Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

The Simple Ingredient Which Creates Die-Hard Fans Of Your Blog

View Comments | Posted In Blogging, Traffic by David

As I’ve talked about before, I am in the midst of a re-making over on PCMech.com. I am putting the finishing touches on the new design, and I’m laying the groundwork for a re-making in how we talk about technology. All this is designed to make PCMech an interesting destination in a very crowded niche.

It is an interesting issue, and one that I think many bloggers deal with. PCMech is in a very saturated niche – tech. There are LOTS of tech blogs out there, and all of them are acting like little “me too” reporters. They talk about the same things incessantly. To a degree, that goes with the territory. After all, when you have that many sites talking about the same topics, there’s bound to be lots of overlap.

So, from a strategic perspective, I’m faced with a task of making PCMech relevant again in a niche where it is all too easy to merely blend in.

It comes down to a simple ingredient: EMOTION.

If you’ve read the Six Figure Blogger Blueprint, you see how I talked about the facets of a good market to blog in. I talk about the importance of picking a market with a unifying goal or fear. I’ve talked before about the scale between optimum survival and ultimate succumb, how people are in a constant effort to move away from succumb and more toward survival… and how our jobs, as marketers, is simply to tap into that basic human drive with our blogs and products. Help people LIVE better and you’re off to the races.

When you think about it that way, then certain niches are going to bewilder us. Some niches lend themselves just to news and entertainment, not toward particular goals or fears. These types of niches are usually the hardest to monetize.

So, we look at the tech niche and see it has this problem. It is essentially a NEWS niche. So there are two problems:

  1. The monetization option, usually, is to rack up a lot of traffic and throw ads all over the place.
  2. It is much harder to stand out because other tech sites with large editorial teams (like Techcrunch) are always going to be more on top of things than we are. From a pure news standpoint, I’m at an automatic disadvantage. I risk becoming just another “me too” armchair tech reporter. Meh.

The answer is to put GLUE on the blog, and that glue comes in the form of emotion. We need to tap into the emotions of our readers. We need to cater a sense of emotion around what we talk about on the site.

I’ve seen other tech blogs try this, but too often they go toward the negative. They’ll try to incite flame wars between Apple and PC, for instance. Admittedly, it is easy to do and we’ve done it before. :) However, markets based around complaints don’t form good businesses. It does me no good to get 20 comments bashing Apple. Those people will never buy anything from PCMech. They’ll just act like little fanboys. Instead, we need to cater a positive emotion that suits the type of audience I want.

For PCMech, that emotion is going to be excitement and enthusiasm. I want to foster an audience of enthusiasts for what we can accomplish with technology. I don’t want to pigeon-hole the site into building PCs (which is how it has been). I don’t want to be about tinkering with the insides of our computers because that market is dying. It needs to be about getting things done using technology – ALL technology. And with the “get things done” idea, we are tapping into GOALS of the niche by enabling them using technology. It comes right out of the Blueprint report. :)

If we see a cool new web app that can help our readers do something, we’ll talk about it. New hardware that does something interesting, we’ll talk about. A cool how-to to show our readers how to do cool things in ways they might not have known, we’ll do it. But, another motherboard being released? Boring! Quite frankly, nobody gives a shit. :)

By doing this, it makes the site more valuable.

  1. I will have an audience with an underlying emotional motivation, and that’s POWERFUL because it creates fans and, potentially, customers.
  2. With the right topics and the right tone in covering it, it now makes PCMech stand out against the typical news sites. Instead of reporting, we’ll aggregate, filter, and make it usable.

It’ll be interesting pulling this off. There are other writers on the site and I have to get them on the same page, too. They aren’t marketers and might not understand why I want things done certain ways. But, we’ll get there.

How can you apply this to YOUR blog?

Emotion is the glue. If your blog doesn’t cater to something with an emotional center to it, the blog is going to have a tough time in today’s internet. How can you adjust your writing to tap into an emotion or generate one?

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

  1. Why Some Blogs Just Can’t Make Money
  2. The Missing Ingredient Most Bloggers Miss When List Building
  3. Can You Post TOO Much?
  4. Techmeme: Pursue It or Screw It?
  5. Is “Make Money Online” The Secret To Traffic?
Six Figure Blogger Blueprint

Get your copy of the Six Figure Blogger Blueprint.

You'll Discover...

  • 3 vital questions to pick the right niche.
  • The layout for funneling traffic into your blog.
  • How this blog generates thousands of dollars monthly - without a single banner ad.

Your information will not be shared with anybody - ever.

  • Thank you for this. It makes me feel better amidst my ranting blogging. :-)
  • Very good dude!

  • "How can you apply this to YOUR blog?"

    By _mixing_ more emotion!

    I can strike a single emotional key no problem, but that's like a drag race. Interesting in the beginning, what with the squeal of rubber and roar of gigantic V8s, but unless you're a big fan of say, of Big Daddy or The Snake, gets boring.

    Mixing emotion is tougher. It's finding emotional points and counterpoints inside the chassis.

    Joy that you specced everything correctly and it's all snapping together... rage because your cut rate motherboard croaked, rendering both your expensive CPUs so much melted sand. (No, I don't want to talk about it.)

    Have fun!
  • Robb Sutton
    You are dead on. I have found my success in a product based, "news type" niche by doing the exact same thing. There are plenty of me too news sites out there if you are looking for the latest press release that hit the web, but Bike198.com focuses on emotion and real world application of reviews to set itself apart from the competition.

    When I set out to really drive Bike198.com, I looked at the successful industry magazines that had a strong reputation. One in particular focused on the emotion in riding through pictures and found a way to carve a huge spot for itself in an industry that is riddled with glorified advertisements pawned off as reviews.

    Using that same theory...I mixed in my own thoughts on cycling and how the biking audience wants information presented to them. That emotional attachment is what brings them back, the rest is a dime a dozen and I can't keep up with a fully staffed, 15 posts a day schedule that the larger news oriented sites can pull off. However, I outperform them in a lot of areas because they just quite don't get it yet in relation to online content and site growth.
  • Easy Essay
    I can't wait to see what you do with PCMech. It's an interesting concept.
    thanks for this nice sharing.... :)
  • "I don’t want to be about tinkering with the insides of our computers because that market is dying."

    :(

    I am a dying breed.
  • Kinda true. These days, most people just use it till it breaks, then upgrade.

    Course, there is a lot of people still building, but I think they're running out of legit reasons to do it (outside of just feeling like it). Problem is, that market isn't a good one for bloggers unless you want to focus on reviews. At least that's my opinion. Those people are in the buying mode. :-) But, then once its built, you focus on what you can do with it.
  • Yeah. For me, the main reason is cost. On my last computer, to buy a pre-built desktop would have been about $2300. By building it myself and buying parts wholesale, I was able to do it for $1250. It took me a couple hours to spec out the parts and about an hour to build it. Then overnight burn-in test and I was good to go.

    I think the real savings is for people who buy higher-end computers (like me). Those groups are basically people who do a lot of video production, a lot of CAD production, and gamers. All three are micro niches--probably not big enough for a site like yours (though a good video production blog with real reviews would be worth its weight in gold to me, and I haven't found one.)

    -Erica
  • I can't wait to see what you do with PCMech. It's an interesting concept that I think will pay off for you.
  • I so agree - emotion is the life blood of interaction.

    I achieve that by showing ultra-passionate videos of myself, and giving people the sense of a mission which I call the Digital Crusade. My writing style is pretty wild, the pics are epic, and the value is fun. I want people to have an emotional joyride when they "ride" through my blog ;)
  • I'm glad you wrote this. Too many bloggers who write about blogging forget that most of us are in niches built around hobbies, not personal development or blogging to make money (the two most popular blog topics, it seems).

    I write about scuba diving. It's hard to tap any kind of primal needs or emotions when you write about what is essentially a luxury sport / hobby. I'm not there yet, but your post motivated me to keep digging and find what my (potential) readers need.
blog comments powered by Disqus