Last year, I wrote about how Seth Godin and I were ruining our blogs. According to the experts, we do it all wrong.
There are lots of expert guides to blogging, which suggest you need to do everything a certain way, in order for your blog to succeed. The problem with these guides is that the closer you follow them, the less visible you become. They tend to focus on the same dozen or so rules, which hundreds of thousands of other bloggers follow.
It’s hard to get noticed, when you are following a massive crowd like that.
Great news: Seth Godin is still killing his blog
I was reminded of the alternative to these ‘how to’ guides, when I read a wonderful post by Seth last week. Seth mentioned a post he saw, which listed 12 things that kill blogs – at least 7 of which should, apparently be killing his blog! If you don’t already know, Seth writes the largest single author blog on the Internet. It’s very alive!
Seth summed it up brilliantly in his post: ‘One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.’
It’s all about choice
We can either become extremely good at following the rules and hope to out-perform the thousands of others using the same approach or we can refuse to work within those rules. It’s a matter of choice. Neither option comes with a guarantee, however, in my experience, it’s easier to stand out, by standing out.