Learning Versus Copying
We all know the sayings. “standing on the shoulders of giants” or the more direct “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
In blogging is it possible to be successful just by looking at what others have done? It seems from looking around there are quite a lot of bloggers who think so!
I do think a great way to learn many things is to model success, but modeling doesn’t necessarily imply copying. If you took every post on ProBlogger.net you would not make the income Darren does. Copying and pasting Copyblogger.com will not make you a great writer.
OK, those are obvious and most bloggers do not do this type of copying.
What I see most often is an attempt at duplicating a strategy.
For example,
- “many of the top 100 blogs post short posts multiple times a day so I need to do that.”
- “so-and-so has a million facebook friends so they must be using them to be successful”
- “This blog gets on the Digg homepage everyweek, all I need to do is get on Digg”
- “Seth Godin does not allow comments so I will turn comments off”
We have to separate correlation with causation!
Are these reasons for success or is it purely incidental?
Rather than try to duplicate any strategy, learn the why. Investigate the rationale behind something instead of parroting the surface.
Remember a bad blogger copies, a great blogger makes a strategy their own!
Todd K. Edwards | September 28th, 2007 at 11:59 am #
Wow very interesting post! Makes sense, and I think you just need to find your style. I feel that you can try to use what other people are doing it, but you need to put your spin on the idea to make it your own!
Kevin | September 29th, 2007 at 7:24 am #
I think you have touched upon the reason why so many bloggers have failed to get their blog to the level they want. Monkey See Monkey Do!
Chris Garrett (Post Author) | September 29th, 2007 at 9:16 am #
@Todd - Yes and your own style is very important, a lot of people overlook that but readers are often intuitively drawn to blogs partly because of personality
@Kevin - Great way of putting it, that is exactly what some people do isn’t it?
Todd K. Edwards | September 29th, 2007 at 4:05 pm #
I agree with your statement Chris, thanks again for the post!