Information - Finite Supply - Limitless Demand
There’s a cycle for learners. You start out being new to a topic - it’s all new and interesting, and you quickly acquire a broad overview and become fairly knowledgeable. At about this point most people lose interest and move on to something else. A few spend a lot of time to learn a little bit more and become experts to some degree. The tiny few true practitioners become Doctors of Philosophy of the subject and work long and hard to make a contribution to the discipline. We could be talking about cellular Biologists, Blacksmiths or just about any other learned group of people.
But what about the sources of information? Other than in current events or celebrity news you can’t produce a never ending supply of interesting mainstream information on most subjects, so what happens to the people who try? Most fail - because they just run out of material.
I’ve subscribed to and read just about every mainstream woodworking magazine that there is at one time or another in my life - being a woodworker to some degree by trade, and also by interest. I’ve noticed that all of the successful ones do the same thing. They recycle. That’s right, they reuse the same stuff over and over again. In a 24 month cycle the best ones that I’ve seen probably don’t produce more than 12 new articles. They just rehash the same stuff. It’s their best stuff, but rehashed nonetheless.
Why would they do this? Two reasons - 1) They make their living publishing a magazine about woodworking, so they have to print something every month. 2) There is only so much you can report about the subject that’s interesting to the readers. That’s right, for the price of a two year magazine subscription you can be exposed to just about every significant mainstream wood working technique that there is. At about this point if you renew your subscription you’ll notice that things start looking mighty familiar.
What does this possibly have to do with me you ask? Take a lesson from the print publishing industry, and realize that the majority of readers in most niches are in the early part of the learning curve where it’s all new and interesting. They’re also the ones that buy most of the tools. On almost any blog that has a “most popular” list, it will be full of basic skills articles. And a lot of the successful blogs devote a significant amount of attention to basic skills. Because that’s what the bulk of readers like, understand, and can use.
I’m not suggesting that the thing to do is to constantly repeat yourself, I’m making the observation that this is exactly what I see being done by successful publishers. And I’m not just talking about wood working.
If your goal is to supply cutting edge esoteric theory to elite practitioners then you’re probably going to have a rather small audience. But really, more power to you.
P.S. The photo is courtesy of a sweet new WP plugin called Photo Dropper that searches for creative commons licensed pictures and effortlessly inserts them into your post for you. Absolutely perfect for my inner slacker.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about the news recently. Now that we have 24-hour news channels, internet news, and more and more money to be made from it, we’re essentially having to invent news, scandals, etc.
In the blogging world, I’m still amazed how many blogs can get huge readership by talking about politics or blogging, even though it seems like many of the ideas are rehashed. There’s always some audience that it’s new to, and the newbies are always going to be a bigger chunk than the experts.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing…
The day after I posted this Chris Garret touched on the same subject briefly in his post about three types of blogs.
Funny how that works.
This is one of those ideas I need to pay more attention to. It’s so easy to run out of topics to write about and have that feeling like you’ve already said everything.
I need to remind myself it’s ok to talk about the same topics I’ve written about in the past.
If you look at what becomes popular on any social news site you start to see the same recycled material over and over. Nothing wrong with that, but it shows that you can recycle ideas.
Nothing wrong with that, but it shows that you can recycle ideas.
As you know Rand is rewriting the beginners guide on SEOmoz. Blogging about the updates makes that valuable content fresh again. Quality content rehashed - even the best do it.