What is a Blog Strategy?
In the case of most people doing business online today, the first thing they do in developing a strategy for marketing is to write a blog or set up a website. This is a great place to start, but it is not the be-all and end-all of online marketing. You need more than a few words on a website to convince people that they need to buy what you are selling. And quite honestly, no one wants to read what you are writing in most cases.
This is one reason why a blog strategy is vital to the success of your business. A blog strategy is a plan, a master plan that you will follow for the length of your business. In the case of an online business, of course you change your plan at any time, but by developing one early on, you can measure your success against where you thought you would be and determine what changes need to be made and when.
Included in your blog strategy is your main business plan – what you are selling, to whom, and how much you plan to make. Then, the hard work begins. You need to ensure that the item you are selling is focused enough so that it is not in direct competition with a hundred others just like it. You also need to find out who would by your product and why. If you don’t know that, you won’t sell one single item.
A product like Firepow can help you with these fairly significant issues. It will help you determine where your market is and how to get to it. It will also help you with automation of a lot of tedious blog tasks. Blogging is, after all, just an online diary, and that includes a lot of writing. A product like this can help automate those blog entries, leaving you more time to do other things.
FTC Friendly HealthCare Affiliate Marketing?
A few days ago a story broke that the FTC is planning on monitoring blogs and other websites for tainted reviews, a current BIG approach to affiliate marketing in healthcare and other markets. Excellent!!!! Since unwitting consumers are misled daily by reviews that are biased, this is a GREAT thing. For one, we might have more truth in advertising. For another, this is going to be a GOLD RUSH boon for ethical affiliate marketers who know how to position themselves and their products correctly.
So it comes down to this. Assuming you are an ethical online marketer, how do you stay out of harm’s way and/or handcuffs while profiting handsomely?
Picking a HealthCare Niche? Pick Women’s Healthcare!
According to ComScore, second only to consulting physicians, women turn most often to the Internet for health information. Of those women who use the internet, 85% have used it to research health issues and 63% have used it to research birth control specifically.
Overall, in the ComScore research report the internet came in second only to health-care professionals for health information. 82% turn to their doc or other healthcare provider, 60% to the internet and 51% to friends and family.
What topics to pick? Here are some major leaders with searches in multiple millions per month. Many of these topics and complementary available information products and affiliate offers have a large number of women searching for answers: pregnancy, cancer, diabetes, weight loss, fitness and depression.
Helpful hint: Take these and enter them into Google’s Wonder Wheel tool or KWBrowse. You will find more than you can handle as far as niches to explore.
Why is HealthCare Internet Affiliate Marketing Different?
OK, this might be a very rude newsflash for some, but it REALLY can’t be all about the money in health-care product marketing!!You’ve got someone out there buying your ebook or solution or physical product that may have a really big health problem. If you don’t help them, or worse if you screw them up, they lose and YOU lose. If you truly help them out, they’re likely to seek you out so that they can send MORE money to you than you asked for in the first place. This could be your next product or the raving fans in your continuity program upsell. They win, you win. Get the difference?
If this strikes a cord with you, read on. If not, you’re probably not going to want to learn how to make tons of money truly helping people, and you should move on. Don’t pass GO. Don’t collect a lot of inner satisfaction and money. Just move on.
Whatever the case, there is a LOT more to lose and people can literally get hurt if you just pick a health-care affiliate offer off the Affiliate network or CPA network or ClickBank shelf assuming that it’s all cool and groovy. These companies do screen for some level of quality in their offerings, but they are not healthcare professionals. So, how do you know if something is pure gold or pure crap? Rule #1: resist the human temptation to accept something as good just because it exists or is published on or offline. You should do some due diligence just like you would if you are buying a solution for any problem you are having.
Whether you search for affiliate products and programs by hand or use some of the very cool automatic search tools, you’re mainly looking at things like “gravity” and “ROI” and how much moolah is on the initial table. By the way, for market research from this perspective, which you still definitely need to do, the hands down BEST MARKET RESEARCH TOOL is Market Samurai…..and it’s only getting better! But the price will likely go up, so check out the FREE TRIAL of Market Samurai!
Anyway, moving along about the product quality research, here’s a dirty little known secret. There is some implication to your selling stuff as an affiliate that the FTC declares a tad wrong, or off-base enough that handcuffs come out…… even more so if you’re the author or manufacturer. Uh, it’s rough out there. Stay out of trouble! That brings me to Rule #2: buy the damn thing and test it out, read it, run it by healthcare professionals for some feedback, look for some evidence. Don’t promote it blindly just because it exists and has a high “gravity”-like measure. Not in the health-care arena! Very bad idea.
Rule #3 is overarching all of this. To quote Stephen Covey, “begin with the end in mind” and keep your prospect’s welfare above your desire to make bucks. The “end” in this case is the likelihood that you are going to help someone by promoting a product. If you do this, you will be rewarded RICHLY down the line because all of the massively important marketing principles related to building trust apply. If you don’t believe me, ask Frank Kern of Mass Control fame or Jeff Walker of Product Lauch Formula fame. You want to grow and keep a list of loyal customers who believe that you are offering stuff that truly has a chance to help them. If you are just peddling a few low quality ebooks and that’s the sum total of your business model, you’re missing the boat….BIGTIME!
If you like the gist of this and want to learn more about ethical healthcare marketing for massive value-added profit, visit us at HealthCareMarketingLab.com and you might want to check out Cureology.com where we look at the evidence behind what works in mainstream and alternative health-care.
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