blogmastr

Having a good website in a good niche with good content isn’t everything. Because there are often tens or hundreds of people in the same niche as you, with equally good content. Look at the Make Money Online (MMO) niche, for example. Johnchow, Johncow, Tylercruz, Problogger - there all the same, for the most part. But what blogs in this niche have you been hearing about recently? And what blogs stand out?

Well, I’m sure you heard a fair bit about winning the web recently. Was it because the content over there is better? He has some secret to give away that the others don’t? No! Of course not! What is different though, is he gave his site a twist. He had a new perspective and a new way of getting visitors. He hosted one of the biggest contests the MMO niche has ever seen.

This is very similar to certain US Presidential candidate you may have heard a whisper or two about. Barack Obama doesn’t have any earth-shattering ideas, but the way he presents them is new. As you probably know, politicians are usually lying scum, promising what you want to hear to buy your votes and then more often than not, never delivering on those promises. Some even drive your country further down hill by starting wars and the like (I wonder who that is?). But Barack has been promising the truth. Most of all, Barack has been promising to fix the mistakes of the past. The Iraq war, for example, is seen by many as a big mistake. President Bush and the Republican party have been slowly leading America downhill - their politics is becoming stale.

This is very similar to how certain niches become stale. The video games niche became very boring for a while. Every games site or blog offered pretty much all the same things, maybe with a slight twist or localization. But then two people decided to set up destructoid.com as a gimmick to get themselves into the “press-only” event E3. They didn’t even intend to continue with the blog, but now it has become a major name in the games media, with nearly 6,000 subscribers to their RSS feed, hundreds of thousands of visitors and even a network of other blogs to their name. And how did they do this? They were original. They didn’t start blogging to make money. They started blogging simply to get into an event that they enjoyed, and people enjoyed it. I, for one, thought it was funny and interesting and am now a regular visitor over at destructoid.

This is what Barack Obama is doing. Whether you think it’s a gimmick or not, you can’t deny it’s working. He’s being original and appealing to an audience of intelligent voters who have grown stale of the same old politics. The same way the people grow stale of the same old content, or the same old perspective.

So I guess the message behind this little rant is: If you want to be successful, try to be original and appeal to what people want. But whatever you do, don’t become stale and just regurgitate the same things every else does. I don’t want to read another article about twitter and how it can be a good marketing tool, sorry.