Help with the future of my Blog direction

[impaul99]

I've hit the 2-year mark on my Blog and I'm looking for some feedback relating the future direction of my Blog.

I want to more tightly focus on a specific topic to help more people.

One of the things I've been doing as a consultant is helping small local businesses market themselves more effectively using the Internet. I was thinking about that as one of my possible new directions for the Blog.

I have a few other ideas for topics too, but I'd be curious to see what others would find valuable.

I wrote a more detailed post about it here:

The Future of Inspired Money Maker

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Manomanman]

How much money are you making with it right now?

Seems like you should just expand your niche slightly, or just scrap it an open up a second blog.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Manomanman

How much money are you making with it right now?

Seems like you should just expand your niche slightly, or just scrap it an open up a second blog.

Anywhere from $250 - $1,000/month right now.

I can do either of those scenarios - Scrap or Change my current blog to the new one. I've just had a tough time deciding which topic to focus on.

I remember watching a video by Steve Pavlina, in which he talked about the fact that his Blog is broad. His topic is PD, but that can mean a lot of things. He did this because then he has a wide variety of topics to write about.

The challenge with this approach is that you are then branding your Blog based on yourself. The "focus" comes in the form of a specific person, instead of a specific topic. Kind of like a celebrity Blog almost.

I could do something like that, and just write about a variety of topics, but I don't know if a broad audience like that is easy to build nowadays. With facebook/twitter etc. out there nowadays, I don't think people are as interested in following a person's life like they used to 3-5 years ago for example.

I do think they would follow a topic though, as you don't see that out there anymore. Less and less quality Blogs are being created in my opinion.

Most people have moved into microblogging with Facebook/Twitter etc.

[SelfAwareWorld]

Personally, I would keep what you've got and create more websites. I have a good friend who has multiple side (part-time) money makers and makes a living through the combined money from each. This is where having multiple websites can generate the cash you need. It's also neat to be able to run comparisons between the sights to see which one generates the most interest and then build on that site more.

[ellie]

Originally Posted by impaul99

Less and less quality Blogs are being created in my opinion.

A bit like mine

Ummm I would go into the area of PD, I don't find there are many PD blogs out there that at are rich in content, or maybe the problem is that I don't like how PD sites are presented. Most of them are just slapped together with no real thought...I'm talking about in a design sense and for some reason that seems to play a part on why I come back to one blog and not another. Although this site is an exception

I do you like your site paul, it's not my design style, but the design shows you are passionate about your area of interest and you have taken the time to present/market yourself.

I am a designer, so obviously I lean towards visuals as well as quality content.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by SelfAwareWorld

Personally, I would keep what you've got and create more websites. I have a good friend who has multiple side (part-time) money makers and makes a living through the combined money from each. This is where having multiple websites can generate the cash you need. It's also neat to be able to run comparisons between the sights to see which one generates the most interest and then build on that site more.

Well, I've got multiple sites already.

Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online - My main site.
Fitness Health and Healing - My Health and Fitness Site
RC Car Basher - RC Cars and RC Truck Bashing, Reviews and Videos - A site on the RC Car Hobby.
Aquarium Fish World - Freshwater Tropical Fish Blog - A site on the Aquarium Hobby.
plus a few smaller ones...

I can always start another one, but I'm looking for a new topic to write on as I've kind of ran out of things to say on the topic of my main site.

When I launched the site 2 years ago I wanted to cover the topic of the mental/spiritual side of making money. I've written over 389,000 words of content on the topic, plus a few eBooks. That's like writing more than 5 - 300 page ~ 75,000 word books on the topic.

If anyone is actually interested in making money, they can easily just read what I've already written and they'll find the concepts covered in detail. I'm always there to answer questions or offer coaching to people who are still haven't trouble making money after reading what I've already written, but most of the time the questions people ask have already been covered in my posts numerous times.

So now I'm looking to dive into something more specific and more fun. Small Business Marketing concepts keeps coming up as a logical choice since I've got real-world experience with multiple business ventures, working with companies with revenues of $0/year all the way to companies with revenues of over $2M/year. Most small business fall into that range somewhere.

I personally suck at sales, it's not my strength - so I learned how to increase the sales of companies with strong marketing to attract clients to the business. Most traditional "sales" has disappeared anyways as people no longer want to be sold anything - they prefer to buy themselves. That's why I believe marketing is so important today. Couple that with the fact that traditional marketing is DEAD, and you've got small businesses totally clueless how to attract customers.

The days of spending $1,000/year on a yellow pages ad and hoping for the best are dead. Nobody picks up the yellow pages anymore. It used to be that when a business had an ad in the yellow pages, it was usually a reputable company - especially when people saw the BBB logo in the ad along with "Established in 1981" or whatever. Nobody thinks like that anymore.

Everyone looks on the Internet for stuff, but small businesses are clueless how to market themselves I find. Most of them assign no value to their websites. Their sites look like crap, their "contact us" page is a broken link, their services page says "Coming Soon" for months if not years, etc. Then they complain "Oh, well we don't get any business from our website anyways."

It's like they think that creating a crappy 3 page website they got for free and slapping it on their ISP's free hosting subdomain will magically get visitors for them. Their pages often don't even get indexed by Google, and if they do, only based on their name - so if you search for their company name specifically sometimes you'll find them, but they don't understand that the customer doesn't KNOW their name in the first place!

Anyway, there's lots of very simple but effective marketing stuff I could write about for small business and it logically makes sense for my Blog.

However, I find that I'm still hesitant to go after that market for some reason and I don't know why.

Maybe it's too easy for me?
Maybe there's not enough growth for me in that area?
Maybe I'm bored of the topic already?

Part of me wants to start a Blog about something totally different that I don't really have too much personal experience with, like paranormal activity or something like that. Something that right now I know just a little about, but within the next 2 years I could learn a lot about it since I'll be focusing on it for 2 years straight.

Usually though, I get an intuitive insight into something like this pretty quickly so it's not really a "logical" choice anyways, but right now nothing is popping into my mind. I may not be asking the right questions, or maybe I'm not thinking of it the right way - for example, Blogging might not be the right medium for my next project...maybe video blogging is, or writing a book, or creating a course, or working on a collaboration with someone, or perhaps personal coaching for a while one-to-one instead of Blogging one-to-many??

[ellie]

Maybe it's be done to death?

There are so many AM explain marketing techniques.

I think though my favourite is yaro, who's not so much a AM but a problogger. But he mixes PD and business really well. His little words of wisdom, mixed in with business talk is a fantastic mix...well for me anyway.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by ellie

Maybe it's be done to death?

There are so many AM explain marketing techniques.

I think though my favourite is yaro, who's not so much a AM but a problogger. But he mixes PD and business really well. His little words of wisdom, mixed in with business talk is a fantastic mix...well for me anyway.

Most of the "Marketing" blogs out there are focused on "Make Money Online" strategies only though.

I was thinking more along the lines of helping small businesses to use the Internet, but it's not just about making money online. More along the lines of how to market your OFFLINE services ONLINE.

For example, lets say someone just started a photography business. I could help them get better ranked in their local area. Like for example teaching them how to dominate a 30mile radius from their home on the search engines. Or if they've been in business for a while, how to put together a proper referral system to attract more customer referrals.

It's a different twist than what most Make Money Online Marketing sites focus on. I wouldn't be teaching a photographer site owner how to install AdSense for example - I'd teach him how to capture his local marketplace etc.

The only thing is that I think a lot of the people who need to know this stuff may not really be looking for it.

Meaning, most small business owners who don't have good marketing programs don't value marketing so I don't know if they would be going online searching for marketing blogs.

I don't want to create a marketing Blog that just attracts other marketers, because the techniques I know work don't sound "cool", but they work in real life.

I see a lot of marketing blogs out there that are written by marketers and read 95% by other marketers... and all they talk about is the newest, most rediculous marketing "gimmicks" that sound cool, but nobody in the "real world" would ever implement them.

For example, a "real world" tactic for increasing referrals at your business, is to simply put up a sign on your wall where you customers see it that says "We accept referrals."

Simple, boring, but it fricken works! Cost $10 to make sign like that, or less.

When you visit some marketing Blogs though, they don't talk about simple/tested/boring things like this. They try to make marketing sound sexxy and cool, and try to convince you that you need to send each customer a singing telegram with a mascot dressed like your logo, and have the mascot repel down from a helicopter to catch their attention.

95% of small business don't have their marketing fundamentals down. That's what the problem is...that's what they need to learn in my opinion. Not gimmicks.

How many local businesses do you know that don't even have their own domain name for example? It's crazy.

[ellie]

Oh I see where you are coming from.

Oh yes please bring it on.

Something like "The tricks of the trade for marketing on the internet for small business owners". I would go for that for sure. I would go for that myself, especially as I am embarking on setting up my own e-commerce site. I know some rules, but not enough.

Yes AM, is just too blingy and a bit cheezy and you're right it's for a specific maket. If you could present your content in a way that didn't seem cheezy, then I think it would be fantastic. But I think you would have to do away with anything that has to do with AM on your site.

Well most local businesses around me have websites, in Australia most businesses have websites, it's just some are poorly designed, or the web developers/designers don't implement marketing SEO techniques.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by ellie

Oh I see where you are coming from.

Oh yes please bring it on.

Something like "The tricks of the trade for marketing on the internet for small business owners". I would go for that for sure. I would go for that myself, especially as I am embarking on setting up my own e-commerce site. I know some rules, but not enough.

Yes AM, is just too blingy and a bit cheezy and you're right it's for a specific maket. If you could present your content in a way that didn't seem cheezy, then I think it would be fantastic. But I think you would have to do away with anything that has to do with AM on your site.

Well most local businesses around me have websites, in Australia most businesses have websites, it's just some are poorly designed, or the web developers/designers don't implement marketing SEO techniques.

I think I'm having trouble deciding between A or B or C because none of those are the right path.

The right path could be a combination of A,B,C or none of them at all.

I'm still working on it. I've been getting some insights lately and just going along with them.

Maybe I don't need a 2 year plan...maybe I just need to see what I'm inspired to write about day-to-day.