In Search Of Genuine Experiences on The Web

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

1. Most blogs, like most sites on the web, suck.  I mean, they really, really suck.  MOST of them!
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Tagged as: Blogging, blogging tips, content development, how to blog