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

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?