How To Get People To Care
You can’t get people to care about what you care about. Not even the best persuasion does that. Yet as a marketer, it’s absolutely your responsibility to talk about the topics your audience already cares about.
To accomplish this, sometimes you have to do a bridge.
Let me give you an example of a bridge.
Most marketers don’t want to hear about excel spreadsheet formulas that help to track and optimize Pay Per Click ad spend, right? It’s heavy, boring math stuff.
So start by talking about something they are interested in. Like The Single Most Effective Fool-Proof Method For Saving Your Ass On Pay Per Click Ad Spend. Then I segue into how creating that repulsively boring excel spreadsheet with such and such formulas will help them achieve it.
Another example:
I despise the nuts and bolts of real estate investing. It bores me to tears.
Yet I like learning about general “money principles.”
So that’s what might be focused upon before bridging to real estate investing.
Here’s Your Big Conundrum
You have to have an audience reading it in the first place to have that kind of knowledge about your audience. You need feedback. And your audience doesn’t exist or it isn’t big enough.
That’s why you need to FOCUS LESS ON YOUR BLOG, and go to a bigger blog and see how their audience responds (and later you bring that intelligence back to your blog).
How To Get Started and Get Noticed …
Even If You Don’t Know Exactly What To Create
You’re just itching to get this “online thing” going.
But you’re not quite sure who you are and what you want to create – let alone who it is that you’re supposed to be writing for (i.e. target market).
Maybe you’ve been creating some content to the tune of crickets.
Here’s my strong recommendation:
Consider doing some guest posts on larger blogs for each of the topics you like to write about and see how people respond.
Here’s the deal.
When you write for other, larger blogs, you get feedback in the form of comments, private messages and from the blog owner itself. That’ll likely bleed into social media too. This process can guide you in which direction to take your marketing.
How To Get Feedback From A Real Audience
The tough part about just getting started with marketing, and having a blog is you don’t get much feedback on what people like.
So, it’s a good idea to do a few guest posts for blogs in different niches, because they already have big(ger) audiences. This will give you feedback. This will be your guiding light. This will be your market research (part of it, anyway)
You don’t need to have a big blog yourself to write for big blogs. As long as your content is good, most bloggers don’t care if you’re just getting started and finding your niche.
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Ask questions in the comments.
Hi Eric, how does one go about becoming a guest blogger for other, bigger blogs? Is there a special, foolproof technique?
Penny, nothing is foolproof, and everything is common sense. Start with the blogs you’re already reading and/or your target market is already reading. Inquire using their contact form. That’s a start.
Great advice Eric! I’m going to put a “hot model” in the blog to bridge people into my boring weight-loss stories 😉