Ideas for Business

COMscore, a leading internet research firm, released their October 2008 Search Engine usage statistics a few days ago and Google still retains a sizeable lead on all other Search Engines combined.

Google led the U.S. in search with 63.1 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo (20.5%), MSN (8.5%), Ask (4.2%), and AOL (3.7%).

Of the 12.6 Billion searches by U.S. residents in October Google provided results for 8 billion of those an increase of 7 percent from September of 2008. Yahoo and MSN came in a distance second and third, 2.6 Billion and 1.1 Billion respectively, as Google continues to increase its search footprint in the US market.

This is an area where many business owners are divided. There are pros and cons to both types of marketing, but really, there`s no reason not to do both if you are already considering direct mail. Since email marketing costs virtually nothing, it doesn`t add much to the marketing costs and even if you end up with just a few people who take you up on the offers you send out, it will be worth it.

Direct mail is still used by many because of the effectiveness of actually putting information in paper form into the hands of the consumer. However, it is fairly expensive and you will find that you need to have a pretty decent budget if you decide to go with this technique.

Marketing is something that every business needs to do. Whether you are going with email marketing or direct mail, it`s a good idea to consider the possibility of doing both. After all, you can never have too much publicity.

Direct mail may be expensive, but there is a good reason companies continue to use it.

One of the best ways to sell on your blog is targeting different parts of your audience. This strategy works well because the people you target will feel like you’re talking to them personally. This personal touch is crucial in internet business because buying things online can often be a impersonal, cold activity. Anything you do to make your sales process more personal can only increase sales.

By being specific with who you’re writing for, you’ll find that people will react positively and your sales will increase.

To explain my point, let’s look at a couple specific examples.

Examples of Specific Content for Subgroups

Pretend you have a online retail shop that sells mp3 players. You can do a little brainstorming and come up with subgroups in your prospective customer base. Here are two that I thought of, audiobook listeners and exercise buffs.

For audiobook listeners, I would write content like the following:

Top 10 Mp3 Players for Audiobook Fans
Top Places Online to Buy Audiobooks
How to Connect Your Mp3 Player to Your Car Stereo

For exercise buffs, I thought the following content might work:

10 Lightweight Mp3 Players for Fitness Freaks
Hitting the Gym? Here are 50 Energetic Tracks to Work Out To

Let’s look at an example of someone who doesn’t sell as many products as a retailer. For example, consider a first-time author of a health cookbook. How can she segment her audience?

To segment her audience, I thought about reasons why someone would want to buy a health cookbook. These two came to mind, increase energy and avoid sickness.

For the individuals that want more energy, she could write content like this:

Feeling Lethargic? Then Eat These 10 Healthy Energy Boosting Snacks
7 Meals That Will Increase Your Energy (Includes Recipes)

For health conscious people that want to avoid sickness, she could write blog posts entitled:

It’s Flu Season, Fight Back With These 7 Organic Meals
Starting to Feel Sick? Eat These Foods to Push Back the Sickness Monster

The previous examples were for product based businesses. What if you have a service based business?

Here are two content suggestions I would give to a wedding consultant in Dallas, Texas, USA.

How to Plan Your Dallas Outdoor Wedding Without Going Crazy
12 Affordable Yet Classy Places to Have Your Dallas Wedding

Over to You

What different subgroups are in your target audience? What kind of content can you create to reach those subgroups?

Also, if you’d like some suggestions of content topics for your blog, feel free to tell us about your business. I’ll give some suggestions and hopefully, other commenters will too.

If you`ve been in business for a while, it might be time to update your logo and other graphic design elements. While it`s a good idea to keep things the same to a certain extent, keep in mind that some graphics can make your business look dated and out of touch.

Updating your graphic design can be done in one of two ways. You can either change everything completely and rebrand your business, or just update the existing look.

Going for a full makeover can be hazardous. While it ensures that you have the chance to choose a great, timeless design this time around, you are also discarding the branding that you`ve worked hard on. However, a simple update might not be enough for some logos. Since graphic design has a huge impact on how we perceive businesses, it`s a good idea to think carefully about this before you make a decision.

Graphic design works to help you brand your business, but making changes to it can cause problems if you end up going with something completely and utterly different.

I recently opened my RSS reader to get caught up on my business reading. I was greeted with these eight new posts from a particular blog.

Would you have clicked and read any of these posts?

The first post got me curious and I read it. However, I skipped the other posts because their titles didn’t seem useful, interesting, or relevant.

This small event reminded me of the importance of writing attractive post titles.

Judging a Post by the Title

Those seven posts that I didn’t read may have been great posts, but since the titles were subpar, I didn’t even read them.

It may be unfair to judge a post by the title alone. But in our busy world where time and attention are scarce, people are making quick judgments on what information they will consume.

Usually your post titles are the first words people notice. Those words are the prominent words on RSS readers, search engine results pages, and social media sites like Digg. When internet users land on your blog home page, they’ll look at your titles and see if it’s worth reading your blog.

Writing Great Titles

Luckily, you don’t have to be an expert wordsmith to write good titles. There are simple yet effective principles. I’ll talk about some of these principles in future posts, so stick around.

Until then, here are 22 title templates that work well. Try them out on your next posts.