How to use iStadia
Making Money Using iStadia #2: Goals, Target Market and Keywords

Set your goals

So if you haven’t done so, think hard about what you want to achieve with your business.

Think about how your online presence will fit into that.

What do you want to convey?

To whom?

What is special about what you have to offer?

What can you offer them that will bring them closer to buying from you?

If you don’t ask yourself these kinds of questions, and know what you want to achieve, then your marketing activity, whether on iStadia or elsewhere, is likely to be unfocused and at best “hit or miss”.

Identify your target market

Hopefully this is really obvious to you, but often people say to us “I’m not sure iStadia hits my target market”.

Let’s bust that myth right now.

Your content - and the keywords (next step) that it contains, will define the people that your content reaches - whether your profile or other content (later). In other words, we provide a platform that lets you reach your target market.

If you’re not in sport or exercise in some way, I’d recommend using other sites, but other than that iStadia does not limit the type of person that you can reach.

This is because the majority of our visitors come from search engines, where they find your content. That’s what’s so important about content. It really is the engine that drives the internet. Sure, you may have something to sell to your fellow professionals, but you most certainly don’t have to for iStadia to work for you.

Choose the keywords for which you want to be found (by your target market)

This is a really important step, and not to be skipped. Think about what people might actually search for, not clever or fancy terms that people don’t know. There are some great articles on iStadia that haven’t been read much because the titles were too ambiguous - clever even. On the web you have to give people signposts.

For example: “Sports Marketing” is a generic and very competitive search term. It attracts 9,900 searches a month on Google, but the competition for rankings means that your chances of getting onto page 1, and getting a share of those searches, is slim.

“Sports Marketing London”, however, gets somewhere in the region of 600 searches a month, but advertiser competition is low and you can be confident that if you are a sports marketing company in London the searcher is looking for what you have to offer, and not general information about the field.

Likewise, when I was working as a sport psychologist I changed my keyword strategy from focusing on “sport psychology” to “sport psychologist”. I got fewer hits, but more enquiries. Think about that for a moment....

The Google keyword research tool can help you by seeing how many searches a term gets, and how much competition there is for it.

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Over a series of articles will be exploring all of the steps outlined in the downloadable document Using iStadia to Make Money: Networking and Marketing your Business.

#1: Social Media is a Business Tool
#3: Optimising Your Profile




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Rob Robson
Co-founder, iStadia.com