In this post, I’m going to teach you a strategy for building popularity: the small market strategy. What is the small market strategy? I’m sure you all know that for a blog to become well known, it needs good SEO, and its articles need to be good too! Many books about gaining popularity say you should write about hot keywords so people will read your posts. But that… isn’t necessarily right. If you understand how SEO works, you know that the more links a web page has, the higher it ranks in search engines. In other words, if your site doesn’t get many visitors, your articles won’t rank near the top. For example, suppose I write an article about Gmail right now. If you search for it in a search engine, you might find your article on page 2 or 3, or not at all. Even if it ranks on the first page, if the articles ahead of yours are all very similar to yours,
the chance someone clicks on you is still very low. Say you rank 5th, and the four sites above you all have the correct answer (what users want to see). Then you basically won’t get clicked! So hot keywords aren’t always good. The small market strategy goes the other way: write articles on keywords that “no one is competing for.” Of course, you might ask, won’t articles on obscure topics get no readers? Don’t worry about that. There are hundreds or thousands of users online, and not all of them are looking for popular articles. Perhaps 1% of them happen to be looking for obscure topics. Don’t underestimate 1%. That could mean hundreds of people. If your site happens to be exactly what those few hundred people need, you’re in luck～～ For example, I have an article that teaches people how to use Fixdwnp. It’s very popular (the most popular on this site ^^), with dozens of people clicking on it every day. But it’s not a hot keyword, and as far as I know, only I and a few others have written about it on Chinese-language blogs.
Of course, a blog shouldn’t only publish obscure articles. My personal recommendation is to alternate: one popular article, then one obscure one. If you only write obscure articles, you won’t keep visitors and turn them into regulars. So I like to use obscure articles to draw in new visitors and popular articles to keep them around. That way, your popularity will grow steadily. One more thing to keep in mind: you must do SEO well, or your articles will still be hard to find. I’ll add a tutorial on that later.
Afterword: This method also applies to business. It’s essentially what the Art of War calls “do not attack sharp troops.” No one dares to meet hard force with hard force, let alone meet hard force with soft force. That’s no different from striking a stone with something soft. Instead, if you go after a small market, your chances of success are actually much higher!
↑↑↓↓ Ranked 9th, yet it only has 20 visits, because the articles ahead of it are all high-quality, so there’s no room to compete.
The two images above show that even when an article ranks near the top, it’s still hard to get clicked.