Is this the Secret to Success?

13 thoughts on “Is this the Secret to Success?”

1. You know, funny thing is I just started a blog thinking what I wanted didn’t exist. When I launched the blog, though, a bit of digging surfaced a blog just like mine.

   Bah. Whatever. Just like what Deb did, I’ll take my blog to the next level soon enough.

2. Great quote, Chris. I think that’s why flagship content like tutorial and case study posts work so well. They obviously help the readers. But they also help the blogger because he/she will probably use it as a resource in the future.

3. You’re right, Ahmed, which is what I’m doing now. Originally my blog was just a list of daily leads for freelance writers. Now it’s leads for both writers and bloggers and discussions of interest to both. I redesigned and moved away from a subdomain to my own domain. As the blog grows it will continue to evolve into a growing community.

   I think another key to success is to grow with your readers and evolve with them. Take ideas from the comments and learn why they come to visit you. Stick with your niche, by all means, but grow with your readers.

4. Ahmed might be right as we do have to keep evolving in what we do but if all the others are just pale imitations you are probably safe

5. deb – perhaps it’s time to take the blog to the next level?

6. This is just the motivation I was needing! I was working on a project and starting to have doubts because I just wasn’t seeing it anywhere. I know I’d like to see it and I’m sure others will too. This gives me a little of my excitement back! 😉

7. When I started Freelance Writing Jobs it was the first writing blog listing jobs and advice for getting those jobs – I started it because I didn’t see it anywhere else.

   Now three years later they’re a dime a dozen.

8. “Something I wanted to exist simply didn’t seem to exist. I couldn’t find it, so I created it.”

   Ah, but the best ideas and realizations are often so simple…

9. It stands to reason that if we’re looking for something and not finding it, someone else might be looking too. Success, then, would depend on how idiosyncratic that “need” might be; whether that need is shared by (enough) others.

   That said, “I couldn’t find it, so I created it” — there’s something so simply powerful in that statement, I’ve found myself coming back to it all day…

10. The more I think about this the more I can’t believe it’s not the way we always do things When I launched my last few blogs I thought about what I wanted to create a blog about, not what I thought the market needed. I guess though you need both a need to fill AND enthusiasm.

11. This is why I launched Mysterious Flame. I had looked and looked for a website that approaches art from a productivity standpoint much like 43Folders approaches general productivity, but I never found what I was looking for. So I made it myself. It’s brand-new, so there’s not a lot of content there yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

12. Tom Robbins covers this idea in one of his books, but he is speaking of artistic creativity. It’s in Skinny Legs and All. One of his characters turns an airstream trailer into a giant driving turkey on a lark, It ends up in a museum.

    When asked why he did it, he said he wanted to see one, but nobody had done it, so he had to make it himself. His girlfriend, a painter, decides this is a pretty good synopsis of artistic motivation.

13. Ah, the memories. I made my first move into the web space by developing a script to fill my own need…and proceeded to sell it because I figured others would need it too. I made over $5k in the first 3 months.

    Chris, I think that quote about nails it.

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