How To Really Differentiate Your Blog And What We Can Learn From Dave Pelz

Dave Pelz is a great teacher of golf. When he started teaching golf way back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a lot of teachers of golf already. He could have set up a golf school and taught golf to the masses like everyone else but instead he focused on a different market. Dave’s target market was teaching already good golfers how to lower their scores by focusing on these golfers’ short game. [The "short game" is golf parlance for after the golf ball is first struck but before the player starts to putt.]

Dave realized by the time he got onto the scene, there were many more established golfing instructors and academies already. He knew he’d have a hard time competing with these more established instructors and academies. But, golf was what he knew and loved and he wanted to make a go of it.

Instead of trying to compete directly with the establishment, Dave focused on a niche area of golf that was underserved. That underserved market was the good golfer who already knew how to play well generally but who would have breakdowns on the course that would lead to disastrous scores. These golfers wanted to lower their scores and they were Dave’s target market.

By focusing on this underserved market, Dave established his own proprietary teaching methods, mined data and statistics that highlighted weaknesses in the golfers’ games, and became a golfing guru known famously for his focus on the golfers’ short game to lower scores. Since he first started serving that underserved segment, Dave Pelz has gone on to write many books, open many schools (just dedicated to his particular niche of golf) and helped Phil Mickelson win his first major golf championship, The Masters.

Why is this relevant to blogging you ask? Because Dave’s story demonstrates that in even a crowded market, there are opportunities to differentiate what your blog is about from every other blogger’s blog out there. Dave Pelz didn’t try to open another general golf school and teach the same stuff as all the other golf schools out there before him, he focused on a particular segment of the market, studied that market intensely, discovered that market’s unaddressed needs and then devised his own solutions to meet those needs.

I propose to you that blogging about a topic is, in many ways, no different. You want to blog about a particular topic but as you survey the competitive landscape you realize it is a crowded field. Surely, you don’t want to add to the “echo chamber” and be just another blogger in that niche. Instead, really look carefully to see if there is an underserved segment of that niche you can address and then strive to be the best blogger in that segmented niche (of the main topic niche).

Examples:

First example: Instead of having a gadget blog about all the latest gadgets, how about a blog about the latest gadgets and which celebrities own them. So, in that case, the niche topic is “latest gadgets” and the segmented niche is “celebrities who own the latest gadgets”. You can even further segment by gender, nationality (e.g., Hong Kong celebrities), etc.

Another example: A blogger wanting to focus on Second Life (online simulation that’s been getting a lot of press recently) may want to concentrate entirely on blogging about how to start a profitable business in Second Life instead of covering general Second Life news.