It’s kind of odd how new bloggers wonder whether they will ever get popular, make money, or be a significant presence in their market niche.
I hear people say things like “There are so many blogs and bloggers out there. How can I compete with that?” First, you have to understand who you’re really competing with.
Here’s How
- Most blogs, like most sites on the web, suck. I mean, they really, really suck. MOST of them!
- Most bloggers will probably always make the same mistakes they are making now: they fail to see publishing on the web as an exercise in giving genuine experiences to readers. They write for search engines and not people. They copy what everyone else is doing. They offer no original thought, personality, character, or opinions. Since it seems part of human nature to hold back like this, it’s no surprise why so many blogs suck.
- So if 1 and 2 are correct, you aren’t competing with 100s of thousands of other bloggers are you? You’re really only competing with the boggers in your niche on the top of the pile. The top 10 in Google. The very most popular and respected blogs in your niche. It’s a very small group you are actually competing with.
- The popular bloggers in your niche have laid out a roadmap to success. Their posts are all public. Their links are easy to trace back to excellent, original content. They have personality, opinions, and a singular focus on providing a genuine, quality experience for their readers.
If you’re going to make it in your niche, there is only one way to do it. The writing is on the blog. You have to turn your blog into a singular experience that readers can get in few, if any, other places on the web.
Sound Daunting?
It is. No doubt. But it is the key to blog success. You have to figure out what your market wants and then give them that plus content, resources, and other things they didn’t even know they wanted or needed. Over deliver.
What you’re after is giving readers that “feeling” you’ve surely experienced while reading other blogs: the WOW factor. You can watch your peers hit the WOW button and you can learn what you can do on your own blog from their posts. Not by copying them, but by noticing exactly what it was on a particular post that made their readers freak out.
It is formulaic in a sense, but totally organic at the same time. It’s about knowing what’s on the minds of your readers and readers of other big blogs in your niche, and “riffing” off that to create posts that make them go “WOW.”
Genuine Experiences Are Rewarded
…with money, advertisers, links, search engine rankings, product sales, ego stroking, reputation, respect and a loyal following that grows day by day.
You can mess up on all the other details that make a blog popular. You can screw up your marketing. You can screw up the look of your blog. But if you are doling out genuine experiences on a regular basis, you can’t help but become noticed, talked about, and followed.
Genuine experiences and “WOW” moments are very few and far between for all of us on the web. When is the last time you read something on a blog and had to tell someone about it? How many sites did you have to land on and leave before your last “WOW” experience?
So you know the power we’re talking about here. If you become an oasis of quality amid a vast desert littered with junk content, you become the blogger you’ve always wanted to be.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Jack, Words to blog by, to be sure. Perhaps we should all post this one by our computers and read it every time we get ready to write a post.
Jonathan – Advanced Life Skillss last blog post..What’s Wrong With Unstoppable Self-Confidence?
I second that Jonathan. I guess blog writing is a true art form that only with practice can we truly master.
Donnettes last blog post..Cultivate a Winning Attitude for Success
Hi Jack,
Great post and I fully agree with your comments. Thanks for the info and the reminder that we are talking to real people not bots! I’m gonna try to make my blog more alive and more attractive!
Something that has always puzzled me is the fact that subscribers will be reading a post in their feed reader or through their email client and I guess never get to see the main blog so miss out on all the other good stuff there.
I never see a blogger saying ‘click the headline’ or ‘open in your browser’ to heighten the experience. Do we assume that all readers are aware they’re just looking at a small part of the whole blog or do we tell them there’s a lot more, and how?
Paul e Wattss last blog post..New Review & Mucklewick Walk
I usually don’t visit your blog, Jack but this headline caught my interest. While I don’t necessarily agree with you that writing for the search engines is not important, I do agree that there is a fine line or sweet spot where you can be both entertaining to others AND give the bots the keywords and relevance that they want.
Leos last blog post..Internet Marketers- Web2.0 Traffic Does NOT want to be sold to
It’s not that search engine are unimportant. I get 40% of my traffic from them. And I write for them CRAFTILY without getting in the way of my readers experience.
I was just talking about people who create blogs for the engines and not their visitors. There’s a big difference there and you can tell the moment you land on one of those blogs that they care more about rankings than their readers.
You have to do both, but visitor experience comes first. You can live without search engine traffic. You cannot live without fans.
One thing you can do is use your Feedburner settings to include a message in your feed. Something like “There’s a lot more where this came from! Click to go to the blog for more great _____” A simple reminder inside your feed can go a long way. People do get used to just reading their feed readers and forget they haven’t actually been to the site in awhile.
Jack-
Great article. It’s amazing how many total junk sites I come across. Not saying mine is the best. I’m sure there are things I don’t do well, like include images in my posts. You know how many sites leave me thinking “are you kidding?”
Anyway, related to your last comment, I notice you include the whole post in your feed. I usually end up coming to your site to comment, but what do you think about only including part of your post in the feed, so you force your readers to come to your site to finish.
Are you against that, or do you think it is important to allow the reader to enjoy the complete article in the reader?
Augies last blog post..The First Thing Every New Real Estate Investor Should Do
The consensus is that full feeds are better. Yes you will have readers who don’t come to your blog as often or at all, but you save yourself with the people who really want your content bad and don’t like to be forced to click through.
A lot of people say they want the choice and this has been proven out by most major bloggers who have flat out asked their readers and gotten feedback. So a reminder in your feed helps get more direct visitors, and a lot of people come to the site on their own anyway. They just want to be able to read it all in a reader on days when they can pull down the info and read on the road with a phone or other gadgets, and they can read offline when they want or need to.
Great tip Jack on full articles vs. summaries in your feed. I just switched to the summary setting a few days ago. Guess I will go switch back and add a reminder.
Jonathan – Advanced Life Skillss last blog post..What’s Wrong With Unstoppable Self-Confidence?
Thanks. I just changed my settings. Now to play with flare…