkplugging. Fortunately Wendy was able to adapt her business model and Sparkplugging survived. But I know it sure wasn’t easy for her.

Is MovableType really that much worse a platform for SEO than WordPress? Was theirs just set up poorly? Or was the Google penalty they got really that severe?

I ask because if you search for their business name, KnowMoreMedia, their domain , KnowMoreMedia.com is burried on the 4th page of Google results. Now granted that may not be their primary keyword. But it’s not like they show up prominently for business blogging, business blogs, or blogs about business either.

They don’t even show up prominently for Business News, which is one of the things they said their site is/was primarily about. “Know More Media is an online publisher of business information and news.”

Couple that with the talk of many of the bloggers moving their blogs to WordPress and it makes me wonder how much of a factor MovableType was in all this.

The general consensus is that KMM was heavily penalized by Google when the Big G decided they didn’t like sites using things like text link ads and paid reviews. In the eyes of the Goog those sites skewed search results inappropriately and therefore needed to be penalized.

KnowMoreMedia.com was far from the only site affected by this change in policy. Affected sites either adapted, or didn’t. From what all I can see KMM was in the latter category.

A huge debate has raged throughout the bloggosphere about whether it was a justified change or just a move by Google to stifle competition from other advertising sources.

Regardless, building your business on a single income source is asking for trouble should market changes ever dry up that source.

Will blog networks have to take on some of the characteristics of traditional media companies to survive long term?

Jeremy Wright, the CEO of b5 Media (one of the most successful blog networks around) wrote a long post last week about what it takes to build a successful blog network. That post should be required reading for anyone looking to start a blog network today.

In it Jeremy explains the complexities of managing a network of bloggers. Many of the issues he mentions require structure, organization and resources along the lines of traditional media companies. Bloggers are a notoriously independent bunch. That independence makes many bloggers dislike and distrust many of the structures needed to make a blog network successful.

Jeremy also gives some tips on getting started right. First one?

Don’t rely on one type of revenue: It is sometimes very easy to become dependent on one “circle of life”: more google pagerank means more text links which means more revenue, etc. As soon as Google says “selling text links are evil”, though, things get… hard. And that sucks.

Becoming more like a traditional media company while retaining the things that make blogs so appealing is the highwire act that blog netoworks must walk. No one’s saying that it is easy. But failure to walk that fine line has disasterous consequences.

Even More Questions

I’ve got even more questions on topics ranging from the implications for a non-profit network like HighCallingBlogs.com (a client of mine) to the long term survivablilty of advertising supported social media sites.

I’m working on a post exploring the non-profit implications that will be published over on HighCallingBlogs tomorrow. I’ll update this post with a link.

The bottom line is blogging is still a remarkably new arena. I think many blog networks will succeeed long term for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they will be able to achieve economies of scale that are simply impossible for individual bloggers.

UPDATE: As promised, here is the post on HighCallingBlogs.com about Blog Network Sustainability. Go check it out to see the discussion over there.

On page 56 is an article about the coming bandwidth crunch and how much video content is passing around the web. One of their examples is a video called Evolution of Dance by a guy named Judson Laipply. They pointed out that this particular video was viewed 87 million times.

Evolution of Dance

Judson Laipply performing the Evolution of Dance

I mention this because the very first speaker of the eWomenNetwork conference was none other than Judson Liapply. Turns out he’s a very entertaining speaker.

His message is pretty straight forward. If you don’t adapt to the rapidly changing nature of our society you’re going to be left behind.

In the social media environment that is especially true. And it turns out that Judson’s video clip has been seen another 5 million times since that Technology review article was penned.

I don’t know what the lead time is on an article for that publication. Regardless it doesn’t seem like the demand for video content is going anywhere but up! Since that’s the case take a moment and check it out for yourself.

Networking in the Middle

The time in Dallas was non-stop analog networking. With something like 2500 women (and about 6 other guys) you can imagine how conversationally focused the event was.

Was it weird being one of the very few guys in attendance? A little I suppose.

But quite frankly it was a good business decision. Starting with the shuttle ride to the hotel from the airport I was able to make several great contacts there with people who are looking to tap into my services to propel their businesses. And their business will propel my own business as well in a win-win situation.

I don’t think I can possibly stress enough how vital analog networking is for folks in our line of work. It can be tempting bore sight on the computer monitor and forget that our businesses are ultimately about people.

Taking the time to connect with some of them in person can do wonders for your bottom line profitability.

Michael Gerber’s E-Myth

One of the last speakers was Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It and who knows how many other phenomenal other books.

Chris and Michael Gerber

Michael presented a ton of great information in his talk just like he does in his books. Perhaps the single biggest thing I took away from his talk is that we should be building our businesses for scalability.

If developed correctly our businesses can grow far beyond our own personal abilities. The trick is to develop systems that allow for growth. Then make them simple enough for anyone to follow.

Otherwise your business will forever be dependent on you or on bringing in personalities just like you to keep it going. A personality dependent organization will never be able to reach it’s full growth potential.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through that first book and I recommend it highly for anyone who is serious about building thier business to the point where it can still operate smoothly even if they take some time off for a vacation or whatever.

And to top the whole thing off, Michael Gerber was gracious enough to let Gorgeous snap a picture of me after he signed one of the books we purchased. Good stuff all around.

Oh. Yes. I do see the irony in the fact that it was the rare male speaker at this event that resonated most with me. Go figure.

Yet some people insist on adding this traffic repellent to their sites and then wonder why they never see more than a handful of visitors.

Smelling Fishy

When folks do this to their blogs or web sites it’s like the owner of a high end clothing store who chooses to intentionally have an overpowering smell in their store that’s just a little offish.

Perhaps that store has a nautical theme to its branding. Maybe the owner is even an avid boater. Perhaps he loves the smell of the sea. So he has figured out a way to bring that smell into his store. The idea is that he’ll boost sales because people will feel like they are shopping by the ocean.

Sure a small percentage of folks will like it. But the trouble is, to a whole lot of people the ocean just plain smells fishy. And those people almost never come back to the store.

Sound like a silly example? Well some people do exactly the same thing with their blogs and web sites.

Assaulting Your Visitors

If you want to maximize traffic to your blog, or your web site, then please, please, refrain from automatically assaulting your visitors with your favorite music the moment they click over to your site.

Now I like music as much as the next guy. More probably. I keep my iTunes running in the background pretty much all day long. If you care you can usually see what I’m listening to in real time on my Last.FM profile. If I’m in my office, chances are good there is tuneage playing.

And I cruse the web a lot, especially looking at new blogs. It’s part of my job.

There is very little that is more annoying than clicking on a site and suddenly hearing some song or other random sound blaring from my speakers. Even though you like music & I happen to like music there is a strong probability that we don’t like the same music.

Not only that but you have no control over the volume your site visitors have their speaker set at. In my case, with iTunes playing in the background, I have my speakers set fairly loud so that I can hear any important system sounds over the music. That means your music pours into my office pretty stinking LOUD!

It’s no different than that image at the top of the post. You are forcing me to listen to your music whether I like it or not.

Potential Visitor Responses

When that blaring noise assaults your visitors they will probably react in one of three ways.

1. Immediately click away, probably via the back button on their browser. This is what I do most often. And rest assured that I am very unlikely to ever return to your site once I do.
2. Frantically search the page for the offending player so I can hit the stop button. I’ll only do this if, because of my work, I have to stay on the page for more than a few seconds (and can’t immediately choose option 1).
3. Reach for the volume button on my speakers to turn them down. I resort to this third option if I have to navigate around the site a little because most of these players reload, and therefore restart in all their loudness every time a new page is loaded.

These are not visitor attraction reactions because regardless of which option I choose I’m annoyed and far less likely to return than I would be otherwise.

Bad For Business

It’s one thing for bloggers to assault their readers this way. There are many reasons for blogging other than attracting visitors. But what still amazes me is how many business web sites are actively repelling visitors and traffic by making this same mistake.

Just because you can add sound to your web site doesn’t mean you should add it, especially if you want people to actually read your content, learn more about your business, and ultimately spend money with your company.

It’s one thing to offer the option to have sound for a “more complete” user experience. But you should seriously consider setting the sound default to off.

Otherwise you’ve basically decided to market your business with that “fresh ocean smell” that many of your potential clients think smells a little fishy.

Image Credit: BoingBoing

The talk was designed as an introductory talk for business people who didn’t yet have an understanding of what blogging and social media is all about. Because most of the people in the room were not much beyond the “we’ve hear the terms” phase it meant I had to cram a ton of information into the 30 minutes I was given. (For some reason when preparing I thought I had 45 minutes plus 15 minutes question time not 30/15. Oops.)

I told the folks to buckle their seat belts and hold on ’cause I threw a bunch of information at them very fast.

My hope was that everyone would find at least one nugget to walk away with that they could take back to their own businesses and get thinking about the possibilities.

Here are the slides I presented for any who are interested.

Enjoy!

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