Define and differentiate your blog

The business world is nothing if it isn’t cut-throat. That is true of blogging as well. Just in a different way. What isn’t different between blogging and business is the need to define and differentiate yourself from your competitors. Before you can even begin you need to ask yourself some questions.

• What is the purpose of my blog?
• What kind of traffic will my blog attract?
• What benefit will someone gain from reading my blog?

Go ahead take a few minutes, give it some thought and write down your answers. Once you’re done with that we’ll start again…

Now let’s take a look at each main component of the questions individually.

Purpose

There is no right or wrong answer to this. The purpose of your blog in and of itself doesn’t matter. It only matters that you have a purpose. If your purpose is to sell diapers online, great! If your purpose is to socialize and make friends that’s perfectly fine as well. Whatever purpose you have for your blog be certain you can define it.

Simply being able to define the purpose goes a long way, but it’s not enough. Not by far. You need to make certain that your readers know the purpose of your blog just as well, if not better than you know it. That probably sounds stupid to some people, but remember the readers will be the ones talking about your blog, sending you traffic and in general just being a part of your community. If they don’t know the purpose of your blog they’re not going to be comfortable spreading the news.

What is the purpose of you blog?

Traffic

This is who reads your blog. There are two types of traffic on the internet; sticky, and everything else. Sticky traffic is comprised of people who come back on a regular basis. They trust you enough to build a relationship with you. This is the kind of traffic you want. The other traffic comes and goes on a whim. It’s not worth any extra effort to gain them. Social bookmarking sites send this kind of traffic. There’s nothing wrong with having it, but it shouldn’t be a priority for you.

Beyond that you need to decide if you only want niche traffic targeted strictly to your blog, or if you don’t mind a little bit more of a general mix which will allow you to cast out your nets and possibly bring in a larger catch.

Do you prefer targeted niche driven traffic or more general traffic? What about social bookmarking, is the spike in traffic you (generally) get from it of any real value?

Benefits

This is where it all comes together, where “the rubber meets the road.” You’ve defined what your purpose is for your blog. You’ve settled on the type of traffic you want to attract and how targeted you want that traffic to be. Your efforts are beginning to pay off, people are visiting, commenting and linking to you. Everything looks great until one day people start to wonder what benefit do they get for visiting your blog.

That’s a question you should ask yourself whenever you are writing a post. How does this post benefit my readers? You should ask it everytime you reply to a comment, and every time you leave a comment on another blog. It’s only natural as each and every one of your readers does the exact same thing each time they visit your site. You do the exact same thing when you read someone else’s blog.

Don’t forget about yourself though. It is just as important that you benefit in some way from your blogging efforts as your audience does. If you don’t there’s a pretty good chance you’ll stop blogging altogether in relatively short order.

Once you’ve figured out the benefits to the reader and yourself you need to come up with a unique way of presenting those benefits to the reader. This is especially critical if you are part of an overly saturated niche.

How does your blog benefit your readers and yourself?

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