Niche authority and expertise: obsess about details
If your business is specialty retail (bricks and/or clicks), blogging is one way to really set yourself apart from your competition. Because you occupy a niche, you should be seen by your customers as authorities, experts, and leaders in that niche. If you sell boutique clothing, you can blog about celebrity fashion and the upcoming season, or about developing a personal sense of style. You can obsess about the details of a particular brand of handbag or jeans. If you sell fine home furnishing, you can blog about the caliber of craftsmanship and skill that goes into the furniture. You can obsess about the details of fine quality and materials. If you are a coffee roaster, you can blog about fair trade issues, taste nuances in coffees, or share coffee recipes. You can obsess about achieving the perfect roast, the perfect blend. If you run a dayspa, you can blog about trends in spa therapies. You can obsess about the little details of the mind-blowing customer experience you’re trying to create. If you operate a bed & breakfast, you can blog about local attractions to attract potential customers into booking with you. You can obsess about what makes your part of the world so wonderful that people have to come visit. The possibilities are as endless as the number of specialty markets in existence.
Don’t hide from comments and problems, embrace them!
Specialty retail blogging is the next best thing to personal contact, because of the commenting functions that exist on all blogging tools (I use WordPress and design custom themes for it). Comments provide a way for you to interact with your customers that’s as easy to use as email. Commenting, however, provides one very important advantage over email: comments are public, which means they are the best kind of marketing and branding you could ever have hoped for.
A lot of people get skittish about this, because they’re afraid of getting angry comments. I’ve spent years working in specialty retail management, marketing, selling, and purchasing (the outdoor gear & clothing industry). Let me share something with you: you will never have a better opportunity to make a lasting and positive impression on a customer than when something goes wrong and you fix it. If a customer has a problem, that is a golden opportunity for you to fix that problem. This will cement your relationship with your customer, provide you with new opportunities to up- and cross-sell, and it provides your customer with an opportunity to spread good word-of-mouth about how well you handled the situation. Now, imagine this happening via comments after a blog post, for all the world to see how well you resolve the situation. Think that’s going to make a positive impression on potential customers? Hell yes, it will! Of course, if your customers are having problems because your service sucks, then you deserve to go out of business and a blog will not help you.
A picture is worth a thousand posts
When you’re blogging specialty retail, nothing helps like pictures. A hot new product just arrived? Take some pictures! Put them on the blog. Write passionately about how hot and new and cool the new products are. Tell people that if they mention this blog post when they make a purchase, they’ll get a little discount. There may be a story behind a particular product (this was often the case with outdoor gear, necessity being the mother of invention). Tell that story. When people buy into the stories behind a product or a service, the act of buying that product or service makes them part of the story. In their imaginations, they are now living that story. That’s always been part of the appeal of specialty retail markets like outdoor gear, gardening, cooking, fashion… almost any niche you can think of. Pictures are like giant magnets on your blog.
Some blogging services like Blogger let you upload pics from your cameraphone straight to your blog. I suggest you use at least a 3 megapixel digital camera. You should familiarize yourself with some sort of image-editing software so that you can quickly do basic tasks, like adjust brightness, crop, and resize pictures. Google’s Picasa is free and does a decent job at some of these things. Your camera may even come with its own software for such work.
