Internet Babel

If you don’t give your readers unique content, you should quit right now. No one needs to read your rehashed crap.

Sorry for the blunt introduction. Anyways, I’m Jason Pereira – I blog at The University Kid (subscribe to my feed! ) and also am starting up Blog Premiere as a blogging forum for all. Make sure you join if you haven’t

Anyways, Nick is busy today so he asked me to fill in.

This has probably been repeated thousands of times, but ironically it’s the very same advice I’m giving you now – if you are not unique in your ways, and you are running a blog, give up now.

Seriously. There are enough John Chow clones around… we don’t need another one. I’ve noticed the standard of blog posts in the blogosphere decreasing steadily over the last few weeks – in fact, I used to do a “Best Posts Of The Week” section on my blog but stopped because, well… I couldn’t find enough posts.

It is time for blogging to go back to what it was when it started out… a way for people to express themselves personally over the Internet. Your thoughts, your views, your experiences – not anyone else’s. Your opinion. In blogging, you are allowed to be selfish – remember, it is your blog, and if people don’t like it, all they have to do is not come back. Obviously if you want to build a following and earn some revenue, you will be considerate towards your readers, but remember – no one else should dictate your actions. Yes, they may influence it, but in the end it is you that will make the decisions.

There is nothing wrong with taking the last post that John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger etc wrote about, and talking about it on your blog – especially if the post was a good one. However, you have to add your opinion, otherwise your blog moves from being a personal journal online to becoming a regurgitation of others posts. Although you may not like to hear this, should you follow the above and not add your own opinion, you are no different from the thousands of scummy spam blogs out there with scraped content – the only difference is that you’re taking the time to rewrite the post before publishing it.

This post is mainly talking about blogging, but it relates to Internet marketing in general – if you have an idea, take it and run with it. No matter how crazy it may seem… you will never know until you try, and if you put off trying for too long, it may be too late. Honestly – some of the biggest projects I have run have been ideas that I had not idea whether they would work or not, as I was an unheard of person in the industry… I preferred to go ahead with them, just for the fun of it and they have turned out rather well (like my blog, for instance). My latest project, for example the blogging magazine – others would have said that there is no way in hell that a sixteen year old with little experience of running an online business will be able to pull it off – I’m delusional enough to think that it just might work.

Ultimately, no matter how insane a project may sound, as long as you don’t spend thousands on it, all it’s costing you is time… and I have a lot of it. Working on projects can also give you experience that you can use in other areas, for example I spent a day working on a “One Dollar eBook” that I wanted to sell a million copies off, to become a millionaire – a couple days later, I realised that it was a silly idea, however I now had a product I could give away for contests, get people to sign-up to my list, promote my own websites… waste of time? I think not.

Nick is the same, as you’ll see with a new project he’ll be launching – there is tonnes of competition, but if you have the belief (and I know he does) you can pull it off. I’m not sure if he’s spoken about it on here but I presume he will when it launches, so stay tuned

Anyways, thanks for letting me guest post here, and check out the links at the top – my blog, the blogging magazine forum and make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed. Laters!