Best Blogs: Friday Traffic Report – Jack Humphrey

Do you have to choose? Between being an expert and being unique?
Blogging is a performance art, and as all art forms it asks you to stretch yourself to be as real as you can. If you were a singer and you got up on stage and sang in a mousy voice or a breathless whisper, stumbling over the words, umming when you forget some and ahhing through the chorus – as you might, some days at home, when no one is listening – what will your audience think?

That you don’t care, that you can’t sing, that you have no discipline.

This post came to me when I was reading Jack Humphreys blog. I was twittering last night, at least I was reading and following on twitter, I didn’t write much! As I followed the breadcrumb trails of name links and faces onto other profiles, I came across Jack’s profile and followed a link from there to his blog. I have been a fan of Jacks for some time now, I originally discovered him on You Tube when looking for useful videos for the library, and got three solid video tutorials on aspects of blogging. This trail is a very good traffic strategy as no doubt he knows. I was also impressed by his black book and I enjoy being on his list.

He is a generous marketer who offers a lot of free information. 

His blog post Success comes from striving to be the best  struck a new harmony when I read it.  Striving to be best is all that can be asked of us.  Achieving uniqueness in the process is sometimes our reward. Being an expert is achievable for some of us, being great at something is more common and may well be enough, as he says. Being better than some may be all we manage. But being unique – we can all achieve that, all we have to do is be ourselves.

That said, I’ll just go back to that performance art topic. Would you say Dylan was a great singer? (Don’t ask me who Dylan is, Bob Dylan, Google him!) How about Kate Bush? (Yes I know I’m showing my age but it’s hard for me to find such unique examples in more current music, the perfect body and pitch perfect voice are more common in this century’s music industry)… Let’s try Pink then…

They are hardly Pavarotti, Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald or whoever else you might choose as the epitome of a great singer. Yet each brought a unique voice to the art form. Whether through their words, their body image, their lifestyle or their unmistakeable voices, each one had their own pocketfull of fame because they were so unique.

I bet they started out with people telling them they’d never make it. 

I think all people when first blogging suffer a little from stage fright. When there is little traffic at first, blogging can also feel like a soliloquy to an empty theatre. Whether the audience makes you shy, or the lack of it brings you down, remember that poem about enjoying what you do. I don’t remember it exactly, but it went something like…

Dance as if no one is watching
Sing as if no one were listening
and live every day as if it were your last…

Like the snowflake -  you are unique, embrace it.

I have always enjoy Seth Godin’s writing. He manages to make reading about marketing almost as much fun as fiction, and I have taken to heart the allegory of the Purple Cow.

I come from a country which loves to have BIG statues of country themes erected. In Queensland there is a huge Pineapple and at Coff’s Harbour in NSW an enormous banana. There’s a statue of a drovers dog on a tucker box, there’s a huge cow (somewhere), all these things are there to focus a tourists attention on the produce or an event that the area is renowned for. None of them were purple – but they were all certainly big enough to never be ignored.

Advertising is renowned for it’s Big Promise, but the Guinness Book of Records is full of examples where small is used for uniqueness instead – or tallest, shortest, longest, deepest, widest, highest, lowest or neatest. Branding and all the techniques we use to remain memorable to potential customers, is built on something unique. In copy writing a similar principle is called the USP or unique selling point or proposition. That is one thing that this product has that is outstanding. Even if it means making a positive of something someone else may feel is a negative.

Mom bloggers have built names for themselves by joining the unique niche of being moms who are blogging about being moms. Although kids are talked of, a variety of subniches are tucked under this title. There are mom bloggers who are marketers, mom bloggers who do craft, moms into fashion, single moms. Each mom blogger has found a way to be a tall poppy or an expert for something, while enjoying the security and networking of a similar niche, that is, being a mom and blogging.

If you do have expertise in something then sing it out loud. Show the world that you are an expert blogger about that topic. Don’t worry that your blog may get little to no traffic at first. You don’t stress out if no one’s listening when you sing in the shower, however fine it may sound (and it does sound fantastic, singing in the bathroom with a fine reverberation). It’s never a waste of time, although being proactive about some traffic strategies will help you to find your audience.

Call it practice, scales, rehearsals. Use your full voice and don’t hold back. Make sure that it is worth listening to – ie. spell check it, check your information, be creative and try new things, toss in a quote, add a personal story. Read Jack’s post for more specific ideas. Then read it back and ask yourself how you can emphasize something memorable in it or about the theme of your blog.

Each time, look for that one thing where you can say “that is my voice”.

If you can put it in visual terms in your blog theme then you have found your purple cow. We have a fisherman here, who would probably not have made a name for himself in a big way except for one thing. After all there are many fine fishermen here. Rex Hunt however throws his catch back in the ocean quite often, again nothing too unusual about that, but before he does it – he kisses the fish.

Now that’s something you remember when you see it. And when you remember, you remember his name as well. That’s branding. That’s unique. Strive to be an expert, strive to be great but find a way to emphasize something unique about yourself and it may well be a turning point in your blog writing career.

Jack Humphrey has concentrated on Traffic, he’s an expert at it.

But I don’t remember Jack because he’s an expert, there’s a lot of those online. I remember him because he is generous. Because he did not make a video saying how much money he made launching a product. He made a video about a plugin that made it so much easier to embed a video in my wordpress blog. He saved me time, he solved a problem, he asked for nothing more.

So when in my travels, I hit a link to something Jack has created, it’s like meeting an old friend in the street. Sure, I say, I’ll follow along wherever you lead, because I know there’ll be something good there for me to find and the company is fun.

Popularity: 62% [?]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under Best Blogs on Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.