How Will You Stand Out from the Crowd?

I’m always getting emails from my blog readers asking how they can take their blog to the next level, or even at the point where they are simply getting noticed. The bottom line is that you need to offer something different that the other millions of blogs out there don’t already do. Also, having advanced knowledge of blogging, marketing or even a ton of money to spend on advertising isn’t the answer.

Stéphane Kerwer from Dukeo.com went through this same thought process, then came up with a brilliant idea on how to make his blog quickly circulate through the top blogs in the internet marketing niche. While Stéphane’s blog focuses a bit on affiliate marketing and his goals to make money online, it wouldn’t be the content offered on his site that would drive traffic to his, but how he would create content for the most well known bloggers instead.

Top Blogger Caricatures

In introduce to you, Stéphane’s caricature collection! What started out as a few simple caricatures of top bloggers like ShoeMoney, John Chow and myself, ended up turning into a monsoon of viral traffic for Stéphane and Dukeo.com. Stéphane has designs created by a friend of his, then also follows up with a custom tshirt with the caricature on it, and mails it out to it’s respective blogger. When you find success… rinse and repeat! That is exactly what Stéphane has continued to do. Some of his latest caricatures are of Ryan Eagle, Shawn Collins, Jonathan Volk, Tyler Cruz and many more… many of which who went on to blog about the caricature and blog.

The True Value of Being Creative

Stéphane has now been mentioned on many blogs now, including ShoeMoney.com, JohnChow.com, JonathanVolk.com and now ZacJohnson.com. If Stéphane was to buy advertising across these sites to try and get people to his blog, he would have had to spend several thousands of dollars… not to mentioned the review posts probably would have generated a lot less attention. Instead, Stéphane’s only investment was creativity and time.

Just take a look at the massive jump in exposure and traffic to Dukeo.com in the past six months. It’s a bit obvious when the caricatures started spreading around. While the traffic may have peaked, the residual traffic is consistently higher than where it originally started.

So how will your new blog, web site or service stand out from the crowd? Before planning on dishing out a few thousand dollars on an ad campaign, or even giving up on growing your blog all together, just look around at how other blogs have made the leap. The Dukeo blog has been around since late 2010, but with massive growth in just the past couple months, it’s a great real life example of how being creative and dedicated can get you anywhere!

 

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25 Comments

  1. Standing out from the crowd simply means being a bit different. Not too different though otherwise people get scared off. If your intention is to make yourself noticed above all the noise around you then you need to do something decent to attract people's attention ~ in a good way!

    Don't do anything that is likely to make you seem an idiot, boastful, or in any other way "dis-likeable".Some people only like being around other people who are seen to be 'popular'. If you can manage this, then you are more than half-way home 🙂

  3. Very cool marketing strategy! Zac, do you remember any actions you took that took your blog to the “next level”?

    1. I made sure I had a unique blog design and a toon mascot that stood out. After that it was just getting the blog out there… I was already established in this industry for 10+ years, so it wasn't like the blog or I was starting from scratch. After that it was focusing on content.

  4. Stéphane creativity is awesome! These blogger Caricatures looks exactly just like their pictures. Different is good!

  7. Now I know the reason why most blogs have that signature caricature. So Stephane is the culprit. LOL The artworks are really catchy.

      1. Missy certainly deserves to be included in the hall of fame!
        My recent post Scenes from the Where 20 mobile conference

  9. Thanks a lot for the post Zac! I'm glad you appreciated my strategy to grow Dukeo.

    As part of the case study, I've been documenting every reaction my caricatures generated from the big guns in the industry. I started writing a post to explain my whole idea, how I came up with it, how it evolved, the ins and outs, and the result it had for my blog and brand. (It should be posted within the next 2 weeks.)

    Hopefully it will inspire some people to think outside of the box 🙂
    My recent post Who is Missy Ward

  10. I didn't think he was the one that actually drew them, but great idea none the less

  11. Amazing and inspirational story of a blogger who relied on creativity, eh. Indeed, his story had proven that creativity is one of the aspects on how to stand out among the crowd of bloggers in the web nowadays. And actually after reading this post, I click on his blog, and looked on his famous caricatures. Very creative blog, eh.

  13. Wow that was a large increase of traffic. The key to getting notice by most visitor and make branding is by being creative. Stéphane Kerwer of Dukeo.com make it. She is now known for making caricature of different internet marketing gurus today. Look out of the box and you'll definitely succeed.

  14. Through with our latest gadgets today we could able turn our human faces to a cartoon one. That is called caricature. The designs where planned and well created. This article was great, it is detailed and has a great point of views.

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