Over all these years of blogging, I’ve mentioned niches 126 times, but written specifically about them 7 times. I’ve talked about niches as it applies to blogging, writing, images and blog commenting. Now it’s time to take it into a different direction.
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It’s time to talk about business and niches, and I don’t mean affiliate marketing. Well, I might, but only in passing. It might not even be talking about niches, but careers; let’s get into it.
Continue reading Do You Have A Niche Business?
I hope you checked out the first part of this mega-pillar post. If not, you can see the first half of Better Blogging here. It was a monster, but this one is even larger as I drive my points home.
These days the Super Bowl is one of the most hyped sporting events in the world, but it didn’t start out that way. For the first two Super Bowls, they had trouble filling the stadium. That was back when there were actually two separate leagues, and the National League, which was the much older league, was considered superior because the Green Bay Packers won the first two, and it wasn’t even close. When Joe Namath vaulted the New York Jets over the Baltimore Colts in the third Super Bowl, followed by the Kansas City Chiefs the next year, the leagues merged and the game started to take on a bit more prestige and charm. Look at the behemoth it’s become.
Hyped!
When the Super Bowl, and football itself, was starting to grow, it was still second fiddle to baseball, which had a bigger presence in at least the Americas and in Japan. It had a major appeal because all baseball took was for each kid to have his own glove, one ball, and one bat, and you could have as many players as you wanted.
Continue reading The Art Of Hype
Over the course of the last couple of months, YouTube has done something incredible… not in a good way. They’ve taken the time to go through the 332 videos I have on one of my YouTube channels and decided that 12 of them aren’t suitable for advertising.
own the car, not the tree
For those who aren’t initiated to the process, if you have a Google Adsense account (Google owns YouTube), you can decide to monetize your videos and allow an ad to show up in different ways but in the same format you’re used to seeing on some websites or blogs you visit. All one has to do is click on a tab called Monetize and then put a check mark in a box and save; that’s all it takes.
Continue reading Being In Control Of Your Content
Are you trying to make money online? Are you trying to sell services or products? And are you trying to do any of this to your blog?
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I ask this question because there can be subtle differences between writing style based on what it is you’re actually trying to do.
For instance, writing about products that you’re trying to sell is a much different animal than trying to explain to people the types of services you provide.
When you’re writing about a product, you almost have to go step by step by first telling what the product is, how it works, why it’s so great and why someone might need to use it.
When writing about services, you’re not necessarily going to be as direct about them, at least most of the time, because that kind of hard sell for services usually falls on deaf ears. Instead, it usually involves a consistent set of scenarios that one puts up to show that they have expertise in that area so that people will get comfortable with the fact that they may know what they’re talking about.
One of the problems some people have when writing about products is that they forget to be conversational. Everybody loves stories, because stories are very conversational.
For instance, if you’re trying to sell a fishing rod, telling stories about being out on a boat in the middle of a bay while casting with your favorite fly and catching the trout you have always wanted to catch makes for a compelling story. A full description of the lure and the rod and the reel could make someone think that if they bought those things they might have the same kind of success or adventure. But most marketers don’t think that way, which is a shame.
As you’ve seen on this blog, I talk about a lot of different things trying to show my expertise, since I offer services. I do have a couple of products at the top of each of my sidebar, but those are only small pieces of my overall business.
Most of the time there’s a story tied in with the particular topic that I’m addressing on that day, and to be truthful I’m always hoping that one day one of those stories will pique the interest of somebody who’s looking for someone with my particular set of skills.
I hope for the same thing on my other business blog, while on my finance blog I keep trying to make it financially diverse hoping to attract advertisers. Of course that’s another way of making money, getting advertisers, but it can take a lot of hard work to have the right content to drive enough traffic to your blog to make it profitable for them.
As I always say, the point of every blog and every article is to either inform, educate, or entertain. If you decide that you’re looking to use it to make money or to promote yourself, then you have to be flexible enough to alter your text to try to accomplish your goals. When all is said and done that’s what marketing is all about.
