A great idea from Chuck Westbrook's Blog

How You Can Help End the Problem of Blogs With Great Content and No Readers

by Chuck on October 23, 2008

There is a simple way to discover under-appreciated blogs and help them reach the audience they deserve. In fact, with no special effort and in one fell swoop, you can now find these sites and reward the creator in a powerful way.

Here are the problems:

1. Great Content but No Audience
There are a ton of brilliant blogs that are being read by almost no one. Some authors give up for lack of readers. Others continue to produce clever, insightful pieces that remain hopelessly buried and forever unappreciated.
2. An Audience Hunting for Great Content to Read
If the blogs with the best content always rose to the top, readers wouldn’t have any trouble finding them. But that doesn’t happen, so instead, it takes either luck or a lot of work to discover good new blogs.

Seems like it’d be easy to fix; they want to be connected to one another. Right now, though, there’s not a great way to make that happen. Unless…
**THE BIG IDEA**: Ending the Tragedy of Under-Appreciated Blogs

This is a problem we can do something about without too much trouble. Here’s what I’m thinking.

1. Gather some nice bloggers who believe in helping good content rise. The more the merrier. This becomes our group for the project.
2. A good, lesser-known blog is chosen. Everyone in the group will read that blog for two weeks.
3. At the end of the two weeks, the group moves to another blog to read.

With scores of bloggers focused on a particular blog, the author should see many nice things happen over those two weeks, especially if the blog really is a hidden gem. This includes discussions, traffic, constructive criticism, encouragement, and connecting to some of the bloggers in the group. That author then joins the group and we move along and do it again.
Crazy Big Potential

Picture what success might look like. What if we get hundreds of bloggers playing along? What if bloggers like Seth or Dooce or other iconic bloggers join in?

Imagine how it would feel to have those numbers and those people looking at your blog after it’s been frustratingly quiet for months. It would be tremendous. That blogger would be permanently bolstered, and it would all be because of the strength of their content, and anything that allows bloggers that focus fully on content to succeed is great for the medium.
It Begins Here

How well this takes off will hinge on how well I’ve explained the idea and whether you decide to play along. Participating is so easy and the benefit to bloggers and readers could be tremendous–you really can’t lose.

All you’d have to do is:

1. Comment on Chuck's Blog to express your interest in participating.
2. Be willing to add only one new blog’s worth of reading to your life. This will be a different blog every two weeks.

With so little required and such great possibilities, why not try? Instead of analyzing and getting everything right up front, let’s just take the first few steps and see where that takes us.

Again, there’s no risk here. There’s no angle. It’s just a promising idea.

Let’s Get Started

I’m not going to load this with links. If the idea is good, help me spread it. That’s the spirit of this whole project anyway.

We’ll try to get a bit of momentum gathered while the final details are set up, and then I’ll reach out again.

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I want to nominate Belgian Waffle to be one of the blogs. The woman is brilliant and I love her British humour (when it is British humor, you have to call it "humour.")