The Difference Makes All the Difference

byLesSimmons

232 followers

8 years ago

This post is an altered and shortened version of my post at http://youandmellc.com/why-being-different-is-good. Feel feel to read the full version and tell me what you think.

Admit it. You noticed the orange one first. But, I can’t talk about why that’s important just yet.

Before I can, I need to take a moment to thank my wife, Jen. She baked these cupcakes just so I could take a picture of them. They were delicious. If you want to see some examples of the really amazing work she does, please visit Someday Cakes. That’s her business page, and I’m telling you, she’s AWESOME (although it'll be tough to get anything from her unless you're in SE Michigan, lol).

Anyhow, the orange cupcake. Most people in our business know that it's important to stand out. But, it's hard to grasp how important, unless you understand why it’s important. So let's start with a definition.

Differentiation is the act of distinguishing yourself from your competitors and/or peers. In business, including online business, you observe what your competitors are doing, and then decide on a different course of action, which encourages visitors to come to you instead.

The goals of Differentiation are:

• To make your content better
• To make your content more searchable
• To make your content more popular
• To make your content more successful

We're just going to talk about the first one today. Differentiation makes your content better by doing one of the following:

• Offering a fresh experience
• Offering a service at a higher level than what visitors may be accustomed to
• Offering a creative perspective visitors may not find anywhere else
• Offering a new form of entertainment

Here's a couple of real world examples of differentiation in action:

• Burger King’s “Have it Your Way,” slogan was born out of a desire to differentiate themselves from their competition, who typically wanted to slap a premade sandwich in front of you without customization.
• LG places their power button and volume controls on the back of many of their phones (which I prefer), as opposed to the industry standard side button configuration.

The list of ways companies differentiate themselves in order to make their products better could literally stretch on into hundreds of thousands of entries. My hope, though, is that I've made clear the value in building (and improving) your blog posts and pages with an eye for being different, and that it brings you much success.

Les