How do you market your blog?
You’ll often hear the advice to look beyond your competitors for inspiration or to improve your product. It’s a pretty simple concept, if everyone in a given field only looks at what is ‘currently successful’ and follows the lead of others, then pretty soon everything looks the same and it takes real effort to innovate and distinguish yourself from your peers.
Fiction writers are encouraged to read extensivley outside their genre of choice, painters are encouraged to study other forms of art… bloggers also need to study other bloggers, not just the ones writing about similar topics, but also those targeting a completely different audience - this is where you’ll find some great ideas that’ll give you an edge when competing for your audience.
There has been two events lately that pushed me in a different direction - I bought an iPod Touch and I’ve been spending way too much time playing World of Warcraft… what does that have to do with Blogging? Let’s take a look.
One of the things I like about my iPod is that I can listen to nearly anything while I’m working… I have some music on there, but mostly I listen to podcasts or non-fiction audio books and boring stuff like that. It wasn’t long therefore that I started tracking down World of Warcraft podcasts… not only did I find some, there were literally hundreds.
When every blog has their own podcast…
There are lots of World of Warcraft podcasts, nearly every popular blog has one and it seems like every second person in the WoW community is involved in some way. Some of these podcasts are very professionally done and they (rightfully so) attract a large audience.
If you were starting a WoW blog, would you start a podcast too? I’d have to say probably not, there’s too much competition there already, but that doesn’t mean you’d neglect that market. Same thing goes for just about any topic you’re blogging on… how can you leverage off podcasts?
Creating your own podcast sounds like too much hard work to me - you need to keep the releases fairly regular, you’ve got to make sure it adds value and in my opinion you need at least two or three good people involved to keep the conversatoin moving in interesting directions… and then you’ve still got to build an audience, much like you’re doing with your blog, but that’s not your only option.
If there are a couple of successful podcasts around in your niche (chances are good), you may be able to leverage off their success by contributing a regular segment to their product. Think of it as writing a guest post on another blog, but this time you’d prepare a short (5 minute max) audio clip about a specific topic within your niche - they’ll be happy with the extra value you’re adding to their podcast, and you’ll get exposed to their (already established) audience (win-win)… not only that, but you don’t need to devote a lot of time to production and you can do the clip all by yourself - no need to work conversations into a five minute piece.
I hope that gives you a few ideas - get out there and see what podcasts are already available in your niche, give them a listen and think about how you can make their show better by offering them a little free audio content.
Image by dan taylor.
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