Why Choose Niche Marketing Over Mass Marketing?

Previously we have defined niche marketing and discussed about using it in getting specific on your blog. Now, have you ever been asking yourself on why and is it really important that you should define your niche and why and is it really important that you should know your perspective costumers?


Well then I’ve researched about the importance of niche marketing and saw several similar tips some marketing guides are suggesting which I think are very reasonable on why you should prefer niche marketing rather than mass marketing.

Here are few of the reasons why you should prefer niche marketing rather than mass marketing:

1. Minimizes Advertising Budget

It is apparent that if you know who you are marketing to, you certainly will be able to use your budget wisely to those who are likely to be your costumers, and in blogging, your viewers. Take it this way; your product includes engineering books. Are you going to market that to everyone? Is it sensible to try to advertise your books to everyone? Is it sensible to spend money advertising your products to no one in particular? Definitely not! If you go massive, how many percent of the population you aremarketing are interested in engineering? A little I guess. Then, you should be reasonable enough to advertise only in this small part of the bigger market since most likely; they are the ones who are going to be your potential costumers.

Focusing on people who are likely to buy from you means minimizing your allotted budget. BUT at the same time it means maximizing the chance of selling since you have targeted to a niche who would be interested in buying an engineering book.

2. Easier way of Making Your Website Special.
If you have defined your niche market, then it would be easier for you to develop your website in a way that would meet the needs of your probable costumers. Your site would be narrowed down to topics and solutions which would be of great interest for your costumers. You will be able to have more time in makingyour site stand up in the group of similar sites offering the same product, the same services, the same information, etc. You will be able to think of ways in whichyour site will have more big, sensible, and welcoming offers.

3. Develops Stronger Customer Relationship
When you only have a small number of costumers, you have a big chance of having stronger customer relationship. Why? It is simply because you can easily define their needs. You can definitely meet those needs by sending useful newsletters, replying to their emails and requests, and providing them what they need. Tending in their needs will eventually develop a sense of trust within customer-marketer/advertiser/seller relationship and eventually they become your loyal costumers.

With these reasons in mind, you would deeply think of whether to enter niche marketing or stick to mass marketing. Yet, you may still think about your profit. With niche marketing you probably will worry about less traffic and even fewer sales. But take a few minutes and think over this statement Mila Sidman the Editor of Internet Based oms had left for her readers, “Even if your potential traffic numbers were to a bit lower…isn’t it better to have a small audience of captivated visitors than a large audience of half interested ones?”

How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog

About a decade back, nobody thought that blogs would transform from a personal diary to full-fledged money making websites. Blog monetization strategies have undergone several transitions during these years, and bloggers have tons of monetization options at their disposal. One of the options is 'Direct Advertisements'. Interestingly, large number of bloggers does not use this option for many reasons. Let's try to understand the dynamics of direct advertising and the methods to grab direct advertisement deals.

If you own a blog with decent traffic (at least 500-1000 unique visits/day) and are planning to monetize it, direct advertising is an excellent option for you. Quality content and good traffic are two most important prerequisites before pitching for direct advertising.

Advantages of Direct Advertising

Cuts out the middleman - Almost every blogger who has monetized his/her blog is familiar with PPC (pay-per-click) ads served by popular 3rd party advertising networks. Since they act as a middleman between the advertiser and the publisher, they take a good share of revenue. On the other hand, getting direct ads from advertisers removes the middleman and you as a publisher get full incentive for your service.

More choice on type of ads - You can offer almost any type of ad format for the advertisers. With 3rd party advertisements, you have limited choices with some predefined standard ad formats. Through direct advertising you can offer a wide array of ad formats with much more flexible ad placements. Following are some popular ad types used by bloggers.

1. Banners (Animated/Static)
2. Text Links
3. RSS Ads
4. Newsletter Ads
5. Site Reviews
6. Audio/Video Ads

When you are in complete control of your ads, advertisers gets more variety to choose from that suits his business demands.

Flexible payment options - Another advantage is acceptance of payment in multiple ways. If an advertiser is not willing to pay by one method you can opt for the second. Normally, bloggers prefer wire transfer or Paypal as the best method to get payments from advertisers. Still, if an advertiser chooses any other payment medium you can be flexible and can go ahead with that option without any chance of losing the deal.

Long-term relationships - More than often, bloggers develop long term relationships with advertisers who are satisfied with their service. This not only opens the door for consistent stream of income from these advertisers, but also increases the probability of grabbing more advertising deals through referrals of these satisfied advertisers.

Flexible pricing - Since you are in complete control of your ad inventory, you can exercise extreme flexibility while quoting price of different types of ads to grab virtually every advertising deal that comes in your way.

Builds Credibility - A blog that gets consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds it's credibility and is seen as an authority in it's niche.

Disadvantages of Direct Advertising

Difficulty in finding advertisers - Initially, a lot of effort goes in finding advertisers for your blog. Sometimes, it may take considerable time before any such deal is finalized. Once you start getting the deals, things become easier though you still have to move your legs aggressively to clinch new deals.

Time consumption - Keeping track of ad inventory, negotiating deals with advertisers, keeping track of payments and time deadlines consumes lot of precious time. If you have multiple blogs that are updated daily, things can become more difficult as considerable part of your blogging schedule is spent in maintaining your ad inventory and in finding new advertising deals.

Disputes - Sometimes, an advertiser is not satisfied with the results and may nullify the agreement from his end demanding refund of his payment. This can also lead to negative feedback to other advertisers in the pool.

Preparations For Getting Direct Advertising

Before you decide to approach advertisers, you must do some very important preparations to increase the probability of clinching your first direct advertising deal.

Create a dedicated advertising page - An advertising page concentrates all the necessary information needed to convince potential advertisers (kind of a portfolio of your blog). This page tabulates the most important statistics about your blog. In simple words, this page gives all the reasons why advertisers should choose your blog for advertising.

Following are some of the essential ingredients of a typical advertising page.

About your blog section - This section gives a brief introduction about your blog. What it's all about, it's niche, target audience and the purpose of its existence (reader's perspective).

Traffic statistics - The most important part of advertising page. Give all the important data related to your blog traffic to convince the potential advertisers. Following are some major blog statistics that are commonly used by bloggers in their advertising page.

1. Page Views (per day/ per month)
2. Unique Visits (per day/ per month)
3. Alexa/Compete and Similar Services Ranks
4. Number of Feed Subscribers
5. Demographic Data (V. Imp)

Some advertisers don't give much importance to Alexa and similar ranks but others do take them into consideration, so its better to include them in your traffic statistics section. Similarly, providing concentrated demographic data increase the chances of getting advertising deals.

Available Ad Slots - In this section the available ad inventory is showcased. This includes each ad type, their format, their exact placement and the number of such slots available for any location. To give a clearer picture you must supplement this section with appropriate snapshots of ads placed in a particular location.

Now here comes the tricky part. What about pricing of ads? Should we straightaway quote the price of each available ad slot? Well, I would strongly suggest you to keep your cards closed. Let the advertiser contact you with relevant details and then you can play your cards according to the situation. Ask for advertiser's website address when he first contacts you. This way you can visit their web site and can get fair idea about their budget and purchasing power. Through this approach, you create an opportunity for yourself to assess the situation and then create a flexible pricing plan. If you publicly display your ad prices, websites with considerably low budget may not approach you and big websites may grab it in much lesser rate then they were willing to pay earlier.

Testimonials - Great marketers use their customers feedback to promote their products. Same rule applies here. Get some testimonials from your satisfied advertisers and prominently display them on your advertising page. This builds your credibility and shows your track record of giving excellent advertising services. Apart from publishing the plain testimonial statement, you can further replenish it by including thumbnail image of the person with his/her designation.

Calculating Advertising Prices

Often newbies are in dilemma about setting the correct price for their advertisements. Sometimes, they fear that quoting a high price can result in loss of advertising deal, while quoting less will be like giving their real estate in pennies. How to overcome this situation and how to correctly calculate the prices for your ad inventory? Here are some basic guidelines to calculate ad prices.

Image Vs Text Ads - Normally image ads are always priced high than text ads. The CTR (click-through ratio) of image ads is much higher than text ads and hence this pricing difference.

Size Does Matter - Larger the size of the banner, higher the price is. If your 125x125 image banner is priced at $30/month, a 250x250 banner should be priced at 4 x 30 = $120/month.

Placement - If the advertisement appears above the fold (area visible without the need of scrolling), it is priced much higher than those ads that appear below the fold. If an ad is going to appear in the footer, it's price will be considerably low than that placed in the header of your blog.

Pricing Model - There are two popular pricing models for advertisements. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model and CPA (cost per action) model. The CPM model is the preferred way to calculate ad prices and is widely accepted model throughout blogosphere. In this model, a fixed amount is paid for every 1000 page views, simple. But how would you calculate the right price for a particular ad in this model? Here are some ways to do it.

The best way to get the correct value of an ad is to check public ad inventories and see their CPM rate. Login to your Adsense account and go to advanced reports to view the CPM rate for a particular ad. Take at least month long data to get the clear picture, though a long-range data will give much more accurate rate. Let's suppose you get a CPM rate of $1.20 from the report. Now according to your assessment of the purchasing power of the advertiser you can increase or decrease this rate. A low budget advertiser can be offered a rate of $1.00 or $0.80, while a big web site can be asked for a CPM rate of $1.50.

Let's assume that the deal is finalized with a rate of $1.50 CPM. How the monthly rate will be calculated? Suppose your blog generates 5000 page views per day. This amounts to 30 x 5000 = 150000 page views per month. So, at this rate the price of the ad will be (150000 / 1000) * 1.50 = $225/month.

Daniel Scocco has written an excellent article about calculating ad prices for your advertising space. If you are still in dilemma, you can also ask an expert to assess your blog's worth.

Finding the Advertisers

Now comes the real tough part (at least for newbies) of finding advertisers for your blog. There are many ways to do it.

Visit Marketplaces - There are several popular forums and discussion boards where advertisers and publishers meet solely for the purpose of finding and negotiating advertising deals. You can visit Digital Point - Buy, Sell or Trade Forum, SitePoint Marketplace and Webmaster World Commercial Exchange Forum to find advertisers for your blog.

Check Competitor's blogs - Visit popular blogs related to your blog's niche and see who is advertising on these blogs. This is a good source of creating a list of potential advertisers. Since they are already advertising on a blog related to your blog's niche, a chance of clinching a deal from these advertisers is more likely to happen.

Check public ad inventories - Some 3rd party advertising networks give public access to their inventory to account holders. Sign-up for these ad networks and browse their ad inventory. Again, filter out advertisers related to your blog's niche. Here not only you can get a list of potential advertisers but can also get a fair idea about how much they are willing to pay.

Write a blog post about it - This is one more way to attract advertisers. Write a blog post explicitly stating that your blog is now open for direct advertising.

Search engines - And last but not the least is search engines. Type in relevant keywords and visit the web sites. Check their contact page and create a list of potential advertisers.

How To Approach Potential Advertisers

Once you have the list of potential advertisers in your hand, its time to contact them inviting to advertise on your blog.

Write a mail giving your brief introduction. State your purpose of writing in brief. To speed up the process give your phone number and messenger id. Attach the media kit/rate card showcasing various advertising options available on your blog. It's somewhat similar to mobile version of your 'Advertise' page. However, this document must contain detailed pricing of every ad type. You must also quote discounted prices for long-term deals. One more convincing methodology is to give limited period read-only access to Google Analytics dashboard to verify your traffic claims for long-term deals (6 months or more). This offer increases the confidence of advertiser and the probability of negotiating a deal also increases.

If this is your first advertising deal, be ready to be flexible enough while negotiating pricing of your ads. Remember, your first deal will open the door for more such deals.

What Else I Have Missed?

I would like to know your experiences in maintaining independent ad inventories and your approach towards grabbing such advertising deals.

Instructions for changing template for New bloggers

Here are the easy steps made only for new bloggers or beginners.

1. Download a five column template of you choice and extract the xml file from the archive ( Double click on the downloaded rar file and then drag it to desktop or another folder ) .

2. From Dashboard click on Template tab and then Edit Html sub tab.

3. Back up your existing template and widget data.

4. In the “Upload a template from a file on your hard drive”, browse the extracted
xml file and press Upload.

5. Message in red will appear alerting you that “Widgets are about to be deleted” .
You will be also asked to confirm the deleting of existing widgets. If you have already followed section 3. then press Confirm and Save.

6. You are done . Now go to Page Element sub tab and reset your widgets !

Yes, it’s that easy… !

How To Keep Your Domane Name Safe?

Your blog's domain name is by far one of the most important assets of your blog. It's a brand through which your blog is recognized. One day you wake up and see that your domain name is no more yours and is hacked. It can happen to anybody, anytime. But we can take some precautions to minimize this risk. Let's see what we can do to keep our blog's domain name safe from hackers.

Register Domain Yourself

Let's say, you have decided to hire an expert for designing your blog's theme and for installing your blog CMS. His package also includes domain registration for you. Beware and never fall in this trap. Always register your domain yourself. The person who registers the domain with his name, address, email and credit card details is the legal owner of the domain. So, if your designer is registering a domain name for you, he will be the legal owner of the domain, not you. Once you have decided to register a domain name, make sure to check that your domain registrar is ICANN accredited.

Use WhoIS Guard

Almost every domain registrar provides whois guard subscription on yearly basis to protect your sensitive contact information. Keeping your registration information public invites spammers and domain hackers, especially if your blog or web site gets popular. With WhoIS guard protection enabled your contact information is kept secret preventing any unwanted customers filling your inbox with junk.

Lock Your Domain

Always keep your domain registrar's lock enabled to prevent any unsolicited 3rd party domain transfer requests. That's how domain hackers steal domains. Locking your domain to your domain registrar ensures that no unauthorized domain transfer can take place.

Enable Account Activity Alerts

Some good domain registrars provide the facility of email alerts for any account activity. You can see below, how I regularly receive security alerts whenever any activity is performed in my domain account.

The security notification includes user name, IP address, time stamp and modification done for specific domains. Ask your domain registrar whether they provide similar security alerts or not. Normally, this is service is free of cost.

Keep Registration Information Up-to-date

Whenever you register a domain, you provide 3 types of contact information to the domain registrar.

1. Registrant's Contact
2. Administrative Contact
3. Technical Contact

The first one is of course your own contact information, the person who is registering the domain. Normally, if you are maintaining your blog on your own, you must provide the same contact information in the other two, as you gave in the 'Registrant Contact'. Always, keep your contact information updated. As soon as you change your email, phone or mailing address, do update your contact information in the domain account. If you forget to do this, you will not receive any notifications, alerts and reminders from your registrar and you may end up loosing your domain.

Keep Domain and Hosting Separate

Are your web host and domain registrar separate? If not, think about going this way. These days almost every web hosting service provider is coming up with hosting plans that include free domain with hosting package. I would never advice to go with this kind of arrangement, as it gives complete control of your hosting and domain to one company. In future if you are not satisfied with the hosting service and want to switch, they can create trouble for you by locking your domain and preventing any transfer.

Renew In Time

As your domain expiration time approaches, your registrar sends you several reminders for renewal. Ignoring these reminders and not renewing your domain in time can cost your very dearly. After expiration date, your domain goes into redemption grace period, and you can still get it back. But it will cost you anywhere between $100 or $200. So register your domain for long period (2 or more years) and renew in time to prevent any unwanted expenses or loss of domain. The best strategy is to register a domain name for long period (let's say about 5 years) and annually extend it for one year adding it to that final year. This way your domain expiration date will always remain that many years (5 years in our example) ahead.

Last Piece of Advice

And last but not the least are some general security concerns.

1. Use a separate email account for hosting and domain.
2. Use strong passwords and change them frequently.
3. Keep a back up of your password and registered information.
4. Do not go to your registrar's site via email links. Keep the habit of manually typing the address. This extra burden can save you falling into trap of hackers and phishing sites.

What Else I Have Missed?

I would like to hear more new methods you may have used to keep your domain in safe hands. What other safety precautions you implement to keep your domain safe?

Tips for new bloggers

If you write only for yourself or people that know you and your blog, it’s ok to just post your content. But if you wish to reach readers that may not known to you, follow these –

Copy your blog address and with that make searches in all major search engines. First time you may see that they haven’t indexed you blog. But as you do query, search engines will come to see what is in your blog so that they can show it later when other people will search topics , relevant to your published contents.

Do not ever publish anything only to test in your blog. Why ? Search engine may index that useless pages. Sometimes these kind of test posts with nothing, can be shown at an upper position than that of your original content pages. To test all your settings set a test blog and play there. After you finish apply the changes to your original blog. Again, before posting, check whether your post title is ok or not. Because blogspot will take the first segment of the post tile to make the post page url.

Try to guess or use tools to know, from which reign majority of your blog readers come . If they are from a reign where provided internet connections are too slow, you should not load your blog with heavy contents like – numerous long posts on main page, high quality images, heavy flash files and unusual scripts. Longer loading time may force your readers to leave your blog.

Let other know about what you are writing. How? By sending 100 of mails to unknown addresses? No. Search blogs of your interest. Go there. Leave your comment along with your blog address. Those bloggers, even some of their readers may get back to your blog. If possible leave a relevant question there, so that a blogger feel interest to visit your blog before answering.

Join different communities and forums. Publish your blog address there.

When you are preparing to write something, think about the words that best present the subject matter. Put those words relevantly into the title of your post.

Try to do post regularly if possible.

Put your blog address whenever you mail someone.

Try to keep pace with latest buzzes and publish them before some other do so before you.