Yesterday I showed a photo of my Seth Godin inspired blog posting list based on his Free Prize Inside book.
One of the quotes grabbed my attention: “..there’s less reason to build some giant campaign for the future - the competition is building something for right now”. It is a call to action - don’t wait until everything is perfect before doing something remarkable.
Are we competitive as bloggers?
This innovative stuff is of prime importance in business - but what about bloggers?
Some of us blog for money, some for recognition, some for a sense of community - there are a lot of different motivators for blogging. Do we need to worry about competition? I think that we need to at least, well, think about it. Whatever your motivation, chances are you would be pleased to have more readers for your blog. Granted, there are some people who write as a form of therapy (although this is not always healthy) and could care less if more than a handful of people read what they have to say - and don’t let me tell you that this is wrong. If you want to stop reading here, I won’t be offended 
What if you do want more readers?
Interesting question. You want more readers. So are you competing with other blogs for them? Do you need to worry about being remarkable rather than just good enough?
I think that it is fair to say that we are all competing with other blogs in our niche. Even if your niche is “bored accountant talking about office life” or “small town book store assistant” then you have competitors - if you aren’t remarkable, then people will only read out of politeness for so long (even friends).
This doesn’t mean that you have to turn into John Chow, or become obsessed with your Technorati rank and RSS reader statistics - but again, I think that it is fair to say the following: if you want more readers, you need to be contributing something above and beyond what everyone else is - you have to be truly remarkable.
How do you become remarkable?
This is the hard part - if I could tell you how to become truly remarkable in your niche, then chances are I would be doing it myself
What I can offer is the following:
- read Maki’s advice on being unique in your niche, and
- learn how to reframe (to be fair: Maki refers to this as well - I go into a bit more detail and while I wrote my reframing post first, I didn’t invent the concept by any stretch - it built on suggestions by Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak that I read earlier in my blogging ‘career’).
And naturally… please let me know how you go
Thanks for the mention, Andrew. It’s rather interesting.. I’ve also wondered if bloggers are really competitors if they are within the same niche.
In a sense, there’s definitely a competition for search engine ranks (because its a limited resource) and perhaps a ’softer’ competition for mindshare as well (although the sky is the limit for this resource).
As you probably know already, everything on Dosh Dosh is related to making money and so my point of view is that to better build an audience and eventually generate an income from your site, it’s very important to come out blazing with unique content/branding that distinguishes you from the pack.
Hi Maki,
thank you for the comment, and for writing Dosh Dosh - one of my favourite daily reads
I agree that it is important to come out blazing with unique content - probably the number one “how to improve your readership” factor as far as I have been able to tell.
Best regards, Andrew