Business, Marketing, Standing Out

Circuit City or Best Buy . . . Target or Wal Mart . . . Apple or Microsoft . . . my blog or a stay-at-home-mom's blog who's got amazing traffic.

How do businesses stand out and make themselves different so shoppers know which one they're going to visit?

Survey yourself: which ones do you shop and why? Price? Experience?

Starbucks Coffee, for example, hasn't had me buy one of their drinks for months. Nothing against Starbucks, but their coffee is priced higher than Pronto's Donuts just down the street from me. And I like the taste of Pronto's better.

We often worry about large corporations running the small businesses out of town. But there's room to compete, provided your differences are clear and if the customer or client clearly sees benefits to what you offer.

I believe blogs are that way. I'm reading a book Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright who describes how businesses of all sizes, especially large ones, can really understand their customers better by using blogs.

For those of us who are bloggers, we really do need to know how we are different than all the other blogs around us. I've read blogs are being created at the rate of 100,000 per day by some estimates. But how many will last? And how many will stand out?

I'm asking myself these questions:

Why am I here?
What do I hope to accomplish?
Why will a reader visit and will that reader want to return?

My niche is providing interviews with people who have real-life experience and tips in business, money issues, real estate, and even health and tech from time-to-time.

I want to move more into video clips of my interviews posted on this site to bring the personality of the one being interviewed to the front for the visitor.

A blog is a product, it's a service, it's a community.

The more clear your purpose and your measure of success, the more satisfied you'll be as a blogger.

(And I should substitute the "I" for the other pronouns used in the previous sentence.)