After a long and hard thought, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t. However, that doesn’t mean I should throw in the towel. Let’s take the analogy of a small time investor versus the big time investor. In a bullish economy, the big time investors with their millions and billions will almost make more money than their small time counterpart and they are usually the ones who would be able to dictate the price of their stock. Given their unfair advantage, shouldn’t small time investors give up? However, there will always be small time investors and while the big boys are earning millions and billions, the small timers are contented with their tens of thousands.
Coming back to my blog aggregator. The big boys like Yahoo and MSN can have millions of visitors a day but if I can have a thousand or two a day, it will still be a achievement for me.
How can I do it?
Going back to the investors analogy, I have a few ideas.
- Don’t compete. In the same way that most small time investors usually don’t bet against the big boys, I should instead look for opportunities to work with them. I have been approached to act as a middleman to liaise my authors with them and I have taken the opportunity to request to have my site link published in their microsite.
- Agility and Flexibility. Due to the large amount of shares to be acquired, a big time investor will need time. Also, if it is a institutional investor, there will be a set of guidelines to adhere too. Similarly for the microsites, the will have to vet through the blogs and authors before deciding if they can be published. In addition, the quality of each individual post is subjected to the approval of the editorial team. I have no such rules or restriction. As long as it is not abusive or offensive, I will and can publish it.
- The Number Game. This is a double egde sword. I will think that the big boys will eventually settle for a few established blogs – those that can regularly contribute good quality articles. I can always allow my site to grow to aggregate say one hundred blogs but more is not always good. The site may get too cluttered and deter readers. The authors too may not get the traffic that was intended since there are no so many blogs. I will have to find a balance point.
The next step to embark is how to do it.
