tdog.blog

There are lots and lots of reasons why marketers fail, really, but there’s one BIG giant reason why you keep missing your goals: you play it safe.

Part of me gets this. Really. In the old pre-Web days, you paid through the nose to get print collateral out the door. You had to live by certain constraints (get it to the printer on time, distribute it a certain way, multiple signoffs along the way). You agonized over the copy, the design, every little aspect of branding. Usually in committee.

If your brochure or poster came back with so much as the wrong color register–better redo it! At huge expense.

So yeah, you had limited budget, unlimited micromanagement overhead and a bunch of sissies hanging around worrying if the new logo might not offend some unheard-of demographic who probably don’t even buy your product.

The end result? Your collateral had to be as drab, boring, and vanilla as possible. You only had the money for one brochure, not five or six. So what if you really needed to target C-suite executives differently than you did the software engineering managers or the QA geeks? It’s all the same, right? They’ll just pass the brochure along with little helpful notes stuck to them! Because everyone loves brochures! Let’s go read one right now.

Guess what? You live in a new world! Your customers want to read blog posts about you, subscribe to RSS feeds, tweet about you, bookmark you on Delicious, yack about you on forums. If they can’t find you, they’ll just talk about you like you weren’t even there, which, if you think about it, is pretty true.

The problem is, you may be living in this brave new world but you haven’t bothered to remove the shackles and blinders from the old world. It’s like you’re wearing some kind of lo-jack on your leg. Out here, you can create exquisitely targeted emails, blogs, and landing pages. (Hardly anyone bothers.) You can create authentic voices that don’t sound like the product of a brain-dead committee of MBAs. (That’s way scary!) You can be sassy, peppy, and full of life. (Oops, let the lawyers review the web copy first! That’ll zing it up.) You can show how much you love your product and how excited you are about the space you’re in. (I just work here.)

Out here, NICHE IS NICE! In fact, niche is to marketing as design is to competitiveness. Good design (see: iPod) can lead to more sales (see: Apple’s recent great numbers). Stodgy crap (read: anything Microsoft) can lead to missed numbers and layoffs.

Same goes for you, my marketing brethren and sisthren. Focus. Reach out to a niche. Don’t have a clue what niche you need to be in? Your customers will tell you! Doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there’s an untapped, undiscovered niche of people thirsting for some attention and devotion. They’re the 20% of your customers who give you 80% of your sales. Or might, if  you would just listen to what they’re already saying!

Believe me, if you give them some love, they’ll reward you with sales, and profits, and glory, and fame, and galactic conquest! (Oh wait, sorry about that.)

Now go out there and WIN.

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Okay, here’s the process I follow when I launch a new niche marketing site. Of course, I’m skipping over most of the details in the first part, which is figuring out if a niche warrants a focused site….

But I know there are lots of folks out there (myself included) who need to keep it real, and by “real” I mean “concrete and specific.” So let’s talk a little about a site I’m launching called BestGuyMovies.com. I got the idea for the site when I finally joined NetFlix and started rating movies I liked.

Those of you who know me well know that I really like movies, but I especially enjoy a certain class of movie, the one I call a “guy movie”–the ones that feature explosions, gun play, thrilling action, a damsel/hellcat (in or out of distress), and all the rest. Don’t give me deep themes, foreigners (unless they’re villains or plucky sidekicks), or any of that high-minded stuff. I want to cheer, eat popcorn, and yell “Booyah!” when the bad guy ends up driving an exploding SUV over a cliff and impaling himself on the splintered blades of a disintegrating Soviet-era attack chopper, preferably with the entire smirking crew on board.

But how do I know this would make a good site? Well, I did the keyword research, figured out what the competition is like, and yes, there’s enough room for little old me. Furthermore, I know that there’s a way to monetize my little niche site, mostly because people like NetFlix.com, Amazon.com, and others have affiliate programs that allow me to make some bucks on the side while I’m having fun reviewing films.

And yeah, I am gonna have a lot of fun, and that’s a big test for me. Believe me, maintaining this blog will not be a pain in the neck. Plus there’s literally oodles and oodles of content out there I can talk about. Not just the movies, but the books these movies are based on, the posters, action figures, video games based on the movies, and all that. In other words, not only no end to material, but also no end to the kinds of tie-ins that can start (and nurture) very good relationships.

So believe me, this thing is ready to roll. So I go to GoDaddy.com and start looking for available domain names that involve my best key words: in this case, guys and movies. Hmmm, not that many left, but here is BestGuyMovies.com. That pretty much says it all, right? I mean, I want the site to feature only the best guy movies ever, even if that list consists of 500 or so movies.

I buy the domain and wait the half hour or so before it is processed by GoDaddy.com and put on my domain roster. I don’t sit around on my can, though, because now it’s time to run over to DreamHost (my hosting provider) and start the process of hosting that site.

I register a new domain on DreamHost (in this case, www.bestguymovies.com) and tell DreamHost to install WordPress in that domain. I’ve already decided that this is going to be a blog, but if I’d decided I wanted the site to be a reference I’d install a Wiki, or if I decided on a community site I’d chosen a forum. Believe me, later on there may just be time/room/opportunity to expand on the initial idea, but for now I’m going to create a blog with WordPress.

By this time, the domains are showing up over at GoDaddy.com, and I point them to the DNS nameservers over at DreamHost. That way, anyone typing www.bestguymovies.com into their browser will be pointed at the site I’m creating on DreamHost.

Approximately 15 minutes after installing WordPress, I get an email from the installer robot and go to the URL they’ve indicated to finish my install. With any luck, DNS is routing properly and I can go right to that URL, or I might need to use an IP address. Either way, I hit that address, which is basically a WordPress admin tool installation package. 

Once I hit that link, I’m prompted to enter my email address and the system generates a random password. 30 seconds later, I’m all set up and I can log in for the first time. So what’s next? Here’s my punch list:

1. I immediately add a bio to my user account and reset my password to something easier to remember.
2. If I’ve enlisted help from contributors, I might add them now, or I might do it later.
3. I activate the most useful plug-in in the universe, Akismet, which helps cut out spam comments. Once activated, I add my Akismet key, which I generated a year ago.
4. Couple of other useful plug-ins: Amazon Reloaded, which lets me add affiliate-friendly links to Amazon.com products; GD Ratings, which allow visitors to rate posts and pages.
5. I pick a WordPress theme. DreamHost has 50 themes available, so I’m likely able to find one that I like.
6. I make a snap decision to play around with the theme or maybe grab another theme from another site.
7. I go to the Adwords site and generate the Adwords code snippet that I then copy and paste into the footer template of my theme.
8. I generate Adsense code for my new site, making sure to create a channel for my new site (this helps me track my impressions better), and then I paste the code into the sidebar (at minimum).
9. I immediately generate 3-5 posts, one that is posted right away, the others scheduled out no more than a week.
10. I announce my new site on the other sites on my network, especially those that are in some way related to that site. If there is no relation, I use those sites to talk about some aspect of the new site (for example, I’m talking about the mechanics of niche marketing here) or (and here’s the genius of it all) I use the other sites to recruit contributors.
11. I make a note in my calendar software to check my traffic in 30 days, because at that point I’ll be able to add contextual text link ads, each of which might bring me 5-10 dollars or more per link.
12. I make a note in my calendar software for six months out, because at that point I can write reviews and be paid for them.
13. I then start figuring out how to add affiliate links, ads, and other content. For example, for BestGuyMovies.com I’m going to be able to sell NetFlix.com memberships, books and movies on Amazon.com, movie posters from wherever, screenplays from some other place, anything related to these movies (mugs, action figures, clothes, whatever).

Once all that is done, I can start working on driving traffic, but at least now I’ve got a there there. And by the way, I don’t pay for traffic unless it’s PPC (pay per click). I normally target 5-10 sites or blogs that relate to my niche topic and I write an article, guest blog, or otherwise make myself known in a non-hate-inspiring way (the easiest way to do that is to prepare a how-to article or something humorous).

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A few weeks ago, Fred Castaneda of StrugglingEntrepreneur took the time to interview me about life, business, the balance of the two, and how to make a go of it as a contractor/consultant/freelancer.

In this episode of The Struggling Entrepreneur, we return to the IT industry and showcase the skilled IT or technical professional who wants to become a consultant within the industry and become a successful entrepreneur.

However, how does someone who has great and valuable technical skills become a successful entrepreneur in the arena of IT Consultant or Technical Consultant?

Listen to Tom Myer, the author of the book From Geek to Peak, describe his experiences, obstacles, challenges, mistakes and success stories in getting to the end-game of successful entrepreneur.

 

Listen to the whole episode here.

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In just a very short while, Barack Obama will become our 44th president. Change indeed has come to the USA, and its because of a whole bunch of hard-working folks all across the nation. Whichever side you were on during the elections, you have to admit that it was heartwarming to see such a high level of participation in presidential politics.

Something that is troubling though, and I guess I should have expected it, is the sudden appearance of the Obama Niche. Just about anything that will hold his name or image is being sold, hawked, peddled, and moved. It’s almost like those guys who hoard bottled water before a hurricane and then sell it to desperate people at cutthroat prices.

Hell, some would argue that the timing of this blog post is designed to attract some kind of attention, and I guess you’d be right about it.

Don’t get me wrong. Anything in the world can become a niche. Anything. Even the man who will be our leader.

So your question to me is, “Is there a right way and a wrong way to handle public events or personages?” Think back to all the folks who made a buck off the sudden passing of Princess Diana. In the midst of all that outpouring of grief we got a mailer for “commemorative china” with her likeness on it. Meh.

The point is, people wanted that stuff, and if I guess you’re in the “commemorative china” business, then go for it. Otherwise, I think it’s a bit tacky. Beyond the tackiness, you have to consider the ephemeral nature of such things. We’re about to hit the high water mark of the Obama niche. Give it about 90-100 days into his administration, and the bloom will be off the rose.

If you’re in the Obama Niche, better get ready to move on to the next thing, or you’ll be left holding a whole lot of bags, each filled to the brim with t-shirts, caps, mugs, tea towels, christmas ornaments, dinnerware, and whatever else has the man’s visage on it.

The only smart way to handle niches like this is to either have extraordinary (and uncanny) market timing, or to be an expert in ephemeral niches. In other words, you’ve either got to be really lucky, or really experienced at working these kinds of deals. I suspect that anyone who has the latter probably has any number of things going on at the same time.

(And if that’s true, I can’t help but chuckle at the niche marketing firm handling Tonya Harding, Michael Jackson, Girls Gone Wild, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all at the same time, then suddenly moving on to whatever is hot next. Must be exhausting. Better have a good system.)

In any case, it’s time to watch the inaugural, so I’ll leave us to it.

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As a kid, I always loved those strategic board games that let you wear the Conqueror Hat for the evening. (You know, that pointy Napoleon-hat-looking thing? You didn’t have one of those? Never mind.)

Whether it was Risk, Axis & Allies, or one of the never-ending list of titles from Avalon Hill (Afrika Korps, Cross of Iron, War at Sea…here’s a complete list chronicling my misspent youth), it was always great fun laying the pieces out on the table, figuring out objectives, marshaling resources, and then blowing the other guy into teeny tiny bits.

But I digress.

I’ve mentioned in other posts (and to some people face to face) that 2009 is the year where I answer that most elusive question in the universe: Is it really possible to make a living just from the Internet?

(Ha! Had you going there! You thought I was going to say something like “Is it possible to understand women?” or “Is it possible to find something funnier than Tweety punking Sylvester yet again?”. Read on, though, it gets better.)

Part of my strategy does involve blogging. Now, there are some of you out there who just don’t see the point of blogging, and I totally understand where you’re coming from. You may think that the only people blogging are these self-centered megalomaniacs who are always trying to be the center of attention in every gathering, and to you I say, “What’s wrong with that?”

Seriously, though, blogging is just a vehicle, a way to get to the grocery store (read: objective) and back. It presents an easy way to communicate with a niche of followers. If you’ve got a blog about scuba diving vacations along the Gulf Coast, then those folks who are interested in that will follow you to the ends of the earth as long as you give them good infotainment.

They won’t mind targeted advertising and reviews and whatnot, because you’re actually enabling them in their quest for Good Times Via Scuba Diving At The Gulf Coast. You could even build a series of affiliate networks around this blog, or introduce a series of microsites each targeting a specific family of products or even information offerings that you yourself have created. Doesn’t matter, they’ll just sop it up.

Why? Because of the content. If you’re keeping it real, they’ll keep coming back with real money, in one way or another. That’s the beauty of it. The number one rule of successful marketing in a niche should be “Don’t make it look like you’re marketing.” (More on that later.)

Anyone who isn’t interested in that sweet spot (say, they’d rather be snorkeling in Alaska, or hunting quail in Italy, or just sitting at home watching old movies about redemption in small-town America) will go somewhere else.

In any case, there are basically three approaches to building a blogging empire. Doesn’t matter if you’re writing just one blog or creating a huge globe-spanning network of blogs (I just can’t help myself, can I?). Here they are:

1. “We only open our traps when we have something really important to say.” This is the New York Times approach to blogging. You go out and do tons of research, interview lots of experts, gather evidence, draw conclusions, make inferences, and all that, and come out with primo stuff suitable for Pulitzer nominating committees. As far as strategies go, this one can be a little exhausting, but it’s a great way to build a brand as The Expert.
2. “Well aren’t we a bunch of gossipy scamps?” This seems to be the model for places like HuffingtonPost and Perez Hilton. In other words, its extraordinarily effective, lucrative, and fun. Lots and lots of posts, covering a major niche (or many interrelated niches, or with a certain leaning–think Lefties for HuffingtonPost), published many times a week. These are the most fun to build, but you’re going to need help, unless you pick a niche small enough that you can’t help but have a blast doing it all yourself (i.e., Perez Hilton). This strategy builds your brand as The Man/Woman About Town.
3. Once upon a time, there was a brave blogger… Anytime you can tell a good story, you’re going to win hearts and minds. You don’t even have to sow your blog posts with good anecdotes (but they certainly help), just help the reader make sense of this ridiculous world we live in. Maybe you have an outlook on life or the industry that helps people get a grip on things (or keep whatever white-knuckle grip they already have). If you’re in the business of making accounting software for small business, maybe your blog is about helping the customer get a handle on smoother operations–invoicing, receivables, taxes, payroll. Give them a story line and they won’t mind the occasional sales pitch. This strategy builds your brand as The Story Teller.

All this talk of war gaming and strategery and such has given me a nostalgic rush: the hexagonal maps, the little die-cut units with attack/defense/movement ratings, the manic roll of the die to see if your hearty but woefully under-strength band of paratroopers holds back the other guy’s satanic armored columns…wait, I’m doing it again. Gotta go and see where I left all my old games!

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