Seth Godin has written a concise post about how small businesses can leverage the power of the internet to grow their customer base. This includes a barebones and very simple marketing strategy that is most suitable for business owners who are not web savvy.
His suggestions differ from elaborate SEO campaigns and only involves three easy DIY steps.
Set up a simple blog on a free or paid blog host. Write some posts about your business service and include your contact details. Build a Squidoo lens with details about the nature of your business. Include RSS feeds and set up a guestbook to include testimonials. Take some pictures which include the company logo. Upload them to Flickr. Connect with your customers and ask them to set up Squidoo lenses or blog about your business.What happens after you’ve done all three steps? Seth suggests an outcome:
A month later, if someone types, migraine acupuncture des moines, into Google, they ought to find you. Or pet store 10706. The beauty of your situation is this: if only 5 or 10 new people a week find you via this ring of links and google searches, you’re going to have a shot at doubling your customer base within a year. For $60.
Squidoo lenses do generally rank well on search engines for uncompetitive keywords and the same could be said for any other Wordpress.com or Blogger blog.
The main problem I see in this strategy is the difficulty in getting one’s customers to actually build lenses or write blog posts which target your product or service. Not very likely, in my opinion. It would be much easier to hire someone to put up hundreds of Squidoo lens, which brings me to another point..
Squidoo lenses can be a tad spammy. Some of the ones I’ve seen have content that are rehashed, rewritten and are generally uninteresting. I’m also not a fan of it’s homogeneous lens designs, which detracts from actual branding.
As such, I can only see Squidoo being used as a means to do two things: 1) Drive traffic to your website (if your lens ranks well) and 2) Provide links to your website to help it rank (Many lenses are needed).
A full post on using Squidoo for your blog and website is in order and I will explore these strategies in greater detail. Seth’s article does however bring out an important principle that I want to highlight.
Monetization for the Small Blog: Choose the Right Money Maker
Seth’s article was on small businesses developing an online presence to gain new customers and I think the general principle behind it applies to small blogs or new blogs with little daily/monthly traffic as well.
The main point is this: Even if very little people (5 or 10 new people a week) visit your website and come to know about it, your reader base will still gradually increase over the long term
To put it in terms of website monetization, making money from your blog doesn’t just depend on heavy traffic flow but also the quality of traffic and your ability to retain them as an audience or convert them as customers.
This means that a new blog shouldn’t entirely focus on contextual ads which are very largely dependent on the amount of pageviews or visitors you have.
An example: You might even get 500 visitors a day to your blog and earn $5 a day. Or you can have only 30 and earn $70 from commissions by promoting affiliate programs that perfectly fit their needs.
A lack of traffic doesn’t mean an inherent inability to make money, though there is some evidence of a correlation. Even if your blog has a tiny audience, these visitors can translate to long-term profitability if you know how to promote affiliate programs which offer recurring income.
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