The Online Sunshine Plan
Posts Tagged charles heflin
The 5-part formula for building your community – an introduction
Posted by robertworstell in Marketing Research on October 30, 2009
The O.G.R.E.S. method of community building
Charles Helfin figured out these 5 steps years ago and they are still the most breaking-edge method of finding and building your community, let alone learning how to serve it. Swap out “target audience” for community and this makes even more sense.
1. Observe – Using resources at your disposal you observe content that is published that is of interest to your target audience. (First, of course, describe your target audience. You’ve got to know them inside out. Demographics? Hot buttons? What REALLY motivates them?)
2. Gather – As you locate meaningful information, Gather it into the technologies (social networks) that you have chosen. (You must find very good resources for documents, audios, videos, photos, pdf’s, software, etc., that would be in high demand by your target market… Gather this information into the social networks you have chosen.)
3. Reward – Spend time in each network Rewarding other members by voting for their stuff (if you find it useful). Comment on the posts they make, reply to comments you receive. This is all rewarding for the recipient and is integral to fostering relationships.
4. Engage – Use the content that you Gather to engage your target audience. Use the tools available in the social networks you have chosen to Engage your friends and followers.
5. Seek – Look for friends in your target audience who also Observe, Gather, Reward and Engage. (As you do your “Gather” step, keep a sharp eye out for content that would appeal to others who want to Engage. You are looking for networkers, and the more value you can bring them, the more of them you will find and the more will find you.)
All relationships are founded, fostered and built by using this formula either online or off. Your relationship with your family members has this formula at its core. For example, you visit the grocery store and “observe” the high price of milk. You then “Gather” that and other supporting information into your memory banks. After that, you “Engage” a member of your family with this information. In relationships you “Seek” others who may be interested in hearing about the high price of milk (aka. your target audience).
As in all relationships, your content must be targeted to your market – what they value, what they want. If your gathering and engaging isn’t relevant, then your relationships will suffer in life as well as on the Internet.
Some additional posts of interest:
An open letter to Bruce – Keywords are like building a PB & J
Posted by robertworstell in Website Marketing on September 1, 2009
How to get started with keywords is like how to make a PB and J sandwich.
You have to start with the goal in mind. In the sandwich case, this is getting a full stomach – or at least one that isn’t growling.
In keywords, we are just looking for something that people are looking for. What words do people use to find something?
But let’s take it better than that – narrow it down. The product in keyword search is to fulfill your passion. Still too broad, isn’t it? OK, let’s take a specific example. I want to learn website marketing so I can make money to pursue my dreams. “Make money” is the key. A person earns money by offering a valuable solution to people that they can pay you for.
So we have to find something we can sell.
Let’s go to the guy who’s becoming the grand-daddy of online marketing: Charles Heflin -”The purpose of Market Research“
Where you lay your focus is the biggest question. If you already have an online business then you already know where to begin. If you are looking to start over or are completely new then you have to go through a process of discovering markets that are profitable enough for you & are appealing to you. Do you want a fortune 500 CEO’s salary or are you content making $3000 a month? Only you can answer this question and only you can find the market that meets YOUR demand.
If you are new or starting anew then you need market research to tell you which market to get into based on:
Profitability
Product availability
Your desire to succeed in that market
Time
Profitability – One corner of a market may be wildly more profitable than another. Which one is the best?
Product availability – Now that you’ve determined your most profitable market are there any products that you can sell in order to monetize it?
Your desire to succeed in that market – Are you passionate about the market or are you just mildly interested? The less interested you are in the market you choose, the less likely you are to succeed in it.
Now, note that one line he places in there: “Your desire to succeed in that market.”
For me, this brings to mind Napoleon Hill and his “BURNING DESIRE” (he always capitalized it in his book, too.) You have to be willing to devote everything to getting what you want most out of life. Or, find out what you are devoting your life to…
Heflin also covers this in another online lesson over at his site:
Money making is not real!
Providing quality products and services to people is real & that always leads to money! Money is an expression of appreciation from one person to another. Expressions of appreciation do not exist without people.
If you try to make money,. you’re in for a long and fruitless ride.
Instead, please people within a subject matter you are passionate about, You’ll never grow tired of growing your business and your business income will grow as a natural result.
Most people fail to make a living online because they’re not truly passionate about the path they’re on, so they quickly lose interest or quit altogether.
Find your passion, stay the course and your prosperity will find you. Unfortunately, most people never take the time. It takes time to gain specialized knowledge through education and then market research.
Your monetary reward is always directly proportionate to your contribution to humanity. Your contribution to humanity is rewarded with money. You can not make more money than other people are willing to give you in exchange for a genuine product or service.
If you don’t know your passion, but you know your immediate goal, that will do. What are you most trying to accomplish in life right now?
OK, let’s find something that you are interested in about that goal and some product you can offer which you would be interested in learning all about. The simple reason here is that you have to provide continuing content, and the only way you are going to do that is to keep blogging about something that you can stay interested in.
You mentioned that you needed to know more about keyword research. It just so happened that I stumbled upon one of my old blogs which was successful at it’s purpose but otherwise was lousy at ranking on Google for the keywords I kept using.
Now, in order to really do a study of this, I am going to use this blog to dissect that site and also tell you how it should have been done. To do that, we are going to align our research in a very practical fashion – to eat my own sandwich, I’m going to align this blog I’m writing from with an affiliate product – Key Evoy’s Site Build It.
So we will then have an outlet for my research (which was always the Online Sunshine Plan’s purpose) and also a test of the same stuff I’m spouting here.
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Get your bread and fixings set – our next post will be on exactly how to back-engineer a site to find out what keywords people are looking for with that product you picked to sell, and how I violated this on that successful-failed blog.
Some additional posts of interest:
Creative Commons License
This work by Dr. Robert C. Worstell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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