I’ve been telling my friends for some time now that blogging will soon be more popular than Myspace as a social medium on the internet. I just had a hunch.
When rapper 50 Cent gets his own blog you know something has shifted in the cultural matrix.
A recent Tech Crunch article just confirms my hunches. The numbers don’t lie.
That orange line. thats Blogger. Wordpress is another blogging platform. That’s the red line. While more common social networks like Facebook are rising, Blogger and Wordpress combined out number Facebook AND Myspace!
This might not mean much to the average socialite looking for the next hot party but to a small business this means everything! If you want to know how to reach your target audience consistently online, dump that Myspace page and build a Wordpress blog.
Trust me. You’ll thank me for it.
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Patrick of PWG Marketing has uncovered the key secret to small business marketing success. And that’s differentiating your business from the competition.
If you remember one thing from this post remember this: if you can’t find a way to differentiate your business from every other business that does what you do and if you can’t communicate that difference in a way that really matters to a narrow target market, then you’re basically in the commodity business. If I can’t tell how one business is different than another then I will use the only thing I can measure – price. Yes, the driving force in the commodity business is always price.
Seems obvious when you first look at it but I know from experience that the vast majority of small businesses tend to compete on price.
Some other points to consider:
Many small business start ups do this because they don’t want to spend the money or time that it takes to effectively distance themselves from the competition.
Big Box Stores will always be able to beat you on price! They have the volume and leverage. However, you can beat them on service, quality, specialization, and a host of other categories.
When it comes to setting your business apart a branding is always a great place to start. Consumers have two categories. Big time and Small time. Branding will make them associate you with Big Time even when you are a small business.
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As you may have noticed, I have made AFFORDABILITY the conerstone of my Graphic Design business. How is this possible, you ask. I have to admit before I read a few chapters from Selling Graphic Design by Donald Sparkman I wasn’t sure either.
The dilema I faced was that I didn’t want to be percieved as one of those cheap logo design websites. The price of their designs are great but the quality is poor. On the other hand, being that my target market was small businesses, I wasn’t sure if I could stick to the prices outlined in Gaphic Design Guild Handbook.
As I was working on my business plan I came across Sparkmans book and this chapter immediatly jumped out at me: “Selling Good Design to Clients with Low Budgets”.
In this chapter he gets right to the point:
“There is good, mediocre, and bad graphic design. What your clients get depends on your company’s knowledge and judgement, not their budget.”
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