In yesterday’s post, What to Blog About?, and in the later comments I used an example of content researching for someone starting a blog about acne just to illustrate that even topics which you might not normally think would have a lot of online active communities likely do if you just search for them.

My intention was not to say anyone should go and use the personal sufferings of people afflicted with any medical condition to simply build profitable niche sites about. One reader’s email contact questioned me on this, so I wanted to be sure I was clear on that.

Honestly, my posting yesterday had nothing to do with “what to build sites about” for anybody, it was just a sharing of existing resources for anyone who might be starting a site on any topic at all.

It doesn’t matter if your site is about remote control toys or breast cancer, that just wasn’t the question I was addressing. The point was to show that whatever you may be starting a site (or blog) about, you can find good communities online already where the existing conversations can help to spark content ideas for you.

And even in cases where the topic would be about medical conditions or something else that people suffer with, I stand behind the use of existing communities for content idea generation for what I think is a very good reason:

To build a useful and resourceful site on any topic, you need to know what people want or need information and help on.

Again, using the acne blog example, it would be a waste of people’s time to create a bunch of blog postings on acne unless those postings addressed the actual questions and concerns sufferers are having.

The best way to know what those are is to go straight to the source.

Sure, I’m usually all about marketing with my web sites and earning a living, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to provide the best information and resources that I possibly can to visitors of my sites.

I mean, that’s kind of what makes being involved in marketing online rather the offline so attractive to me.

Offline marketing is all about pushing your message on others regardless of their actual needs. Where online marketing is about the targeted matching of your message to people’s needs. It’s win-win for everyone in my opinion.

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Tags: Blogging, internet marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.