Roooarrr! How to Rise Above the Noise Blogging? Be Yourself!

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We’re in the AI content flood era. So what?

The noise level of the Web is overwhelming.

Almost everybody does publish and uses so-called LLMs

1. harder
2. faster
3. better
4. stronger

and of course more. Thus there is a huge amount of noise out there.

How can we overcome it? How can we rise above the noise level?

Do we need to became robots like Daft Punk?

The sad thing about the noise is that in another context it could be useful.

Just a few years ago the noise would have been signal. How come?

How to stand out from the crowd

There is simply too much similar content out there. I call it “me too” content.

Even Google had to demote it by now despite their business model of putting ads around third-party content.

By now authors and bots are repeating themselves and parroting others.

• Headline formulas
• recurring lists
• the same memes (“SEO is dead” anyone?)
• regurgitated summaries
• reinventing the wheel posts

are hitting the Web over and over until the last piece of originality is lost.

Each new post has to be the same as the already successful one but better.

Yet that’s almost impossible by now in most cases with dozens of similar articles.

To stand out you have to do it differently. Instead of following the herd find your own path!

Appreciate your uniqueness and add your

• local
• historical
• individual

perspective or point of view! I for one often speak about my blogs, Germany, parkour etc.

Ideally you find your own niche or even create one!

Also refrain from obnoxious yet widely spread mistakes business people make!

Aggressive self-promotion backfires

Some bloggers attempt to deal with that noise level by aggressively promoting their work.

They are flooding, provoking, pushing, e.g. by sending it to all their connections on social media.

I’ve stopped looking up those altogether. Especially as it’s always the same people!

Some are sending me their content while rarely showing up on my profile.

Those never engaging don’t deserve my attention in the long run either.

Others try to overwhelm with long-form content and ultimate guides.

That may be a legit way. Yet how many essays can you read per day onscreen on your

• laptop
• tablet
• mobile?

How many ultimate guides on any given topic can there be?

After all “ultimate” means literally “last”. Reading the last guide and then another one is a bit strange.

No, neither blatant self promotion nor excessive content size will really help the majority of writers out there.

The trick is actually writing less but better I have recently found out.

Back in the days you needed to publish constantly to build your audience and make them remember you.

How to excel each time now

Now you need to excel each time to become memorable!

How to be and stay a sought-after source of updates? What does this mean in particular?

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Depth

The latest trend of “the bigger the content the better” is pretty short-sighted. It works for the first few.

Then it starts to get annoying as you simply can’t cope with all those large pieces to digest.

Cognitive overload is a real issue.

The secret to maintaining a high quality while not losing the attention of your readers is depth.

Depth also implies the right choices. A list of 100 SEO tools might become popular for its size!

Yet the reader is left alone to decide which one of those really matter. Again, that’s overwhelming.

A list of four high quality free tools that haven’t been around for long and people might have overlooked until now is better.

Curation is not about an even bigger onslaught of information, it’s about picking the few gems worth looking at.

Depth can also mean succinct articles that update old lines of thought.

Why repeat everything each time going back to the basics?

You can link to them and only refer to what’s new or changed!

Digging deeper is best for intermediate and advanced users.

It can also help readers new to a subject by pointing them in the right direction.

Involvement

Involvement is not the same as engagement but similar.

When you engage your audience you obviously already have one.

Who to engage when you haven’t an audience yet?

You can “engage in the conversation” that is going on all over the place.

Yet that’s very generic advice without actionable steps.

Involvement is the key to engage a future audience you try to get.

Your audience should be comprised of some peers of yours, those who are at the same level of expertise as you.

These like-minded individuals will help you share and review your work.

They will comment when they agree, when you make a mistake or when they have something to add.

How do you motivate them to share your articles? Involve them on post level.

Simply feature others in your article.

They will gladly show others how you appreciate them.

On social media it often might appear that these few people are your whole audience.

All the others are invisible until you actually deep dive in to your analytics data.

There you will find the silent users. These are even more important. These visitors are the ones to buy your products or services.

They are below your level of expertise and exactly because of that they are following you.

These “lurkers” follow you either to learn how to do it themselves or to buy a solution from you.

You can’t reach them directly though at first. You get their attention by involving your peers.

Your peers are doing their own thing, publishing, selling stuff or consulting and trying to get clients too. Still, you can’t view them only as competition.

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Uniqueness

You can’t always write about things only you know, there are very few. Breaking news is the exception, not the rule for most of us. So how to achieve uniqueness?

You have to provide a unique perspective on things. You need to find a unique angle to a popular story.

Remember that every person is different based on their

• cultural background
• social status
• geographical whereabouts
• personal experiences
• even religious or sexual identity.

Don’t be afraid to write a Post on “What Marketers Can Learn from Gay Pride”.

In the US most employees are forbidden to talk about politics, religion or sexuality while at work.

In case you aren’t use your freedom to excel by being open minded.

Timing

There are two kinds of timing when writing and publishing on the Web.

The timely response to a burning issue and the time and date you publish and share your article or content piece online.

Make sure to react when a hot topic is still steaming.

Don’t wait until your thorough analysis is ready when everybody else is talking about it right now.

Add your unique angle (see above) and publish right away.

It’s pretty useless to post articles on SEO on Friday on during the weekend! Why?

Nobody will see them as search engine optimization is considered work so people don’t read about in on the weekends.

Publishing about  sports or entertainment is no problem on the weekend it might be even better than during the workweek.

Last but not least you want to make sure that everybody is awake when you publish something.

For an English speaking audience that will be in the evening UK time and during midday and in the morning US time depending where your readers are at.

Luck

Are you a lucky person? What a question! There are theories that positive people have more luck than pessimists.

Aside of that luck is with the industrious.

Try, try and try again and one day you will be lucky. This is simple math.

Don’t assume that blogging doesn’t work for you just because the world has overlooked your posts until now.

Apply the advice noted above and try again until it works.

One of my most popular articles with more than a hundred of shares was a quick and dirty post!

It was emotional! It that helped me to deal with the sadness of a failing project.

I posted it shortly after Christmas when everybody is still on vacation.

It’s not always perfect planning and implementation that make you succeed.

You are enough. The real you. Authentic. Unique. Be yourself! Don’t be a bot.

* Creative Commons images by Harrison Krix.