How to make your blog stand out in a saturated blogging niche

Chris Holdheide asked a very interesting question in a comment to my latest blog post:

My question to you is what do you do when you work in a niche that has a lot of other bloggers in it. How do I differ myself from them? If I do everything the other bloggers are doing how am I going to gain a competitive edge?

Video blogging vs text writing

Everything has been written already. It is very difficult to write something completely groundbreaking at the moment. But the thing is that not much of this material has been converted to video.

So even if your blog is in a very saturated niche, you can still make it unique by basically making videos of all the information that everyone else is competing for with text articles only.

What you have that no other blogger has

There is one thing that every blogger has that is very unique. You have yourself!

You are unique, you write your own blog, and no other blog can copy that. So you must use yourself when trying to make your blog stand out from the crowd.

You can make your blog unique by bringing yourself to the front. Find your voice in the way you present your blog, in the way you write your articles, in the way you comment to your readers.

Just see bloggers like ProBlogger, John Chow and Chris Brogan. They all put their face out there and make their blogs unique in that way.

What I do to make my blog unique

• Content

1. Being as transparent as possible
2. Giving away my blog design / promotional secrets
3. Sharing my blogging results
4. Going deeper in details than competitors do
5. Making my advice more practical / easier to implement than competitors do

From the start I tried to include as many real life examples and information as possible. For example the exact email I wrote to ProBlogger to get my guest post, the exact comment I wrote on a blog to get many visitors, exact blog visitor stats from my Google Analytics, or the exact codes to how I customized my blog. Not many bloggers in my niche reveal as many real-life examples about their blogs and strategies.

• Design

1. Unique customization to my Thesis WordPress theme
2. Unique blog header image

What steps do you take to make your blog stand out?

What do you think? What steps are you taking to make your blog stand out and to build a larger readership?

Image by SnappedUp