“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” - Cecil Beaton

There are millions of blogs in the blogosphere and, unless your blogging about teaching your parrot advanced calculus, thousands in your niche. Right now, the market is flooded with other blogs just like yours. What is it that makes your different? Why should I follow your blog on making money/SEO/funny videos/whatever over the next guy (or gal)? Like the wise Cecil Beaton says above (actually I’m not really sure if he was wise, but that’s a darn good quote up there) you don’t want to be a play-it-safer. Make your blog different.

Take a controversial position - 2+2 = 7?

It’s easy to follow the crowd. It’s easy to find some popular topic and blog about it just like everyone else. You love twitter? So does everyone else…including me >blush<. Try standing out. Write about the 10 things you hate about twitter or tell people how they can get rich by dropping out of high school to flip burgers.

People don’t want to hear the same thing from you that they’ve heard from everyone else. (Let me throw a marginally off-topic nugget of wisdom in here also - if you are regurgitating news you’ve read somewhere else, spice it up - add your thoughts, add a video on or find a complementing post from a fellow blogger. That’s what I did in my post a few weeks ago on how expensive text messaging is.)

Make your design unique

To the first time visitor to your blog, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. I don’t care if you’re Agatha Christie (world’s best selling fiction author, BTW), if your site is ugly, people won’t stick around to read your potential award winning post on the sleep patterns of sheep.

Upon starting a blog, most people set-up Wordpress and begin blogging with the default theme (very boring mind you.) Some get a little more adventurous and Google “Wordpress Themes” and grab the coolest looking one from the first site they come to. So now you and 6 million people are using the same template (look at you, you’re so unique now!)

This leaves you with two viable options - purchase one or customize one that someone else has done most of the hard work on. Purchasing a template is a great idea, but not always an option for the low-income, part-time blogger. I prefer to customize a pre-made template. I find a template that I like and modify some of the images and formatting to fit what I’m looking for (that’s a whole other topic, more on this in a future post.)

The point is, most first time visitors will only glance at your page for a few seconds before moving on. Be sure to grab their attention with a unique blog design.

Make your blog you

When it comes down to it, your blog has to be your blog. Why is blogging so popular? Because people are interested in getting information from real people, not a faceless news site. Whatever your topic is, your blog is really all about you - your interests, your writing style (voice) and your personality. You is what will make your blog stand out from the crowd - even if you have the dullest blog in the world. This is a huge reason that the biggest bloggers are the biggest bloggers. People like them - their interests, their writing style and their personality. I hope my personality shines though on WallerBlog dot Com (I feel like it does anyways.) I like to be a little snarky, a little nerdy and a little outside-of-the-proverbial-box in my ramblings.

If your goal is to have a blog where you’re the only reader (family doesn’t count) then be the same as every other blogger out there. Otherwise, you have to be different. These ideas above are by no means a complete list on how to make your blog stand out from the millions of others out there, but it’s a starting point. Go, be different!