Start the year by getting customers not traffic,target your customers

Stephanie Staidle

There is a big ol' myth about business that as long as you have a slew of customers coming in, then you'll be rollin' in the dough.

Well, yes, traffic helps, but if it isn't targeted to match your business product, you are wasting money, time, and loads of energy.

Would you rather have a million people coming into your store and only one person buy from you, or 10,000 people entering your store and 1,000 leaving as buying customers?

Honestly, it is better to have LESS traffic that is concentrated to be a good match for your business, than massive 'low-quality' traffic (aka, customers who don't want what you got!). To know how to target customers for your business, you need to get inside the mind of your customer.

Here are 5 questions you must have the answers for, to help you understand your target customers and position your marketing and business brand accordingly:

1. What bothers your customers about their life right now? As a business, you provide a solution to your customers' problems. It is crucial to understand what their problems are! An understanding of what your customers are struggling with will also help you create future products and services to match their needs.

2. What excites your customers more than anything in the world- what is their dream life? Customers will buy from you because your product provides a new possibility for their life. You want your product to assist them in reaching their goals and align with their dreams.

3. What scares them? What keeps them awake at night? Ok, we aren't talking about werewolves. Every potential customer has real, valid fears. If you can understand their fears and create a product with a marketing campaign to address them, your business will have a powerful advantage.

4. What interests them? Where do they hang out? Now that you know more about how you can meet your customers' needs, you need to know where to find them. By understanding their interests, the websites they are on, the books they read, you can target your marketing campaign to areas that are brimming with buyers.

5. What is the #1 problem in their life right now that, if you could solve, they would pay any amount of money? Ah, here is the clincher. As you tune in to your customers' needs, wishes, and fears you can really hit home with an understanding of the kind of solution you can provide that will have them pulling out their credit cards. This isn't meant to be manipulative- as a business you are solving problems and making a difference; however you obviously want to make a profit doing so (otherwise, you wouldn't be a business owner). By gaining an understanding of your target customers' top priorities and the things they are willing to pay money for, you can fine tune your products and marketing campaigns.

In essence, as a business, you need to understand your customer and their story; you should be able to describe them in detail as though they are standing in front of you. In knowing your customer, you can serve them better.

Stephanie Staidle is a personal and professional development coach, an online entrepreneur, and founder of Cloud Renaissance-a website that empowers people to stop settling, live the life of their choosing and be their own boss.

10 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Blog

So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).

The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.

Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?

I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.

Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business:

1.    Fresh Content

Have you ever been to a website that said ‘last updated 1997′ or ‘last updated 254 days ago’? What impression does that give the reader? Nobody wants to visit a blog to see the same content all the time. Update your website and blog content at an asbolute minimum of twice a week to keep your content very fresh and current. Your content can be things like industry news, tips, advice, warnings, an update on your work/projects, feedback received from clients..etc.
It’s perfectly fine to write content and upload it to your website/blog and set it up to publish every few days. This way, you do all the hard work at the beginning and put your updates on auto-pilot whilst you research more ways of improving your blog.

2.    Article Marketing*

This is where you write articles not only for your blog content but also to distribute to article submission websites. You can usually put a link back to your website or blog within your article (usually in the author’s bio box). Article marketing is a great way of putting yourself “out there” as the authority and go-to person for your expertise area.

There are thousands of article submission websites that you can use to distribute your articles, but to start with i’d recommend Ezinearticles.com

*The same applies for Video Marketing

3.    Social Networking

The buzz word for the past few years. Incase you’ve been living under a rock recently this includes Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. Social networks are great to find like minded people who you know would be interested in your content. It’s very easy to target the demographic of your ideal blog reader using different social networks and by connecting with those people and sharing your thoughts you can easily gather quite a following.

It’s also very easy to link your blog to all your social networking profiles, so that when you update your blog all the other profiles get updated too.

4.    Viral Marketing

Ever seen one of those videos that everyone is talking about? Viral marketing is when your content (article/video/audio etc) is passed on from one person to their friends & contacts to see. Then those people will tell their friends about it, and so on. Before you know it, hundreds or thousands (sometimes millions!) of people have seen your content.

A good way of making your content viral is by discussing topical issues or adding some controversy into your message – it’s sneaky, but so what!

5.    Use RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The visitors and readers of your blog can ‘subscribe’ to your RSS feed and get an email update whenever new content is posted on your blog. It is an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog without having to actually go to your blog. RSS feeds can also be used to update other sites and social networks.

6.    Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

By manually submitting your blog to search engines helps your website/blog to be indexed and get ranked. Google and Yahoo! are the most popular search engines you want to ‘crawl’ your blog pages. Manually submitted your URL does not guarantee top ranking or indexing…there’s much more you can do to get your blog indexed quickly.

7.    Joining Forums

Relevant forums are full of your target readers. You are marketing yourself to find traffic to your website because people are interested in what you have to say. Become a member of a relevant forum for your industry connect with new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can click on it and read & subscribe to your blog.

8.    Visit other blogs

If someone comments on any of your blogposts, show your appreciation by also posting comments on their blogs. This helps form relationships with other bloggers. Also, you can add a link back to your own blog when commenting on someone elses!

9.    SEO Marketing

SEO is an entire industry in itself but a quick word on it here. Do ensure you use your relevant keywords in your content to attract the search engines. Getting a keyword density (ratio of keyword text to all text) between three and ten percent is recommended by most schools of thought (although this can totally depend based on what your competitors are doing on their sites). Don’t forget to do your keyword research first though – it’s pointless doing SEO for a keyword that nobody is searching for!

10.    Social Bookmarking

Not to be confused with social networking. Social bookmarking is when you submit your posts to sites which allows others who are members of those sites to track you back to your blog. For example, sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking sites.

About the Author

Internet Marketer Suraj Sodha is the founder of Internet Marketing Highway. He lives in London, England and runs a number of successful Internet businesses, including this blog. Suraj has consulted for & trained over 400 businesses since 2008, helping them use the Internet to get more clients & more sales.