You Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

On the web its important to be different. So important in fact that your livelihood hangs in the balance over it. Whether its a brand new internet auction site, or a fantastic unheard of niche that has a market craving for it, unless you’ve got a different way to lure in a fresh audience then you’ll have a hard time breaking even, making money or achieving your goals.

But I’ve also learned that you can take existing models and ideas and with a few simple changes convert them into something spectacular and business-changing. I got an email from someone called Terry at Kineda asking me to check out there new “Bloglebrity” tool. The idea is very similar to a concept by Business Opportunities Weblog:

Here, Tristan Louis, the creator of this tool has used Technorati link statistics to place a monetary value on my blog. The idea behind it is extremely simple; assign an amount of dollars for each link back to your blog, with higher repping blog linkbacks worth for $$. As expected the little box spreaded like wildfire so much so that the page got a PR7 and some great publicity to the site.

Now Terry has again used Technorati linkage values but displayed them in a different way than money. She has assigned a certain amount of links to a Celebrity Blogging Status. So for example, if you have a lot of links back to your site in a 7 day period, you could see yourself as an A or B-list Bloglebrity. The range goes down to a disappointing D. As a matter of fact, Blogtrepreneur happens to be a B-Lister (see the badge top-left of this article).

Again, this author has created a little graphic so that others can display it on their sites (just like I have done), once again giving her site some more link love. No doubt this will work wonders on her SEO and traffic.

But what Im really trying to emphasise is to look on original ideas in a different light. Examine what has made a particular site or product successful and look at a different marketing or USP (Unique Selling Point). Then you can leverage the resources from the first product and inject it into your brand new one – appealing to the same audience who may not recognise the ingenuity. So to all those who cliché, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” – you’re wrong. Teaching an old dog something novel may just be the best thing that will happen to your business and prosperity.