There is a simple way to discover under-appreciated blogs and help them reach the audience they deserve. In fact, with no special effort and in one fell swoop, you can now find these sites and reward the creator in a powerful way.
Here are the problems:
- Great Content but No Audience
There are a ton of brilliant blogs that are being read by almost no one. Some authors give up for lack of readers. Others continue to produce clever, insightful pieces that remain hopelessly buried and forever unappreciated. - An Audience Hunting for Great Content to Read
If the blogs with the best content always rose to the top, readers wouldn’t have any trouble finding them. But that doesn’t happen, so instead, it takes either luck or a lot of work to discover good new blogs.
Seems like it’d be easy to fix; they want to be connected to one another. Right now, though, there’s not a great way to make that happen. Unless…
**THE BIG IDEA**: Ending the Tragedy of Under-Appreciated Blogs
This is a problem we can do something about without too much trouble. Here’s what I’m thinking.
- Gather some nice bloggers who believe in helping good content rise. The more the merrier. This becomes our group for the project.
- A good, lesser-known blog is chosen. Everyone in the group will read that blog for two weeks.
- At the end of the two weeks, the group moves to another blog to read.
With scores of bloggers focused on a particular blog, the author should see many nice things happen over those two weeks, especially if the blog really is a hidden gem. This includes discussions, traffic, constructive criticism, encouragement, and connecting to some of the bloggers in the group. That author then joins the group and we move along and do it again.
Crazy Big Potential
Picture what success might look like. What if we get hundreds of bloggers playing along? What if bloggers like Seth or Dooce or other iconic bloggers join in?
Imagine how it would feel to have those numbers and those people looking at your blog after it’s been frustratingly quiet for months. It would be tremendous. That blogger would be permanently bolstered, and it would all be because of the strength of their content, and anything that allows bloggers that focus fully on content to succeed is great for the medium.
It Begins Here
How well this takes off will hinge on how well I’ve explained the idea and whether you decide to play along. Participating is so easy and the benefit to bloggers and readers could be tremendous–you really can’t lose.
All you’d have to do is:
- Comment below to express your interest in participating.
- Be willing to add only one new blog’s worth of reading to your life. This will be a different blog every two weeks.
- Click “Subscribe” in the top right corner to get RSS or email updates.
With so little required and such great possibilities, why not try? Instead of analyzing and getting everything right up front, let’s just take the first few steps and see where that takes us.
Again, there’s no risk here. There’s no angle. It’s just a promising idea.
Let’s Get Started
Just comment below, and subscribe to the RSS or email updates for further instructions. Maybe we’ll make a banner to give out, set up a special blog, and set up a special RSS feed that will change the channel every two weeks. We can get sophisticated later. Let’s just get started now.
Oh, and send others in this direction too. I’m not going to load this with links. If the idea is good, help me spread it. That’s the spirit of this whole project anyway.
We’ll try to get a bit of momentum gathered while the final details are set up, and then I’ll reach out again.
VERY IMPORTANT
I’m going crazy trying to get email updates to everyone. Only 40% of the emails I sent with the message service got all the way to being opened. So I’m not using email anymore for this.
TO BE INVOLVED: You must click the “Subscribe” button in the top right of this blog to have updates pushed to you. This lets you subscribe using RSS or email. This is the only way that you will have anything set to you to keep you involved. Otherwise, just bookmark the site or get a tattoo or something.
****Bonus****
Instead of only commenting below to express interest, post a link to this post on your blog too. This will help things spread, and then we’ll choose one of the people who do this to be the first blog the group reads for two weeks.
Just make sure it shows up under the trackbacks (which appear right above the comments section) OR link to your post in the comments section.
****Sooner is Better****
I mentioned that we’ll probably get a little banner for those who participate in the group. Well, your banner will have the number corresponding to the order in which you replied proving that you signed on before it was cool. Move fast, so you can show your friends that you MADE it cool.
