Archive for December, 2009

he Marketing Mix is one of the most famous marketing concepts, it refers to the elements of the marketing strategy which are designed to meet the needs of the customers and to support a company’s product or service offering.

Traditionally the Marketing Mix has been represented by four “Ps”: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. In simple words, the product must suit the customer’s needs, the pricing structure must be in line with the company objectives, the promotion techniques used must be efficient for the target market and the distribution channels must ensure that the product will be available on the right places.

One could use those four “Ps” to perform a marketing analysis of manufacturing and production businesses, but in order to apply them to online entities like websites or blogs we must redefine the four concepts. Below you will find the four “Ps” of the Online Marketing Mix.

From Product to Purpose: instead of a suitable product website owners and bloggers must have a clear purpose. This purpose will help you to define what you should and what you should not do with your blog. Secondly it will also make clear for your readers what they should expect from the blog, explicating what is the value that they will get out of reading it. Online success comes from understanding one simple rule: “it is not about you (author), it is about them (readers)”.

From Promotion to Persuasion: innovative media such as blogs, wikis and social networks are changing the flow of information on our society. Until some years ago companies had almost complete control of the promotion factor. Today, however, customers and users control half of the equation. They are able to rate products, express their opinion and recommend stuff to their friends or online communities. As a blogger you need to persuade (in a positive way) your readers, making them want to share your ideas and recommend your information to their friends.

Form Place to Presence: the term place has lost its meaning on the new economy. Today you are able to create a company and offer your services worldwide without leaving your room, as long as you have an Internet connection. Instead of place bloggers should focus on the presence. In simple words, where are people looking for information? What are the different ways that they could use to discover your blog and your content? Examples include online portals, article directories, forums, social networks, other blogs, advertising placements, online communities and so on.

From Price to Personalization: most of the services and information online are free, meaning that the price element is inadequate. Before paying attention to monetization options, in fact, bloggers and webmasters should focus on the personalization issue. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is growing fast because it shifts the power to the users. People want to be able to read their news on the most appropriate device, they want to personalize their home page, to tag their content, to share their favorite videos. And what is more important, they want to do all that on a smooth way. Make sure that your blog reflects that trend. Practically speaking make sure that you offer RSS feeds, email subscription, comment subscription. Secondly make it easy for people to comment, to contact you, send personalized emails and so on.

1. Make Yourself Easy To Contact / Create an “About” Page – Although some first time visitors will be more interested in your site’s content than you as a blogger, repeat visitors will want to know about you. Creating an about page makes your site more trustworthy because your readers can put a face to your site. It helps to show that you aren’t just some faceless machine churning out posts, that you are actually a human who can relate to their experiences.

Making yourself easy to contact should be obvious. Blogging success comes with the peril of many e-mails, a lot of those messages will contain genuine gold. Your readers will inform you when your site has a problem, they will give you ideas for new posts, and if you build a good relationship with them, they will likely recommend you to family and friends (related: How to Write an Effective “About” page).

2. Speed Up Your Site – You might be operating on a cable modem, but a big percentage of Internet users still use dial-up connections. If your site takes too long for them to load, they will likely pass and not come back. Take some time to optimize the loading time of your pages.

Firebug for Firefox is an excellent free tool which enables you to identify bottlenecks. As an added bonus of speeding up your site, you will hopefully consume less bandwidth, bringing your hosting costs down (you can read more about it on the articles 6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site and Formatting Tips to Speed Up Your Website).

3. Organize By Category, Not Date – It may be important to you when you wrote a specific post. You might remember the time-frame better than anything else, and organizing your archives by date makes it easy to find. But for all your readers, they are more interested in your categories than when you wrote a specific post. Organizing by categories can make it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

An extra tip – keep your categories list lean. Somewhere between 10 and 15 is a good number for most sites. If you get too many you risk your users not being able to find what they are looking for. If you have too many now, try collapsing some of your categories with only a few posts in them into a larger group (related: Organize Your Categories: 5 Practical Tips).

4. Use Above The Fold Images – It is often quoted that an image is worth 1000 words. Well, by placing an image “Above the fold” in your blog posts, you can quickly relay to your reader what a particular post is about. They won’t have to read the first 3 paragraphs to know if they are interested or not. If they find your image interesting, they can keep reading, otherwise they can continue on to a different post. I think you will find that if you use images earlier in your posts, you will tend to intrigue more readers.

5. Make Your Content Scannable – People read webpages, and especially feeds, differently than they read other media. They don’t take the time to read every sentence. Your visitors are more likely to scan your posts than read them. You need to make it easy for them to pick out your best points quickly.

Tips on this include making strategic use of bold and colors, organizing your content into lists, and using blockquotes to make specific points stand out. If you just create huge blocks of text, without any breaks or highlights, it will intimidate your readers and cause many of them to leave (related: Writing for Your Readers).

6. Avoid In-Line Advertising – Under no circumstances should you use an in content advertising scheme such as Kontera or Intellitxt. These advertisements work by betraying the implicit trust between a blogger and the readers. The ads are displayed as double underline blue, easily confused with a normal link.

They make your reader think that you recommend whatever product is being advertised, when in fact you don’t. Use these and you will begin to lose repeat visitors. It is no wonder that hardly any A list blogger tries to monetize with this method (read more about this here: Stay Away from In-Text Advertising)

7. Quickly Respond To Comments / Reward Top Commentators – As a blogger you want to encourage reader involvement in your site. One way of doing this is to do whatever you can to increase comments. Two of the best methods of increasing comments are quickly responding to comments on your site, and rewarding your top commentators with search engine enabled backlinks.

By quickly responding to comments, you can turn your static post into a dynamic forum, having visitors coming back to the same post time and again to respond to the conversation. Rewarding your top commentors will incentivize your readers to lurk less, and participate more (check the Top Commentators Plugin).

8. Show Top Posts / Related Posts – Make it easy for your new readers to navigate your website. Although your returning visitors may not be interested in your archives (they read them when they were published), to the first time visitors your archives are as new as any other post. By enabling related posts and top posts you can make it easy for those readers to skip from one post to the next, covering the entire site. Enabling these plugins will go far to driving up your pageviews (check the Popularity Content and Related Entries plugins).

9. Get a Distinct Theme – What theme are you using? Is it the same theme as 1000 other blogs? Do your readers a favor by getting a distinct theme. It will make your site more memorable to them and allow you to customize your navigation in order to tailor it to your particular niche. If you do decide to get your own theme, make sure that you run it by a few trusted friends. You may think the colors are fun and upbeat, they may think it induces headaches. Take their criticism seriously.

10. Validate Your Website – Do you want to be sure your website works for all your visitors, with all browsers, or you do want to rely on the often used phrase, “Well it works for me.” Take the time to validate your website and make sure it conforms to internet standards. You don’t want to turn away some visitors just because they don’t happen to be using Internet Explorer or Firefox.