ComputerHunter.org |
|
|
|||
|
 |
The Viability of Blogging to a Niche Market
Niche marketing is an old and very successful marketing strategy whereby a company focuses on marketing and selling to a clearly defined segment of potential consumers. The company earns by supplying a unique product or service to this narrowly defined market which other companies have not met or provided. Are there potential buyers online? According to the Central Intelligence Agency's latest figures, there are over 185.55 million internet users in the United States alone, of these around 139.52 million active users. The Computer Industry Almanac which compiles statistics on global internet users, records a staggering 934 million users for 2004 and this market continues to grow. Do these users buy online? Statistics gathered on internet users, show they do and their numbers are increasing. For instance, in December 2004, online sales rose by 53%, from $795 million of the same month 2003, to $1.22 billion 2004, (gathered by CMP Media a service provider of information and marketing services to the technology and healthcare industries). For each unique marketing hook, product and service, your business blog can tap in, that's how many niche markets you can serve. The next question then to answer: Can your blog be the perfect vehicle for reaching and marketing to your niche? You should realize that successful blogs go a step further in providing excellent content, as well as regular updates or new content. Most websites provide these services. Rather it is the ability of these blogs to provide the author and the readers' a venue for one-on-one conversations, in an impersonal medium. By sharing commentaries, thoughts and opinions, the author positions himself or herself as being an authority in his or her field of work. If you write content that is relevant to their needs, they'll remember and keep returning to your blog. But that's not all; you need to have an abiding passion for the subject matter or product you'll sell. Without this, your blog won't stand out and carve itself a niche apart from the other blogs. In essence, a well researched and crafted business blog is a potential revenue center. It has the authors' personal touch and speaks to the need of this particular consumer. As every marketing analyst knows, when a seller understands his or her consumers well, this seller gets their business. Copyright 2005 Mal Keenan Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of the Home Business Tips Blog: http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/blog/ Visit his Internet Marketing Plug In Training site for great strategies and step by step processes in running a successful online business: http://www.pluginprofitstraining.com/
Google News - Top Stories
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
The RSS Promise for Internet Users The RSS promise for end-users is simple: The Viability of Blogging to a Niche Market Niche marketing is an old and very successful marketing strategy whereby a company focuses on marketing and selling to a clearly defined segment of potential consumers. The company earns by supplying a unique product or service to this narrowly defined market which other companies have not met or provided. How to Build a Niche Site With a Blog Building niche sites is all the rage these days. Blogs are an Art Form that Takes Practice to do Well Writing?Blogs?Blogs are on-line journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing?Writing is the process where one puts down words of a language on a format that others can read. This process has not been around very long, to use one of my writing teacher's favorite sayings, "Writing has only existed for one day in the one year that humanity has existed." Speaking and thinking come much easier than writing. These processes just flow out naturally like a river of consciousness; sometimes we hardly have to think about doing them. Anyone and everyone can write words down on paper but that doesn't mean it's 'good writing', myself included. Like most things in life, our society already takes writing for granted which is proving to expose more of our ignorance. Writing is a new form of expression, and if we want to do it in a way that the masses can connect with our ideas, we have to think much more simply and clearly about this art. How to Make Money from Your Blog Content Writing a blog can be fun and exciting, but it can also be rewarding. If you do not know how to make money from your blog content then you need to consider implementing the following suggestions in your blog. Introduction to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it's name states. A very simple way to syndicate your websites contents to other websites and news reading programs. This article describes the benefits of creating an RSS feed, and not how to produce one, or integrate other peoples RSS feeds in to your website. RSS, Feeds, and Aggregators When you work online all the time, immersed in bits and bytes, hands automatically resting on the keyboard, where the lingua franca is a mish-mash of acronyms and abbreviations - it is easy to forget that the average person has no clue what we talk about. It can be very daunting for the Internet neophyte with all these terms, technology and hardware. That's why I wrote this. Because I don't want people to be afraid to either ask (via comments on this thread) or to click/use buttons they don't know or use. What is an RSS Aggregator or RSS Reader? I keep hearing about RSS, XML and RSS feeds. I just barely have a clue what they are, but when people then start talking about RSS aggregators, what are they talking about and why would I want one? Do you use an aggregator, and if so, which one? Comparing Free Blogging Software With the increased interest in Blogging (web Logging), many web hosting providers now provide an assortment of free usage, open source blogging software packages. Among the most popular of these blogging tools are B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus. Each of these programs offer similar basic features, so the question arises as to which one is easiest to use and would be appropriate for the requirements of your particular website. The Right Blog Software Can Make A Blog Stand Out from the Crowd Blogs are an easy way to get your voice out onto the Net. For the Web-It-Yourselfer, custom blogs are a great way to learn about web technologies and create something from the ground up. How To Avoid Blog Burnout Most serious business bloggers have at least two or three blogs that they write simultaneously. I have ten, but don't update all regularly. How to Create an RSS Feed An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without the need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed. There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version. An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the actual news items. The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo. Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets. [?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?] [rss version="2.0"] [channel] [title]The Widget news feed[/title] [description]The latest news on widgets[/description] [link]http://www.widget.com/[/link] [image] [title]Widget News[/title] [url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url] [link>http://www.widget.com/[/link] [/image] The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below. [title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title] [description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description] [pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate] [link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link] [/item] You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items. Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag. [/channel] [/rss] I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification. Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file. That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article. The Hybrid Blog and Ping For the past two years, one of the best SEO inclusion tactics was the use of blogs. Blogs have become a base standard in SEO marketing, but as times change, so does the efficacy of any tactic. RSS & How to Use It (part 1) Have you ever read an article, intended to explain RSS in simple terms that, begins well, but soon descends into confusing jargon or information overload? Blogs: The Hidden Ace Up Your Sleeve If it wasn't for my blog, I wouldn't make any online sales at all. RSS - The Intelligent Marketing Medium Are you new to RSS? If so here is a introduction to what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is and how your website will benefit from offering an RSS feed to your visitor's. Content Syndication Through RSS Feeds Delivering regularly updated content to website visitors is easier through RSS resources. Creating A Basic RSS Feed For Your Site The future of RSS Feeds and internet marketing is looking bright and promising. It would be a wise decision to get yourself up to speed on this developing content sharing technology by putting together your own news feed for your site. How To Display RSS Feeds on Your Website This article is intended as a guide for webmasters who want to display automatically updated content on their website in the form of RSS feeds. In this article I will cover the easiest method to implement using javascript for displaying RSS on websites to create additional dynamic content. This will allow you to display headlines from syndicated content around the web on your website. RSS to Javascript. By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to display. To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free service that will allow you to select a few options to choose your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and paste into your website. Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic content on your site in a few short minutes there are some downsides to this method. Javascript is not search engine friendly. As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you are doing this to better your search engine rankings. You are using a third party service. The second potential downside is that although the javascript is on your site you are actually calling a script on another server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer to display on your site. The other point is if the third party server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be displayed at all. In summary there are a few downsides, but if you do not code and want some feeds on your site quickly then this is the way to go. Ok, so now you understand what is involved here are the links to the sites that provide the free RSS to javascript service. All you need to do is follow the on site instructions. Feed2JS RSS2HTML RSS-to-Javascript FeedSweep RSS Xpress Lite Blogs Explained It seems like Blogs are everywhere these days. You can't seem to surf the Internet without seeing the word Blog somewhere. The intent of this article is to explain the basics what a Blog is and how you can use them to help promote your business and gain valuable information quicker that surfing the Internet.
|
|
|
|
|
Comment by George B.N. Ayittey, Ph.D.