Know Your Real Advantage in Blogging
No, this is not a typical advice on how to stand out and be known by your customers. It is not also a post about beating your competitors through better marketing message. You probably heard it a few times that in order for others to buy from you, unique selling proposition (USP) is necessary. Can’t agree more with that.
However there is another perspective related to advantage. I see people rarely talk about this. The good news is, if you know how to use it, you will not only survive but win over your competiton.
Sounds good?
Let me put it this way. At the first glance, every web business may appear the same.
You build a web site that people want to use and then find one or more ways to profit from it. The rest is about business and marketing strategy. As a blogger, you also have to take care of the content so the visitors keep coming back.
If you are a blogger or web publisher, you also have specific strategies.
After you have quite a bit of content, later you can re-purpose the content, add substance and sell the new content as premium. That’s definitely a strategy.
A strategy can be an advantage. The niche you blog about can be an advantage. Ability to deliver good information is another.
Another thing is your ability to attract people and relate to a situation that makes people stick with your blog. Or perhaps it is how your promote your blog. If you are able to reach a group of people who have never known about an existing solution, you are immediately an expert blogger.
However, believe it or not, if you work alone, you could be able to turn that into an advantage too. Certainly at this level it can be hard to compete by earning less per sale and getting great number of sales. So which product should you first create and sell is an important question to answer.
How you could reach customers or readers efficiently without spending a lot of money?
You know what, even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising and other paid promotional methods, there are alternatives. Some of them are better.
And the fact that you have relatively low operational cost is big. Seriously.
In some businesses, speed is everything. But if you carefully pick your battlefield, have a sound blogging strategy and low operational cost, you can move slowly but surely. Just let the competitor lead the way while you observe what works and avoid costly mistakes they make along the way.
Only a handful of business owners and bloggers use this intentionally as a strategy. Often they just blog because they enjoy the topic and they win because they still are active in the niche while others have come and gone quickly.
But if you are aware of this, that could set you in the right mindset and be patient while the nature do its work.
Plentyoffish.com is a perfect example. Without high expenditure, the owner of the dating site could afford to wait. He didn’t have to waste a million dollar per month if he didn’t figure out how to break even in the first six months of operation.
Bloggers can learn a lot of from this, especially if you are competing against more established sites. It takes time to prove value. But if your cost is low, you can afford it.
It takes business instinct to know if you could use this strategy successfully, but that’s just part of the risk you will encounter in any business.
So, what’s your real advantage in blogging?
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