Corbett Barr publishes a terrific blog called Think Traffic, all about how to get more traffic for your website or blog.
Corbett recently interviewed Derek Halpern, who runs another great blog called Social Triggers, which is about the intersection of psychology and online marketing:
I was really struck by one thing Derek said about breaking through plateaus with your blog, and realized that his advice applied to business as well.
So I chimed in with this video response:
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I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the recent video interview you did with Derek Halpern from Social Triggers.
One thing that jumped out at me was what Derek said about plateaus.
He talked about the fact that it’s common to hit plateaus when you hit certain numbers of subscribers to your blog, like 1,000, then 10,000, then 50,000, and so on.
And he said that if you want to break out of those plateaus, you need to do things differently because what got you here, won’t get you there.
It struck me that a lot of what Derek said applies not just to blogging, but to business as well.
My husband and I own a martial arts school in Brooklyn, NY called Urban Martial Arts and I blog about local business and local marketing at CarmenSognonvi.com.
Over the years we’ve definitely hit different plateaus in our business, whether it’s the number of students we have enrolled, or the amount of revenue we have coming in.
And what’s allowed us to break out of those plateaus is exactly what Derek talked about in your interview: finding a way to tap into a new market segment instead of hitting the same people over and over again.
Our core business is teaching kids karate classes, and the main market for that is parents looking for enrichment programs for their children.
But last year we were able to grow our school by adding an after-school karate program, which taps into the market of working parents who need someone to pick up their kids from school and keep them in a safe and positive environment.
This year we’ve been able to grow our business again by adding a kickboxing program for adults, which taps into the market of adults looking to lose weight and get fit.
As business owners, it’s easy for us to assume that we’ve saturated our market – but it’s simply not true.
So for any fellow business owners who watch this video, think about how Derek has been able to tap into different audiences to grow his blog – first he got in front of people who read social media blogs, then people who listen to podcasts on iTunes, and it sounds like next he’ll be hitting up people who read books from the Amazon Kindle store.
There’s no reason you can’t do the same thing in your business.
You just have to get a little creative.
Thanks for allowing me to share, Corbett.
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