This is in response to a direct message I got on Twitter by someone who requested not to be named.
(If you have a question for me that you’d like me to answer in the blog, you can send them to me on our contact page. If you’re reading via feed, it’s a good time to stop by the site and see the last round of changes we’ve made to help you. 
Just sayin!)
The question was:
I keep getting ideas of what to write from my peers, how do I avoid looking like the “me too” person?
That’s actually a common problem for bloggers, especially in the tech area. Blogging veterans call the tendency for a lot of people to report on the same thing “the echo chamber”. None of us wants to be the blog that just reports on the other blogs — our readers will say, “but TechCrunch already told me that, Tinu, so why should I subscribe to both of you?”
The answer to this issue is two-fold.
First of all, strive to be as unique as possible. You don’t want to bill yourself as the cutting edge expert, then cover the same content other industry leaders wrote about the day before, the month before, the year before. Remember that people who read Newsweek, sometimes also read the New York Times. They don’t cover the same topics the same way, in part to remain useful to that over-lapping audience.
In journalism, this is why reporters look for “exclusives”. In some cases, you aren’t going to be the only person reporting a story though.If If Google comes out with a new feature that is helpful to your readers, you don’t want to just tell them to go read the Google blog – so offer them some piece of information other blogs aren’t.
How is this relevant to their business?
What are some steps to implementation?
What’s your opinion after a “first-look” at the tool?
Unique content, regardless of the format you deliver it in, is a key element for retaining visitors.
Secondly, you’re going to find that there are times when not telling others about something you discovered is unavoidable, because it’s better to sound like a me-too person than to neglect to inform the part of your audience who pretty much only listen to you online. You have people like that in your audience, who are only subscribed to your newsletter, would only buy products on a topic if you made one, who just don’t read any other ezines in your industry, because they happened upon you or simply because you’re the only one who makes sense to them.
Most iPod users would rather be shot than have to switch to a Zune. And vice versa, by the way.
The question is, how do you serve those people with the information you find without alienating your advanced people who may have heard the news you want to report ten times before they get to your blog?
It’s so easy. And you can get TONS of traffic out of doing this.
Link to the other sources. Do a shorter audio, video, slideshow, bullet list, and link to all the other references. Send trackback notificaitons to all the other blogs. Write to the authors to let them know you wrote about them.
Add/vote on the other sites in social media bookmarking sites, and share your article about them in social networking sites.
So how does this bring you traffic?
You have no idea of the gratitude that results when you fully credit other people with an idea, a breaking news story or simply, a good blog post. It’s done so seldom online that it’s now the norm for someone to see a fresh perspective on someone’s blog, create a product from it, and have it on the market before you can say “stop, thief!”
When, instead of opening oneself up to an ugly lawsuit over copyright infringement, or the ridicule of your customers who see that all you do is reblog other people’s content, you can do an end run around all these problems with one simple, elegant sentence.
“I’m writing about that same thing – where would you like me to like to you?”
And when you link to people? They tend to link back.
You’ve heard that before… but what you don’t understand is that linking is the key to ALL the traffic on the web.
Better search results come from proper contextual linking.
Links are the roads on which internet traffic travels.
Linking out can help you become seen by humans and search robots alike as an authority site – it says “I’m so confident in the quality of my content that I will show you where you can get tips elsewhere.”
Give credit where credit is due.
Send links to the people who have the same great ideas.
Before you know it, you’ll have built a highway of traffic pointing to your site as the premier destination.
Coming soon – How Traffic Works, a preview to understanding the Whys of Traffic.
