This article is from Jack Humphrey, TheFridayTrafficReport.com. It is filled with good information that we all should consider.
I have a 2 1/2 year old son. Every day I spend a couple hours with him. Sometimes we play with his toys, sometimes we read, and sometimes we watch movies. Since I can’t watch movies like my favorite, Braveheart, with him yet, I have to settle for whatever Disney stuff we have in the dvd pile.
Today was Ratatouille day.First lesson of blogging: pull from whatever you have around you to create something unique and special. And I mean whatever you have around you! That’s also the first lesson of cooking if you are a rat who also aspires to be a French chef.
If you haven’t seen Ratatouille, I highly recommend it. I’m glad I have a kid as an excuse to watch such things because they are usually just as geared toward adults as they are kids. If you’ve seen Pixar and other hit animated movies before, you know what I’m talking about!
So what can Ratatouille teach us about being a great blogger?
1. Blogging is something you have to love.
It cannot be something you do to “make money.” That’s what garbage collectors do. They have a job. It makes them money. It’s not a job intended to be “loved.”
2. Your special blog posts are like a main course.
Your blog is an information restaurant where you serve your dishes to, hopefully, expectant and happy readers.
3. Critics can make or break your blog.
In the restaurant business you live or die by what the food critics print about you. Blog critics come in 2 flavors: your readers and bigger blogs. You must please them both or close up shop.
4. You create special dishes to set yourself apart from others.
You use different ingredients in different combinations than the other “word chefs” in your niche, hoping to come up with a winner above all others. Every restaurant is known for something. “You just HAVE to go to Jack’s Bistro! He has the best link building pie in town!”
5. You must thrive on praise, respect, and great reviews.
Money only comes after you’ve captured a portion of your market big enough to generate profits. And to capture that market, you must thrive on serving up the best information, jokes, advice, insights, news coverage, gossip, tips or whatever it is your blog must be known for. You can’t phone it in. You can’t just put a list of other websites up and hope everyone starts talking about how great a resource your blog is. Those days are over!
6. You have to take risks and go with your gut.
In order to stand out as someone worth following, you absolutely must take risks. You have to be willing to do something, anything, that your competitors have not done. You have to put yourself out there with creations that push the boundaries of what’s become status quo in your market. This is how great recipes are discovered. This is also where failure can take place. But you have to be willing to risk failure to discover something great!
7. You must inspire people to talk about you.Restaurants thrive on word-of-mouth advertising. They inspire patrons to recommend them to their friends and associates through their food. No blog ever grew to a respectable readership without moving people to spread the word freely and without any nudging or compensation whatsoever. Growth and popularity depends on the dishes you serve up, day in and day out, with the faith that the momentum will build once you’ve hit your rythem.
8. You cannot serve up the equivalent of frozen fish sticks because you see others doing it and they appear to be successful.Fight temptation when you see a blogger in your niche serving fast food and giving off the appearance of success. Those bloggers are like Peacocks. Their grandeur is an illusion. Their popularity is fleeting.
9. Go organic for better posts.Everyone knows the freshest, choicest ingredients produce the best tasting dishes. That’s why any serious chef only uses organic, high-grade ingredients in their kitchen. Fresh, original content is better than content produced with recycled ingredients. Unless you are the one and only place in your niche where people go to find the best compilation of other peoples’ content, you have no chance of going big by aggregating other peoples’ content on your blog.
You cannot prepare a World Class meal by picking through the dumpsters of other bloggers and content providers for your ingredients!All this from a movie based on a rat who likes to cook. You could do far fewer, less stringent acrobatics to create great content for your blog. This post serves as a humble example of just how far you can go to develop content that makes the grade with your readers and pulls them away from the fast food joints in the blogosphere.Think of the blogs you compete with all sitting on a buffet table. You have to get your information-hungry market to sample and then become hooked on your dishes over most or all others. Many unsuspecting surfers will fall well-garnished sites and lavish presentations. But when they get down to the meat of most, they find them severely lacking.
What are you going to do to impress the hungry crowd waiting at the door?
