The Internet is an opportunity to add value

The First Wave

It can get very hot during summer in Australia.

Last week, I was in the outback and I stopped in a very small town; so small that it only had one shop.

I was very thirsty and rather hungry, so I became the shop’s only customer at that point in time.

Sadly for me, the pie was cold and the cool drink was warm, but as the guy said, with a cynical grin when I complained, “You can always try the shop over the road.”

It struck me later, that I had just seen a good metaphor for the current state of the blogosphere.

That shopkeeper was a pioneer.

In blog-speak, he had the space all to himself. His was the only blog where I could get what I wanted.

If he was in fact a blogger, he would probably be offering a course on “how to open a shop in the desert.”

It would have lots of really helpful stuff on how to solve the very real challenges that he faced in creating the first shop in the area.  Both the problems and his fixes would be top quality in terms of his pioneering context.

In my experience this is what most current blogging courses are like.  They are very good at solving the problems of the pioneer.

The Second Wave

Ok, let’s extend the metaphor a little further.  Let’s say they discover gold in this town and overnight, the population expands from one man and his dog up to a few thousand hungry workers.

I trust you can see the analogy here, with the rapid expansion of people all around the world entering cyberspace.

So first of all, there is probably room for a few more lunchbars.  However, the space for me-too copy-cats will probably be filled fairly rapidly.  Moreover the competition will be fiercer because those who follow the pioneer will be able to stand on his shoulders and then add their own enhancements.  Soon the client will have a range of options and cold pie and warm drinks simply will not cut it.

So lesson number one if you are just entering the blogosphere is that you need to learn all you can from the pioneers but be prepared to improve on their efforts in satisfying the needs and wants of your clients.

You need to wade through all their courses, especially the ones that give you their specific techniques.

Avoid the courses which tell you it is easy, all you have to do is get a few cold pies and a few warm cooldrinks.  This is the business in the box junk where they sell you pies and cool drinks at far higher prices than they can get in their shops and convince you that all you need is a website.

On the contrary you need to diligently learn all you can about website construction, SEO, and all the other basic skills of the blogosphere but do not expect to just copy the pioneers

Check Out the Opposition.

As the second shop in town, you need to keep a close eye what the first shop is doing.

Keep an eye out for things they do well as well as the things they cannot be bothered with.

The following research strategies will give you a good head start.

Who currently owns the Google listing?  Visit the top three sites in Google over and over.  Be prepared to buy their offerings in order to really learn what they are up to.

What is the client experience when they visit the site?  Is their a focus?  What is the navigation like?  Are they buiding trust.

Is the site chaotic?  Often you can improve on the efforts of the pioneer simply by creating a bit of order.  Pioneers tend to be creative and chaotic.  Sometimes you will even find that they ahve abandoned the space that they have created    out of boredom.

It is all about adding value.

It is now 30 years since I touched my first computer.

I enrolled in a degree course at night at my local university.

My first program was written in Fortran.  It took a row of ten numbers and sorted them into ascending order.

The next night, we had to sort them into descending order.  That was my first experience of product enhancement.

Over the next thirty years I have watched as enhancement upon enhancement has brought us to where we are today.

And each one of these enhancements has given the client more choices and predictably most of the clients will choose the enhanced product.

So as you enter the blogosphere, you could enrol in a course covering Java, PHP, ASP, SQL, etc or you can sign up down at Wordpress.  To discover the value-add, just ask which product would you choose and why?

You will know you are on your way to success in the blogosphere when you have a clear idea of how you are going to add value to what already exists.

Avoid the false promises of the snake oil merchants who try to sell you a “proven recipe”, that requires no further work from you.

You certainly need to know how they achieved their success, but you also need to be ready to create your unique value-add to what the pioneers have done.