The Xark ideal & Scoble's No. 3

I decided not to bring this up in the Scoble session because I think his point about niche is important and useful. If your goal is to get maximum traffic and branding, be your own niche, and hammer it. You'll be Tom Wolfe in the white suit.

I started that way with my media blog, but the thing I learned was that when you write about one topic you get exactly only those people who are interested in that topic to the point of fanaticism. I wrote about media and politics, which meant that the people who were COMMENTING were people who were finding me because they were media/political junkies.

If you see your blog as your posts, then whatever brings YOU traffic is good. But if you see your blog as the totality of what you find there -- in other words, the community of readers and commenters -- then what you attract to the blog is as important as what you write. And I realized that the readers I was attracting were a self-selected group with an extreme perspective that didn't reflect the diversity of ideas about politics and media.

Xark was born out of the idea that by embracing many interests we could build a community of readers and writers and participants that was more interesting than a self-selecting, narrowly focused, special interest blog.

So yes, it's good to own a Google search term. But to me the magic is that this blog will surprise me. That makes it hard to "market," and that's really OK.

Comments

[peg]

I can relate to your ideas about too narrow a focus, and say a little about this on my blog
http://bellascribe.com/blog.