Why not everyone able to take their blog to next level? Many bloggers often ignore this simple strategy often you can create a successful blog with more readers and more revenue.

The key is to find a unique position for your blog content and build a following by staying faithful to this position. When you stand out as unique, readers and revenue will follow.

The one reason why blog fail

The good news for bloggers and online businesses is that nearly 3 billion people on earth have Internet access. In the United States, the average adult spends just over 1 hour a day surfing the web with 20% of this time reading online content.

That’s means people are spending 12 minutes a day reading content. So the average adult American might look at two or three pieces of content every day. That is a lot of content being read. This presents an amazing opportunity for your blog.

But now the bad news: the great demand for online content has generated a lot of competition. In fact, there are over 2 million new blog posts created every day. How are your blog posts going to fair against their 2 million competitors?

Most people who start blogging quit within the first 3 months!

Why?

It’s mainly because people start blogging without planning for any definitive strategy beforehand. Most people only dream about making it big with little effort to get thousands of subscribers. A common misconception is to just focus on writing more and more posts to get their blogs to be popular.

The key to success is to have your blog stand out as a whole, not just one blog post itself. So, everyone will remember what your blog stands for. Blogging about random topics does not help your blog to stand out.

You also should not create the same content as other bloggers. Many of these new blog posts report the same information over and over again. You can test this: search the Internet for a topic that is important in your field. The results will list a bunch of posts that essentially share the same information.

If you write a post that stands out from the crowd, then you can distinguish yourself from your competition. Better yet, if you have a strategy for your entire blog that makes you unique, then you will create a large readership that is interested in hearing your unique perspective.

Here’s a simple strategy for creating a successful blog by standing out:

1)Embrace the James Bond mentality

Be the “James Bond”

First you need to become the world famous SPY “Pierce Brosnan James Bond”, sniffing around for your enemy’s advance contents.

Please understand that this is the utmost importance as you are not going to be able to stand out if you don’t know what your competition is doing. It is easier to plan unique stand-out content when you know what content is already out there.

Quote from Sun Tze
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The first step you need to identify your competitors

You may already know some of them, but you may need to do some research to identify others and you can do it by owning your own cool spy gadgets.

Own your cool gadget like James Bond

You should also identify influencers in your field so you can spy on the most popular content creators that you are competing with. Buzzsumo and Keyhole are good places to start. Both offer free service levels to get you started. Although they cannot help you to pick a lock, scan fingerprints, or act as a remote control for your luxury Sedan, they can definitely help you quickly identify your competitors and spy on all their contents.

Once you identify your competition, you can conduct an audit of their content. You do this by taking an inventory of the content on their site. You want to collect data that includes the quantity of each type of content, the frequency at which this content is published and the topics that are discussed in the content.

The goal when you audit your competition is to identify their unique positioning statement and keywords they are ranking for. This way you can avoid duplicating what they are doing.

For example, if a popular site is ranking for keywords like “growth hacking for entrepreneurs starting blogs,” then you are probably going to have difficulty ranking for this keyword even if your content is great. You want to identify keywords that are not as competitive that you can go after.

A content audit can be a time-consuming process, but it is well worth it if you truly want to create a blog that really stands out from the crowd. There are tools that can help you in this process.

In addition, you want to note the tone and personality of each blog. Eventually, you will want to craft the personality and tone of your own blog so that it is unique.

Ok, Let’s take the business blog niche as an example:

Derek Halpern Vs Marie Forleo

Take a look at Derek and Marie. Both of them have unique blogs. Both talk about business. However, their target audience is very different. Let’s stop right here and explore their websites to watch a couple of videos from both Derek and Marie.

After watching their videos, you may have formulated certain opinions regarding both Derek and Marie.. You might say that Mr.Derek has his own distinct personality. He is the kind of guy you hate or love, no middle ground! He is the kind of guy that gives out actionable internet marketing tips and who loves to debunk business BS. Look at one of his works, “The Dumb Pricing Mistake People Make“.

You will see this guy calling people dumb and offending people. You will hate or like Derek, but you would not be “meh”, and this gets attention. People remember you because this is not normal. One lesson we should learn from him is about not being normal. This tone of voice is so rare, that is why Derek Halpern is able to stand out from the crowd, and this became his unique selling point. Sometimes, It is ok to use the word “dumb”.

Wait a min, I am not asking you to be Donald Trump. If you are going to use Derek’s tone, be careful about what you write. That’s why Derek always backs his word up with reasonable points, and so should you.

Now let’s have a look at Marie. She uses a different approach, where she is all about the emotion of businesses. She answers the fears and worries that small business owners have and discusses situations which the audience can relate to. See, small or medium businesses face emotional turbulence often. Marie is there to calm the pain of small or medium business owners. Just look at one of her works, ” Want To Power Up Your Results? Shut Down Your Business“

She understands the audience’s pain and this comment says all:

Here is the special part about both of them: They both have a different tone of voice. Therefore, this makes both of them different, unique and exciting. They both have their own huge following because they serve different sets of audience needs and expectations.

Moral of the story: Take a deep analysis for each influencer’s blog. You should be dissecting each one of them in great detail. Here is the thing, do not analyse the business as a whole but break it down into small pieces.

The next stage is to identify opportunities to stand out

It could be that very few blogs are creating video content in your field. This could present an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself with excellent video content.

You also want to look at the topics that your competitors are covering. There might be topics that are not receiving coverage that you could cover on your blog. For example, if you are personal trainer and your competitors have blogs that cover strength training and muscle building, you might try to cover more about muscle tone, cardio exercises and nutrition in your blog.

You can continue to monitor your competition and keywords with Google alerts. Sign up and Google will send you an email when certain keywords are mentioned in content so that you can keep an eye on what people in your field are saying. This helps you to know what conversation are happening and plan a unique response from your own perspective.

2)Create a unique blog positioning statement

Neil Patel Unique Blog Positioning Statement

The most important tool that you can develop for a successful blogging strategy is unique blog positioning statement. This is a statement that describes what your blog is about and who it is intended for. It helps you define what is unique about your blog. It also tells people why they should come back to read more.

Creating blog positioning statement will help to keep you on message and consistent. It also helps to create content because you have a well-defined field to blog about. Your content will speak to a specific audience that will be loyal to your blog

To develop your unique position statement focus on these questions:

What Your Blog Is About:
Try to describe what your blog is about in a few words. This phrase could even be used as a subtitle for your blog. It provides a short, memorable and clear statement about what someone will find if they start reading your blog. For example, this blog is about helping people to grow their own vegetable gardens to feed their families year-round.

Who Is Your Blog For:
Here you want to describe the attitudes, mindsets and desires of your readers. This helps to define and describe your target audience. Focusing on mindsets and desires makes it easier to write content that corresponds to these attitudes. So for our gardening example, you might say that this blog is for people who want to be more independent by producing food from their gardens.

What Will Your Blog Provide:
Answering this question will spell out the scope of your blog content. It tells people what they can expect from your content. In our gardening blog example, you might say that this blog provides tips, advise and how-to instructions for planning, planting and harvesting a vegetable garden that provides food for the family all year round.

Why Is Your Blog Different:
Here is where the rubber hits the road. You need to clearly say what is unique about your blog. What is being provided that only you can provide? Back to our garden blog, the owner might say that only this blog will tell someone how they can provide food for a family all year round saving money. It will enable families to save money on groceries and foster a more independent lifestyle.

Blog Positioning Mistakes

One mistake is to ignore your unique position statement. This means that your blog posts will be unfocused and readers will not know what your blog is about. Your audience expects something from your blog. If you stray from your unique positions, then people will lose interest in what you have to say.

Another mistake is to keep a unique position statement when it is clearly not working. If you have carefully positioned your blog, but you are not seeing an increase in traffic, you might want to head back to the drawing board until you find an audience that wants to hear what you have to say.

3)Do something different

It helps if you can do something different on your blog. You want to find a unique voice, style and persona that other blogs don’t have. For example, check out the Social Triggers blog. This blog applies consumer psychology to online marketing with a hip and edgy look that is in your face. It definitely leaves an impression.

Moz provides SEO tools for websites. Every Friday, their blog features Rand Fishkin, Moz’s founder, presenting information on a whiteboard. This unique videos provide an in depth look at what is going on in the SEO world. These whiteboard videos are not only a unique format, but they provide more info than a basic blog post. It makes Moz’s blog unique.

One popular blog is called Get Rich Slowly. It presents financial advice about long-term investing. Its title and subheading make it clear what the blog is all about. The title is a play on “get rich quick” schemes and suggests that the sensible way to get rich is not through a scheme but through smart financial decisions. The blog’s unique position is clear, and it has a loyal audience.

One final example: Nerd Fitness. This is not just another wellness blog. It is targeted towards nerds and people who you might not expect to be into fitness. Steve, the author, says that he wants to help average people achieve more from their lives. His posts feature content on health and wellness with a nerdy twist invoking superhero and video game analogies to make his point. He has successfully positioned his blog to attract a unique and loyal audience.

4)Go out and promote your blog

Some people have great blogs, but they never get discovered. You have to have a plan to promote your blog if you want to grow your readership. Here are some tactics that you can use to get the word out:

Monitor online forums and discussion groups related to your topic. When you contribute to the discussion, add a signature with a link to your blog. Everyone conversation you participate in will contain a link back to your blog.

Make sure you help people by answering questions online. Quora is a website where people ask questions and you can answer them so it is a great place to help people. You can also help people in online forum and groups.

Ideally, you want to answer the question with a post on your blog. Then you can link to this post in your response on Quora. Make sure that you include a brief explanation of the post so people don’t think it is spam.

We did a guest blog with Coschedule

Guest blogging is a great way to introduce more people to your blog. You can identify popular blogs in your field with established audiences and ask the owner if you can provide a guest post. In this way, you get exposure to a larger audience and some people may check out your blog and become readers.

Get listed in a directory of blogs. People often search these directories when they are interested in reading about specific topics.

Make sure that all your promotional activities conform to your unique positioning. This helps people know what to expect when they visit your blog.

Conclusion

With this simple strategy, you can create a successful blog. By focusing on what makes you stand out, you can create unique content that will attract a loyal audience.

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Updated: 24 April 2024

About Winnie

Winnie is an aspiring copywriter & internet marketer in the vast world of digital marketing. She's as curious as she can be; constantly hunting for answers to her questions, never saying no to new experiences. When she's not spending her time typing up a storm, she is at home keeping up with her never-ending movie marathon & books.

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