What Can Pepsi Teach You About Blogging? Part 2
Posted on December 6, 2007 - Filed Under Marketing Strategies
In Part 1 of this topic, I talked about how Pepsi usurped Coke by diversifying their products. As Internet Marketers, there are similar benefits that we can gain by following PepsiCo’s move to diversify their product range. In this post I will elaborate on further benefits in addition to those listed in Part 1.
Converting the Frequent Visitors. When you are in consumer marketing, a large percentage of your customers will remain in the gray zone. These are customers that have not committed themselves to your brand or blog. You are well familiar with them - they are those who will come back to your blog frequently to check if you have any interesting posts, but do not subscribe. And they form a very large part of your audience. In a sense, they have not reached the tipping point yet to convert into loyal subscribers and lurk under the “Direct traffic” segment of Google Analytics or make up part of the “referred traffic” from social networks.
Pepsi understood the economics of converting this group of “unconverted” consumer base - or the brand switchers. To convert them, a special strategy was needed to convert them into loyal consumers. Pepsi had foresight that people will be increasingly concerned with weight and health matters, and launched Diet Pepsi in 1964 by replacing sugar with aspartame. This appealed to consumers who may like the drink but watch their intake because of weight issues. Diet Coke was only launched in 1982. After Diet Pepsi, followed a series of products like Pepsi One, Pepsi Wild Cherry, Pepsi Blue to capture different audience demographics. We see the same strategy happening with other brands of consumer goods - shampoo and toothpaste for instance.
How do you extend this strategy to your blog? Diversify yourself. Offer videocast or podcast to audiences who prefer listening and watching than reading. Publish eBooks for different topics of your blog. Some people read your blog because they want to learn about SEO tactics. Others want to learn how to make money from affiliate marketing. And yet others want to know how to build traffic. These are your “niche” audiences who may be interested in only a particular topic. Create an eBook for them, and provide updates if possible. Provide an online interactive course teaching people how to make money. This will help to convert the large slice in your Google Analytics pie chart of return visitors to subscribers and even paid customers. The key is being able to promote your blog brand while similarly targeting segments within the scope of your target audience for increased conversion. The important thing to remember is that while diversifying yourself, you do not stray from the main focus of your blog and end up adding another 20 or 30 categories to your blog that are unrelated.
Diversifying Income Source. When you diversify yourself on your blog, you have a stronger representation of diverse segments of your target audience, and have the opportunity to diversify your income source. For example, if you are writing targeted eBooks for each segment of your target audience, the content will be highly specific and include important resources. You can sell your eBooks for a fee. If you have set up an online interactive course that consolidates all the important information into a 3 week or 6 week course, you can charge a fee for people to attend the course like what Brian Clark of Copyblogger has done. Similarly you can also package your lessons into mp3 / mov files instead where readers can easily pay for and download off your blog. There ARE other sources of earning income to your blog besides advertising.
Instilling Confidence in Your Stakeholders. By diversifying your blog, you not only increase your “market share” on the blogosphere, but you also instill confidence in your readers and advertisers. You show your readers that you are interested in reaching them effectively, and advertisers will be more assured that your blog will not close down in the next year or few months. Any blog that earns money from advertising alone is at the mercy of advertising networks and Google Page Rank adjustments. Look at traditional publishing. In its heyday, publishing companies earned a lot of money from advertisers but as more publications entered the market the slice of pie started to become thinner and thinner. Then came the invention of the Internet with no critical barriers such as geography and high printing costs, and many publishing houses closed down within a few short years. The publishing piece of the pie is now even smaller now that online publishing has entered the publishing game.
While it took quite a while before traditional publishing took a huge cut in profitability, do remember that things speed up on the Internet. A year’s development in online technology and publishing is equivalent to five years of development in publishing. Even now, Internet giants like Google are starting to change their policies. Google Adsense has remained largely unchanged in the past few years, but as other monetizing programs are now offering publishers other alternatives for earning money online, it has thinned out the slice of pie for Google and they are keen to keep advertisers happy. Thus, things are going to get tougher for online publishers who want to earn income from advertising alone. The next big thing on the blogging horizon is viral marketing and video blogging. Big money makers like Hollywood and the music industry are putting their money into viral videos. While I am sure that the blogging phenomena will stay for another 5-10 years, who is to say how drastically the form and shape of blogging will change?
By diversifying your income source and instead of relying on advertising alone, you will protect your blog business from shifts in the blogosphere as advertisers, search engines and other publishers fight to enlarge their piece of the pie. Having other sources of income like selling eBooks, an online course, or a tutorial package will cut out the middleman or third party and stabilize your blog income despite the changes in the blogosphere.
Do you have a strategy for diversifying your blog? Are you planning a campaign to reach segments within your target audience? Or do you think advertising alone is enough to give your blog a healthy income?
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3 Responses to “What Can Pepsi Teach You About Blogging? Part 2”
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Hi Ivy, I’ve just finished reading both parts of this entry and I really enjoyed it!
I do have a couple of ads on my site but not anywhere near as many as some blogs. I’m not even all that happy with the ads I have.
I never really expected advertising alone to generate a great deal of income, if any. However, I wanted to give it a trial run because I believe you can’t knock it till you try it. I will definitely be reviewing them shortly as they have not done me any favours so far.
You’ve already noticed that I do quite a few things on my site but as you say, I now need to find ways to promote the things I do in ways that will achieve better results. I’ll say more about this when I reply to your comment on my blog in just a moment.
Hi Ben,
Glad you enjoyed the articles and found my suggestions useful
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