This is part 3 of the “A to Z series of Esssential Blogging Tips & Tricks” – covering K to O. Concepts covered include: Know your competition, link building, marketing, niche markets and originality.
K
Know your competitors and mentors
- Competitive analysis will allow you to identify who is better than you and why. Replicate successful strategies and you will be successful in no time. Once you have surpassed a competitor, set your eyes on the next big fish. When you are a big fish, watch out for the small fish after your place.
- With today’s pace of change, what you do today can be replicated by a competitor while you sleep. You have to identify a unique point of difference and work on this – in addition to the usual stuff.
- Sometimes you will find a site that is successful for reasons that you are not comfortable with – take a note of these tactics and make a note not to do them. Be true to your professional ethics.
- Joint ventures are also fruitful. If you find a site with a similar topic area, around the same size and readership – you can work together to grow both of your sites. Refer readers to each other’s site via article or banner links. If you are the smaller fish, then you might be lucky enough to write a guest post and share some of their Google juice.
L
Link building
I wrote a great article on this over at Thesis Theme HQ – The Best, Easiest And Quickest SEO Linking Strategies. The article goes into more detail but to summarise, the best linking strategy is:
- Get a link for one of your pages (that is for a specific page – not just your home page)
- On a site with ‘DoFollow’ enabled (permits the search engine spiders to index the page after the link and shares the Google juice) that has less than 50 links on the entire page (the number of links on a page includes those in the sidebar, header and footer that leave the site)
- With a keyword of relevance as anchor text for your link or in the headline of the page where your link is
- With relevant content on the same page where your link appears
Long-tail
A concept that the Internet has opened up the possibilities of finding a market for all forms of niche (small volume) content. Basically, whereas the top songs are bought by most people, there is usually at least one person who will buy a copy of all the other songs. A theory developed by Chris Anderson, the ‘head’ is normally 50% of the sales, and the ‘tail’ can be very, very long.
M
Marketing
Marketing forms the foundation, the pillars and the ceiling of your online success. Get to know the “4 P’s of Marketing” and how you can use them to your advantage and counter the use of these tactics by your competitors:
- Product (solution)
- Promotion (information)
- Price (value)
- Placement (access)
- Whatever your goal – making money online, building your credibility, getting traffic, etc – you need to understand that each one of the 4 P’s needs to be engaged for ultimate success. Even if your product is free information, you have to state that your price is “free” and promote it as a free product.
- Other topics of interest include: target market, sustainable competitive advantage, consumer behaviour, market research, SWOT analysis….but the list is endless.
- The important thing is to understand that marketing encompasses nearly every aspect.
- More marketing topics will be covered in the A to Z series over time. Stay tuned for updates.
Mashup
Taking content and chopping and changing this to deliver something new. Sometimes mash-ups will include content from a variety of sources ‘mashed up’ in a new offer.
N
Niche market
Your target audience (the visitors you are targeting to visit your site) need to be identified. The more clearly defined your audience, the better able you are to choose strategies that will satisfy them when they visit and encourage them to visit in the first place.
A niche market is a small – sometimes extremely narrowly focused – market. For example, if you are targeting dog-lovers, that is a market. If you are targeting huskie-dog-lovers, that is a niche market. If you are targeting huskie-dog-lovers wanting to buy a particular brand of nutritional food – then this is a really well-defined niche market.
Stories abound of people making money online by selling information products for a niche market. The market may be small, but it may be larger than you think. There is a fellow who sold a do-it-yourself book on how to transfer the engine from a Honda Accord into a Honda Civic. He made lots of money by targeting a niche market. His marketing strategy would have been very interesting as well!
O
Originality
Your articles need to be original for two main reasons:
- If you have duplicate content, search engines will punish you. If Google is coming up against the same content, that is a series of words in a paragraph or post, they will penalise the site by not indexing the page. It will assume the first place that it visited and read the content to be the original author and any further use of the article will be ignored or given a low credibility score. Keep in mind search engines’ secrets are closely held but this fact is widely espoused as a fact.
- If your content is just a rehash of somebody else’s work, then why should visitors both reading it? You need to organise your own ideas in your own unique style in a way that adds value to the reader’s life, answers their questions, resolves their challenges and gives them something interesting to do for the few seconds, minutes or hours they are at your site. If you want repeat visitors, then you want to give them something special and this usually means original.
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