Don’t Follow The Leader

There is so much noise on the internet that it is literally impossible to get noticed while doing the same thing as everyone else. As designers and/or business owners we need to be unique and different from everybody else in order to stand out from the crowd.

Often, when a new business enters a market, they find out what the leaders in that market are doing well and they try to copy them and do it a little better. However, this is not a good strategy if you want to grow your business quickly, as it involves changing the opinions of thousands (or even millions) of people who have already made up their minds about a product.

In a certain market, consumers might already have the image in their minds that a certain product is the cheapest. Instead of changing this image, it is much easier to create a new one. For example, you could make your product the fastest or the prettiest or the easiest to use.

For designers or online businesses, this applies in exactly the same way. If there is already a huge tutorial blog that everyone goes to to learn design or Photoshop or whatever, you don’t have a big chance of beating that blog in a short amount of time. It would take tons of money for advertising to get to the level of that competitor.

Instead, create something that is currently not out there. Something that people will want to talk about, because it is so different to everything else. Using the idea of a tutorial blog, why not create a blog focused on just teaching one area of design, like digital comics.

You can take this idea even further by, for instance, running a contest on every tutorial you publish for the person that can use the technique you just taught to create the best image. Or how about a tutorial blog that only uses comics, instead of plain text and images, to teach the reader a certain technique?

Those kind of things will get attention, and lots of it, because they are unique. Seth Godin calls them purple cows. He has written a book on the subject, which explains this idea in great detail. If you want to learn how to create your own purple cow, you should really check it out!