Category Archives: Branding

Dominating A Niche

Posted by on March 5, 2012 3 comments

There are a few ways which you can dominate a niche, but the most common is a slow and steady building process. Creating content one piece at a time and learning as much as you can about your niche will be the foundation of the process. A secondary attribute you should be working on is mastering search engine optimization and internet marketing. The final piece to dominating your niche is having an understanding of what your niche is, the competition within your niche, and what the competition is doing.

To begin I recommend picking a presence which is easily updatable with content. This will ensure as you create content for your niche it will not be time consuming to publish the content. In most scenarios content will be what your audience is wanting so if you provide the content on a regular basis the audience will tend to stick with you and promote you through word of mouth marketing. This is the key element which many webmasters screw up thinking the major players in a niche market themselves or pay for marketing. To become truly the best in your niche the presence you are running has to be the go to place for key information and you will need to become the expert that all others look up to.

Now that you have an easily updatable presence another very important part of your domination endeavor is creating content regularly. Many webmasters and bloggers including myself find this difficult and one way I tend to keep the relevant information pumping out is spending time reading different sources within my niche. This ensures I am not sitting looking at the computer screen having no idea what to write about. Content creation will be how you can rank for thousands of keywords and phrases. Simply publish content with an accurate title relating to the content and it will show up in the SERPs as long as you have done basic SEO and internet marketing.

SEO or search engine optimization and internet marketing are actually quite simple. The goal is to get quality sites to link to your presence. The more links and the higher quality links you have pointing to you is what will determine your site placement when someone searches for your presence. To learn SEO and internet marketing visit v7n.com/forums and subscribe to this blog.

The final key to niche domination is spending time learning everything you can about your competition. You should know the number of sites in your niche by searching Google with a few different searches including the “Keyword” search, the inanchor:”Keyword” search, and just placing your keywords into Google and searching. To begin you will want to search for keywords which closely relate to your site. For example my blog is called “Online Business 101” so the keywords which closely relate would be “Online Business 101”, “Online Business”, and “Internet Business”. By searching Google for these keywords I can gain a good idea about my competition.

To really understand competition you will need to follow them. Find out the answers to such questions as “how many times a week do they update their presence”, “who are they targeting”, “who is linking to them”, and “how well have they branded their presence”. If you are able to answer these questions you should have a pretty good idea on what you will have to do to overtake them in the search engines and how to get the same audience they are marketing to.

Keeping Online Business Integrity

Posted by on January 24, 2012 1 comment

There will be few things that separate you from your competition and one of the biggest should be your honesty and integrity. We as online business owners do not have close personal contact with our customers so we have to build trust and loyalty through a computer screen. The reason building this trust is so important is the way information spreads online. One of the biggest factors for your lasting success will be people telling others about your business. If what they are spreading is good then you will see increased profit and traffic. On the other hand if you are screwing over your audience or even sharing information which is inaccurate the backlash from scorned people can potentially be devastating to your business. Something to remember about reputation online is when you please people they are likely to be happy and go on their way, but you will probably not see much in good reviews on your site. On the other hand if you are dishonest with a visitor or rude that person whom you hurt will be very likely to post anywhere they can telling people about how you hurt them.

Saying you will be honest with your online business is easy, but following through you may find it more difficult than expected. Everything you do online can have different shades of honesty. Perhaps you publish work which you have not thoroughly fact checked and was slightly off. This may not be dishonest, but could definitely hurt your credibility. Everything you do online will tell visitors who you are and you should always be attempting to put your best foot forward. The first and most important aspect of building trust and credibility is the work you publish. This is basically what you say on your presence. Every word written should be the truth as you know it. Most of the time you will need to research what you are writing about to ensure your words have truth behind them. Another important aspect is remembering that as people read your work they will be making judgments about you so be sure your spelling and grammar is up to par. Personally all work I do online is firsts done in a word processor. This allows for spelling and grammar checks.

The second aspect of credibility and trust is your personal interactions with visitors. These can be done using social sites such as twitter or facebook and through email. Every time you speak with your visitors be sure to treat them with respect no matter their education or demeanor. You may run into someone who is angry with you or your presence and is rude within an email. Rather than reacting to their email with your emotions you should attempt to resolve the situation by treating them kindly. Once you start seeing some success online people will be attempting to contact you so keep these thoughts in mind when you begin communicating with your audience. For bloggers one of the biggest things to focus on is how you respond to comments. Always be civil on your blog even when the visitor is not this will make you look very good and those who hatefully spam your blog very bad.