What’s in it for me?

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

Darren has an excellent post on his blog at the moment about the fact that blog readers are selfish.

He makes an excellent point with the following sentence:

“One of the best ways to do this is to work hard and nailing down the key benefit of reading your blog into a single sentence or phrase so that you can incorporate it into your page title and header - you might even like to reinforce this with a picture or some other visual element (like a logo) that communicates simply and clearly what the blog is about.”

(Cue thinking music)

Whilst (I think) Darren is talking about reinforcing the benefits of reading your blog to the reader, this is an excellent idea for keeping yourself focussed on the main aim of your blog.

This makes for some interesting navel gazing. Rather than thinking about how our blogs benefit us, I think we need to focus on how they benefit our readers. For example, rather than saying “I’m going to make a blog about electronic gadgets, in the hope of picking up some traffic and generating AdSense clicks or affiliate sales”, we probably need to be saying “What can I offer readers that they won’t get from anywhere else, which will keep them coming back, which (hopefully) will generate ad clicks and sales?”

I would think that the key here is the “What can I offer” part. The blogger / reader relationship seems to be a give and take one: the blogger gives the reader good content, and the reader takes it or choofs off to somewhere else where he/she can get it.
I guess you could almost take the quote from Darren and extrapolate it out to the creation of a mission statement. For example, for this blog, up till now, it might have been:

“A place for me to vent my spleen, take the piss out of people who I think are doing the wrong thing online, and discuss my online money-making adventures”

What does this give the reader? Nothing! It’s all about me. Notice all the bold bits - There’s not much here to pull a reader in and hep them feel a part of my blog, is there?

Maybe something like this would be better:

“To create an environment where my readers can discuss issues relating to online money making, interesting developments in the online world, and look at what I and others could do better. To ask for the advice of my readers, and make them feel like a valued member of my community”

I think I’ll print this out and stick it above my monitor!

Footnote: Thanks to Jeff for his kind words - I’m not going anywhere, just slowing down a bit and re-focusing