Finding Your Shtick

I'm in the middle of reading Hugh MacLeod's Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity for the second time.  I picked it up because Seth Godin wrote a nice review, and I pretty much do whatever Seth Godin tells me to do.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because the other night I came across the 26th key and was struck by its relevance to blogging.  Here it is.

"You have to find your own shtick."

In case you're not up on your Yiddish, this basically means finding the thing that makes you — well, you.  The thing you do that nobody else does, or at least, that nobody else does like you.

Great artists, authors, and composers find a style that resonates with them and they stick with it, and their work becomes instantly recognizable as their own.  As Hugh says, you can always tell a Picasso is a Picasso.  When I hear a song by The Police, I know it's them, even if Sting isn't singing.

So what does this mean for bloggers?  It means making your blog your own, not just looking at the popular blogs and doing what they do.  Sure, you should copy the mechanics of successful blogs, but you've got to distinguish yourself with your content.  Whether it's your ability to inspire, your unique photography, your slang, your crazy rhymes, your three-sentence posts, or your particular brand of craziness, something has got to resonate with new readers and make them say "I can't get this anywhere else; I want to read this; I want to share this."

The most obvious way make yourself stand out is with the basic concept of your blog.  Plain old "healthy lifestyle" worked when it was new, and it created some of the most popular blogs in our niche.  The bloggers who got there first and built a readership with it are able to keep doing it.  But "healthy lifestyle" isn't new anymore, and it's not enough now unless your content is really special.

I get a lot of emails from HBH readers asking me to check out their new blogs and give them some feedback.  (Which feels kind of weird, since I was the one writing those emails just a few months ago.)  I love to do it, but the advice I keep giving is often the same.

Narrow your focus.  Don't just make it "here's the food I'm eating, here are the exercises I'm doing."  Sure, you have to write about this stuff, but make it different.  Pick a few things you love and inject that love into your posts.  What about a yoga and coffee blog?  A barefoot running and music blog?

I'm still looking for my own shtick on No Meat Athlete.  Running marathons on a vegetarian diet is kind of different, and having a memorable blog name to reflect that has been good.  But I'm still not sure what the best style for me is.  I tried taking pictures of everything I ate and asking a comment question-of-the-day at the end of my posts; that just wasn't me.  Recently I've gone for more of an information-meets-inspiration thing, and that's definitely closer to my shtick.

It's ok for it to be a work in progress. Picasso didn't start out as a cubist, and The Police weren't always raggae-punk.  But I bet when they found it, they knew they were onto something.