Flat Packed Blogging

I was recently talking about this to a client and realized I have never mentioned it on my blog, so let me introduce you to – The Ikea Blogging Strategy.

The Ikea Blogging Strategy doesn’t mean you have to blog about flat packed furniture, nor does it mean that your posts take hours to assemble but you’re convinced a piece is missing. Plus you’ve now got 3 Allen (hex) keys that now longer turn properly, though that might just be me.

What I mean by this is follow the strategy that the company founded by Ingvar Kamprad, from Elmtaryd Agunnaryd used when entering the UK market.

Ikea cleverly decided that rather than spend millions of dollars (or Swedish Krona, whatever) on surveys, studies and analysis to decide where best to locate their stores, they would just look where Marks & Spencer (a big British store) located their best stores, and build a store as near as possible. M&S had already done the research, tested the best locations and spent years refining the system, so why reinvent the wheel if those customers are the same as your customers?

Yes, but how does this help with blogging?

It’s likely there are already successful bloggers in your niche. You probably read them yourself and like what they write. So rather than trying to struggle to think of topics to write about, look at what is already successful and emulate those. Good places to look for popular posts in your niche are sites like:

• Digg
• Stuff to Tweet
• Stumble Upon
• Delicious

On all of those sites you can easily see what topics are doing well in your niche. Take a look, work out why they might be popular and think about how that can be applied to your own blog.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to find you own unique voice, and in fact this is where you can differentiate yourself and provide better value. A great post over on Remarkablogger asks “Should You Blog About the Same Topics as Everyone Else in Your Niche?” Go read it now, well in a minute.

Study your competition. What about their writing is it that you like? And don’t like (such as using “And” at the start of a sentence)? How do they promote their posts? What forums are they active in? What are they doing on Twitter or Facebook that you’re not?

In the end, blogging is like any other business:What are you doing better than your competitors to win customers?

Ikea includes extra screws in their products as it’s cheaper to give you more screws than deal with complaints and dissatisfaction by being one screw short. What do you provide that’s extra?