Remarkablogger

If you’re link blogging instead of creating original material, you’re not a thought leader in your space. The more into your niche you get, the more important (and easier) it is for you to write original material. Focus on your niche. Burrow into it. Be as specific as you can within it. Not just consulting, but IT infrastructure change-management consulting. Not just web design, but content management systems for real estate agencies. Not just farming, but organic heirloom tomatoes for gourmet restaurants.

If you’re thinking that your business isn’t that specific in the first place, well, I was expecting that. Most of us don’t specialize enough for fear of narrowing down our customer base too much. We fear we’ll miss out on “all that business”. And yet, if everyone is generalized, nobody stands out. You have to excel at something specific. Instead of addressing the symptom (your blog), you can address the root problem (your business). So let’s put the horse before the cart, shall we? Your business focus needs to become specific enough for you to carve out and own your niche. When you own your niche, your blog will stand out from the generalists, because you will always have specific, detailed, knowledgeable things to write about.

If you’ve been in business for a little while, dealing with a geographically localized clientele, owning a super-specialized niche seems counterintuitive. It feels like you’re shutting out all potential customers and drying up your revenue stream. If you were completely limited by geography, that might be true, but we live in the age of the Internet! Let’s say you’re really into beautiful, expensive antique fountain pens. You would like nothing more than to make your living talking about them and selling them. The problem is, you live in a small or medium-sized town. You will never get enough customers locally to stay in business.

But if you start a blog about antique fountain pens, where you write about them with passion and expertise and you sell them online, the whole world is now your customer base. There are enough antique fountain pen enthusiasts out there searching the web looking for pens to buy and add to their collections. If your blog and your site is good, you not only can stay in business doing what you love, you may even earn a comfortable living at it. This is the power of the internet. Worldwide, there are enough people to support almost any endeavor, including yours. There is even a name for this particular phenomenon; it’s called the long tail.

In this situation, it pays to be very specific and precise with what you’re doing and what you’re saying about it. Your blog needs to be chock full of those highly specialized keywords that only fanatics in your niche will be using to search the web. Your business needs to occupy a very specific niche doing the one thing for which you want to be well-known.

I present myself as an example: the more specialized I get, the more traffic my blog gets, the more comments and emails I get, and the more business I get. Most importantly, the business I get is the kind of business I really want. I started out as a web designer. Great. There are fifty-million or so web designers. Then I got more specific: I became a blog designer. That’s better, but today’s blog designer is yesterday’s web designer. Now, I’m a blog consultant and WordPress Theme designer for specialty markets. Very, very few people specialize in one system only, and for a specific clientele, but the internet allows for this to happen and even be profitable. But you see, I’m not a faceless web designer along with the millions of other web designers. I’m the blog consultant and WordPress business theme designer guy for specialty markets. And even that is starting to sound a little too vague. I might have to narrow it down even further.

A generalist is practically forced to take on work he or she doesn’t really want to do, because it’s difficult to compete with all the other generalists out there making the same mistake and turning everything into a slim margin price war. And all the other generalist blogs are posting about the same thing as everybody else. The thought leaders at the top of the blog food chain are posting original material. Everybody else is just linking to them and adding their own meager observations (coattail blogging). When I see blogs like that, I can’t hit the back button fast enough. When you occupy a specific niche to the point where there are very few others to link to, you’re in a position to be a thought leader. Others will now link to you.

Granted, there many other important aspects to successfully running a business, such as knowledge, design, logistics, sales, and customer service. While I’m going a little deeper than the surface of your blog in order to help you with your blog, my main focus here is still your blog and what it’s doing for you. Some of the links in my blogroll on my blog’s home page may help you with some of these other aspects. It is much more difficult to differentiate yourself in the marketplace nowadays based on knowledge or even customer service; these things are easily acquired by your competition. By occupying an extremely specific niche, however, you may not hardly even have any competition. To paraphrase Tom Peters quoting Jerry Garica, you don’t want to just be the best at what you do—you want to be the only one doing what you do.

Determining your niche and staking your claim to it will enable you to blog with originality and authority. It will allow you to become a thought-leader in your field, driving traffic and business your way.

Of course, nothing is that simple! The most successful people do not follow formulas! Following a formula automatically makes you an also-ran, a me-too. Finding your niche should be a process of imagination, innovation, discovery, and bravery. Finding your niche is scarily a lot like asking, “What do you really want to do?”