« How My Big Blogging Failure Became an Accidental Success: In Three Different Ways | Home | Gourmet International – Restaurant Reviews »
Fill the Gap
By SEO Advisor | January 2, 2010
Dear readers of MaxBlogPress,
I have been in the blogging game for some time now. I started out with a personal blog, hoping to make money from Google adsense and affiliate offers. Back then, I had no real focus with the blog, and I pretty much wrote about anything that hit me. I started to get decent traffic, but I never got any income, at all! Maybe a single click on my adsense, once a month or so. As you can imagine, this is not exactly what I had in mind when I started out. Although I knew that focus on a specific topic was essential, I never took it that serious. However, about 7 month ago, I changed my mind, and decided to start a niche blog, www.tradeprofits.net. The topic was short-term trading, with specific focus on forex trading. Now when starting out I was under the impression that this “industry” was already saturated, but as this was one of my great interest, I chose to go for it anyway. In these 7 month I have seen far more traffic and conversions than I ever did with my previous blog. Now I know what you think. You have heard this a thousand times before. But here is the “twist”.
There is a lot of blogs about forex trading. However, due to the nature of the industry, I knew that the majority of these bloggers were more interested in profit, than bringing value to their readers. The forex industry is booming with scammers. New shitty products are lunched every single day and this can obviously be a confusing element, if you are new to forex. Hence, there was a clear gap! Honesty. So I decided to keep this as the locus, for everything I write. It takes time to build a trustworthy reputation, but it seems to be working out. My readers know they can trust me, as I don’t promote every single new product out there. I write reviews of products, and often I don’t recommend them. Not only are my readers enjoying this, but I there are several advantages for me as well. When I find a product which I actually find to have some value, people tend to be more open in their buying decision. Furthermore, I have started to get free trials and offers, in return of an honest review.
The point here is, that if you would like to blog about something but find that it might be too difficult due to a saturated market, then look at it from another perspective; twist it somehow. Most people mainly think of design as the only dimension which they can change. But this is never the case. As an example, look at all the “make money online” blogs. I think that most of them tell you nothing about how to make money, but more about how to spend money. Rarely do I see any useful tips on how to actually make a decent income.
So how can you go about this? Well, first of all, figure out what you want to write about. Then find all the blogs in the same industry. Put them into an excel sheet, and add all the important dimensions you can think of; that is, from the perspective of the reader. What do the readers actually want if they come to your blog? Put in values from 1 to 10 for all the blogs, in all the dimensions. My guess is that you will find a gap somewhere. Take the money blog example again: probably most of them would get 10 in promoting products without knowing what it is, but most of them would get 1 in valuable content (that is ofcourse if 10 = high level and 1 =low level). Now I know that it might be difficult to come up with other dimensions than the typical; content, design, seo, etc. But this is the essential part. Do some research, and all the time think in terms of what will bring value to your readers. When the steps above are done, the rest is easy. Find the low level dimensions and reconsider the importance. It is not enough that you find it important. You readers should too. When this is done, you start the blog and fill the gap.
Submit your blogging success stories and get FREE passive traffic, fame and popularity:
You can now submit your blogging success stories and get FREE passive traffic, fame and popularity. Plus, advertise your name and get no-cost business exposure to a fresh audience…
Topics: Internet Marketing, Network Marketing, Network Marketing | No Comments »