Friday, April 13, 2007

I'm sitting in my car when I see a magazine salesman coming up to the window, trying to sell me a copy of "Good Housekeeping". Another of their lot was trying to sell a copy of "Maxim" to my mother.
We didn't buy either. There was nothing wrong with the products; both are excellent, world-class products (I can certainly vouch for Maxim ;) though I'm not too sure about Good Housekeeping).
This is what happens when you've got a great product but you don't identify a target audience: no sales. Period. Marketing your product is thus as important as having a great product. Maybe even more important.
Contrary to popular belief, Marketing is not just about making awesome ads. The first step is to find a target audience and then create a campaign that will convince it. Just having a great campaign probably won't result in a sale either (unless the customer is an idiot).
You can't sell a garage-lock to a guy that doesn't have a garage, even if you've convinced him that you have the finest garage-lock in the market.
Take a look at some successful products around you. Most of them have done well because the marketers identified a target audience and worked to sell it to that very audience by developing a great sales pitch.
This applies as much in the online world as it does offline. Websites (blogs included) have to identify a target audience and sell themselves to it. Of course, this stage comes only after you have something worth selling (please note that I am not using the word sell literally). For a website that something is either great/unique/quality content or a great services.
The reason that most blogs (mine included) aren't too popular is because:-
1. they don't have anything unique (most are personal blogs)
2. they don't have great content in addition to being non-unique
3. they don't have a target audience
Who are you writing for? Why should people read your blog/website? Will it make any conceivable difference to them if they didn't read it?
The answers to these questions most often are: dunno, dunno and no (these are also my own answers). And the result is obvious.

P.S. I have no idea why I wrote this. It's a strange post, admittedly, but quite relevant to most bloggers. And I'm not writing this to discourage anyone from blogging. And yes, I have written a rather meandering post where I've been moving back and fort between marketing, target audiences and great products.

7 comments:

akshat said...

The fact that the products are not given to these vendors by the marketing departments of the products mentioned above should count to the fact that these magazines do take their product with a target audience. These vendors are given these magazines by some idiot newspaper-stand wala guy who wants to sell their extras easily. Dhruv Bon Voyage my friend sorry we cudnt meet before, dunt worry vll meet after u return from london. Enjoy!!!

RaSh said...

I agree wid d blogger wala part.. And it even happens wid group blogs (PS: Especially wid class blogs :D)

But yes, with time, even personal blogs become popular, among ppl wid similar interests.

Anyway, are u really interested in selling ur blog? (Again not the literal selling) Isnt it better to have just a few ppl reading it?

Abhishek Nandakumar said...

You need not have any target audience when you start blogging. They were always meant to be personal (we)blogs. Corporate blogging and blog marketing started only with personal blogs.

In fact, personal blogs have become such a great resource that if I don't find some very specific information I'm looking for on Google Web Search I just use Google Blog Search. Most times I end up being more satisfied than I expect.

Also if you've noticed, because I sure have, Google's Blog Search hosts content from any blog it can find, and the indexing is almost instantaneous(if your blog is part of their site list). Google's Web Search is more conservative and need not crawl over your site. That is strange as if they are running from two different databases, rather than two related tables in one database.

When it comes to statistics and visitors, the amount of content your blog has is a direct proportionality to the number of visitors.

Aditya said...

By the way, who won the Chandigarh bike marathon?

RG said...

What has the Chandigarh marathon have to do with...

nevermind.

Aditya said...

curiosity you see

Aditya said...

I just checked out madrasgin.com
well done, its awesome