Key Merger for Black Enterprise!

Black Enterprise and Film Life Inc. have joined forces to create ABFF Ventures, a cooperative vehicle to further leverage Film Life Inc's American Black Film Festival mission of "giving content makers of color from the worlds of film and TV a supportive platform for networking, learning, and showcasing art." 

Adding Meta Tags and Key Words to your Blog script!

OK. So you've started blogging and you're getting a trickle of visitors to your account. This is a good thing, keep posting quality content oriented blogs on a consistent basis. 

Choosing the right Passion to Blog on and Profiting.

I spoke the other day of allowing your passion to dictate your niche. This is a highly rational approach to blogging.  Rather, let me clarify this by saying if you're using your blog to establish an audience and build a relationship, then following your passion is an effective course to take. The alternative is a heavy onslaught of hard sell tactics associated with what I like to call "quick sell" blogging that serves only to redirect the audience to a website and some product purchase. 

Niche Marketing is not restrictive marketing

Keeping focused

I wanted to get a blog entry in even as I’m researching several topics to be shared in the coming days and weeks. This will be just a word of encouragement to find your passion and stick with it. 

To Niche or not to Niche

Anyone interested in blogging either as a livelihood or for just a part-time passive income will hear plenty about finding your “niche’. When I think of the term “niche” from a social ecological perspective, I think of limiting, and confinement to a societal role that is not conducive to personal growth beyond a strictly imposed environmental role expectation.  Now I understand the intent of the term “niche” as it relates to internet marketing. It is designed to place oneself in the best position to make sales by focusing on a specific target market and becoming an expert in that one subject matter while avoiding competing against the major players in the general marketing industry. I think that it’s important to remember that you’ll never get to the place where you are the SOLE authority on any one subject matter, and even if your “niche” content is not directly related to internet marketing, you’ll still be required to know many aspects related to any particular product or service. 

Don’t let your Niche confine you:

Let’s say for instance, you say that you want to blog on the broad area of playing the guitar. Well a “niche” authority will want you to narrow down your focus to say “lead”, “rhythm” or “bass” guitar. But since those instruments already have the “monsters” of the industry blogging on them, some would suggest that you consider narrowing your choices down even farther to a less competitive market, say banjo or ukulele. However, if your passion is not with those instruments, but with the three former, then you’re not going to be as dedicated in committing to the ukulele “niche” than you would say to lead, rhythm or bass guitar. 

Go with your PASSION

And if you’ve had experience in all three instruments to include an extensive knowledge of performance and theory on each, you could establish three different blog segments that will give instruction on each instrument. And for a person who is a beginner, they will be able to learn from either block of instruction and not realize that you’re not the “very best” lead, rhythm or bass player in the world. And if you have experience in ensemble playing and arrangement you’ll be able to start yet another blog that gives instruction on combing all of those instruments to make music together, what their roles are when engaged together and how they accompany other instruments in an even larger ensemble as a complete unit. 

This is similar to establishing a platform for your marketing. You’ve figured out what niche or various number of niches that you’d like to specialize in, but you also need to figure out how you’re going to relate them to one another and also communicate them to your targeted market. 

Refer to the Experts

Rather than viewing the experts in a “niche” as someone to shy away from, while cloistering away into a specialized content area, incorporate elements of their particular strengths into your blogs or choice of marketing by giving them legitimate recognition when including blurbs of their content expertise into your subject matter. You can do this during the critical analysis portion of your text during your research of the literature and resources already successfully practiced in that niche. 

The Short and Long of it

Let’s say, for instance, you wanted to blog on the SEO topic, “laser targeted key words”. You could obviously expound on the topic while referring to personal experience or expertise. You could also refer to any hard or digital copies of materials that you’ve gathered from clinics or seminars that you may have attended. Another way is to get resource materials would be to simply Google “laser targeted key words”. Such a search would render more than 1 million related articles that you can refer to, but remember that although your immediate intent is to blog on that specific topic, your long term goal is to establish yourself as a reputable resource who provides rich content for that particular market. 

This approach doesn’t make you the “be all, know all” subject matter expert, but it can establish you as a reliable resource for those seeking to further their knowledge in that particular niche market.

Copyright © 2014 · Paul S. Jones · All Rights Reserved