COURSE n – BASIC MARKETING

Contents

Chapter 2    Chapter 3     Chapter 4

I can tell you that after spending 40 years as a professional marketer conceptually marketing is pretty easy to understand. There are really only two things that you need to know how to do.

1. How to create a great product, and,

2. How to tell people about it.

Unfortunately, these two things are pretty challenging.

As an aspiring successful blogger or online entrepreneur, these are the two things you need to master. If you are a blogger then your product is the blog and you need to create a great product. That means creating great content. If you are planning on launching an online store then that store needs to be great and the fundamentals of marketing are essential. You need to work constantly to create a great product and then you need to work to tell people about your product.

Its a big topic and the entire Module 4 is devoted to it. Here we will just begin the discussion with a quick introduction.

The first thing you need to do is change your mindset. Unfortunately, too many bloggers think of themselves as bloggers and that seems to mean that you create a website and just blog a lot of posts to it.

And that’s why so many fail. When you are publishing a blog you are for all intents and purposes a product manager. Your blog is your product and it is your job to manage and sell it. Your ability to manage your product and tell others about it will go a long way to determining how well it goes and whether you succeed or not.

So from the outset change your mindset and become a product manager.

You must spend a great deal of time creating a great product.

There is much written about how easy it is to start a blog and just write posts and get lots of hits. And it is easy to start a blog and it is easy to write and post posts. But It is not easy to write good posts and even harder to get people to read them.

But a great product is so much more than just a collection of posts.  

Firstly, start writing now. Dont wait. It is going to take time for you to get good at it and the more you write the better you will become. The first few posts might be rubbish. the surviving members of the Beatles have admitted that some of their early stuff was rubbish but look how well they did. There is just that initial confidence hurdle to jump over and you are away. I promise you one or two posts and you are away and hopefully enjoying it. So just start posting – you can always come back to those early posts and amended them later.

KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

A great product begins with knowing your target audience.Secondly, write for an audience not to yourself. To be interesting to others you need to be answering their needs so you need to understand them, they are your customer and you need to get to know them if you are going to be able to appeal to them. This is the key job of a product manager;

Know your customer

Thirdly, quality works. How many times have you tried a product and thought this is no good and never bought it again. Well, it’s the same for blogs and posts. Great quality keeps people coming back for more, they bookmark you or join your newsletter or RSS feed so they don’t miss one of our posts. They become your loyalists or fans and they are your key to ongoing success. Remember repeat business is good business.

Sure, a lot of your posts might be a simple solution to things like changing a car tire but if you brand the post well readers will start to remember you and will click on your articles in preference to others when they come up in the search results because they recognise your quality.

Fourthly, you have or develop a point of difference

Telling People About It

So you have written a great post and you are proud of it. That’s not enough. No one knows you exist yet and Google has not found you yet either. In marketing terms the awareness of you and your blog and its posts is nill.  So you need to go out and tell others about yourself. This is the big P of marketing – Promotion.

The world is full of this P. Every ad you see belongs to this P, every special offer, every emailed newsletter, every video pop up on youTube and Facebook. Our minds have become good at filtering out a great deal of it so that largely we only attend to the things that interest us. And even in these fields, it is a crowded market with a great deal of clutter getting in the way.

Your job as a blogger is to break through that clutter and become noticed. This short course will give you some hints as to how to break through but its too big a topic for the short course.

Write often and you will get better and get good at telling others about your posts.

Do this now!

Write down, or type into your post, the topic heading in capital letters at the top of the page.

This may change after the next two sections but get started.