Catering to the Blogging World’s Minorities

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At the end of the Seventies, a former insurance salesman looked for support in San Francisco’s minorities. Surprisingly enough, this allowed him to win the local elections and thus, become Supervisor of Castro and San Francisco. His name is Harvey Milk.

I am going to draw an analogy between this and a very close subject to many of you: blogging.

Something similar happens in the blogging sphere. There are candidates in elections as well: bloggers competing against each other for hits (voters); and there is a continuous process of voting that is never ending (hits, positioning, hits, results, hits, Google, hits, PageRank…).

So you wake up on a Sunday morning; you brew yourself some coffee and you sit in front of your computer with your blog editor on. Now what? What will you write about today? Well, in this case, you’ve only got two possibilities: whether to write for majorities or for minorities.

Do What Everyone Does. Write For Majorities

To write for majorities means to write about a hot topic, a revolutionary, viral, and very popular topic –a subject with a huge demand from the readers.

Everything till now is fine but a slight inconvenience: you take a look around where you find thousands and thousands of bloggers like you, and there they are, running next to you, passing you sometimes, and other times you passing them.

Worn out after the run, gasping for air, running like thirsty and starving dogs. Everyone running after the same reader, a fierce struggle in order to reach for the first positions in Google.

Or Be Unique. Write For Minorities

Well, if blogs existed in the Seventies and Harvey Milk were a blogger, surely he would do it in a different way: he would write for the old and retired; for the handicapped, for the homosexuals (at a time when it was taboo), for the African Americans, for the children, and for the jobless.

On the other hand, the other possibility would be to write for minorities. In fact, even though it may sound incredible, many of the searches that are done everyday in Google don’t get what they want. Has it ever happened to you that you’re googling and you can’t find anything interesting about it? Sure.

In addition, this never happens when we look for a hotel, a flight, a trip, a celebrity, or anything like it. It only happens when we are looking for more precise though less demanded information.

For example: how to find a job in North African countries in the fall; how many ATM’s belonging to a specific Bank there are in a certain city, etc.

Unsatisfied Searches. Just Wait Out There

The idea basically consists of the fact that, while the majority of bloggers fight for the most demanded searches, an endless number of subjects stay untackled. No one pays attention to them because they are subjects that are rarely looked up; or with a low advertising value.

In spite of not being frequently demanded subjects, they are covered by an important volume of searches. Maybe there are 10,000 daily searches throughout the world (whereas popular subjects might have 10,000,000 daily searches, for example).

Moreover, it might be true that their profitability in advertising is very low. On the other hand, you would be covering a vast territory of subjects for you to explore and exploit. Basically, no competitor would be pushing you, and you would end up being more profitable.

So, would you like to let minorities take you to the top? Just write some content for them and see what happens.

You will be surprised.