However, as the barriers to entry have been removed, the barriers to establishing yourself and becoming widespread and popular have been fortified and reinforced. After all, why should anyone follow your blog on French Dining and Cuisine when there are 100 French Dining and Cuisine blogs to choose from? To stand out, you must differentiate yourself from the crowd. One of the easiest ways to do this is to become hyper-local. For instance, consider changing your blog to “A Guide to French Dining and Cuisine in Morris County, New Jersey.” Not likely is the competition in this area not nearly as steep as in the global market for French Cuisine guides, but this hyper-concentration also allows you to offer valuable and relevant information to your readers. You could offer a rating service for each of the county’s French restaurants. You could list the supermarkets in the area that sell the ingredients listed in your recipes. By narrowing your focus, you can concentrate more closely on the needs of your readers.
Dangerous Internet Trend Number Two - Popular Sites are Becoming Entrenched
Not only does the sheer number of websites and blogs that exist today make it hard for your site to become popular, but you may be surprised to learn that the very infrastructure of the modern web has been set-up to favor established sites and brands, and to crush small start-ups.
The web, hailed as the paragon of democracy where every voice has an equal chance of being heard, is actually quite far from that egalitarian ideal. Instead, today’s web is increasingly set-up to reward entrenched sites and early-arrivers to the scene. Late-comers, even late-comers with superior products and services, will find they have a hard time generating enough buzz to cross the crucial threshold after which their site begins to market itself.
And who are the gatekeepers of this threshold? Well, they are none other than the well-meaning and all-important Search Engines.
I want to make one thing clear here before I continue. Search engines in no way desire to stifle or suppress superior products and services in their search results. In fact, their whole business is based on returning the most relevant and helpful sites per your request! I simply mean to say that the very infrastructure the search engines use to decide which sites are most relevant is biased towards well-established sites that have been around for a long time. Think about it. Sites that have been around for longer have had valuable time to accumulate links. The more they are linked to, the higher they are displayed in the search engine results. The higher they are displayed in the search engine results, the more traffic that is sent their way, which in turn generates more links back to their site. It is hard for any new site to overcome this system of ever-increasing returns, and it will only get harder as popular websites age and gain more and more links. The lesson to learn from this? Get in the game as soon as you can.
Dangerous Internet Trend Number Three - Anonymity on the Web
Partly because of the exponential increase in the number of people and groups on the web, it is getting harder and harder to verify the legitimacy of a website or blog. Many of your visitors will come from search engines. And these search engines are hardly free from unscrupulous, and sometimes malicious sites (A September 2009 issue of The Week listed “Jessica Biel” as the celebrity search term most likely to yield results that attempt to install spyware . Even if visitors trust you enough to stay on your site and look around for a bit, they may disable scripts, rendering your high-tech applications useless.
We at See Link Run have devised a tool to overcome this third problem facing web developers today. This tool allows web developers to display the top Incoming Links, or Backlinks, to their site directly on their web pages. You already (or should already) work hard to generate links to your site from popular blogs and sites in your field. In fact, if you’re smart you’re already keeping track of these links as well as other website statistics with some sort of web analytics service. Why shouldn’t your visitors also be privy to the information about what sites and blogs recommend your services? This information fosters trust among your users, a valuable thing in the increasingly anonymous web. Also, the Top Incoming Links tool can help point visitors to relevant and complementary sites and services. Check it out at Web Development Tools – Top Incoming Links.
