No Differentiation

Differentiation permeates all levels of a website, but it need not be unique in all its features. It just needs SOMETHING that sets it apart from the pack, and makes it unique and desirable.

Nearly every week I run across someone who is launching a new "Work at Home Directory!!!". They are so excited about their idea, until a year later when they do not understand why it did not take off like they thought it would!

They have just built a website on which they throw some Work at Home links. They have not bothered to write any new content, or even to gather any articles that give useful information. They try to sell "advertising spots" to other home business owners, none of whom want to buy, because they know that nobody really looks at work at home directories. The site is unoriginal, redundant, and trying to break into a vastly overcrowded niche with no new focus at all.

Such a site will NEVER be anything more than a sucking hole in the budget and time of the person who builds it. Because it has no value. It has nothing to make it useful or necessary to anybody. They can find the same information more easily, and better information, somewhere else.

Your site has to have some feature or aspect that is unique, that makes it desirable and useful. If it does not, then it will not be able to build traffic, and nobody will come back, if they even visit it in the first place.

Taking the Work at Home Directory example, what can the person do to make that site useful? Since this is perhaps one of the hardest niches to break into because it is SO overcrowded with three kinds of sites:

  1. Genuinely useful and helpful resources.

  2. Scams and halfway efforts that are marketed with a lot of money, so that they overwhelm the startups that offer good resources.

  3. Floods and floods of identical, unoriginal, fairly useless sites that don't do anything constructive.

So you'd want to find a way to build a site that is in the first category. But it would have to be done in a way that did not duplicate their efforts, that put an original twist on it.

The entire project would need to be approached in a way that screamed "Original!", from the URL, to the site title, to the site description. You'd have to say what nobody else is saying, and in a way that really made it plain that nobody else was saying it.

I am using this example because this truly is one of the hardest arenas to carve a niche in. One problem you may have is that you may actually come up with a unique and different concept, but someone else out there may already have chosen to use the same words you do, for something that is NOT unique. I see the words "legitimate work at home" everywhere. But the fact is that 99 out of 100 sites that use the words "legitimate work at home" are hawking the same scams every other shady site hawks. Sometimes it is out of ignorance, sometimes out of an intent to deceive.

So if I want to build a straight talking, forthright site, and I say "legitimate work at home", I sound like all the rest, even though I am not! Differentiation then becomes a matter of finding a new way to describe it, that still gets search engine hits, and that people can still understand the meaning of.

And then I have to figure out what it is that people really want, that they are not getting elsewhere, and incorporate that into the site. I can't please everybody. I have to target specific people. Those who want MLM or business packages. Those who want to build their business from scratch. Home manufacturing, drop shipping, custom order stores, information site production, etc. Who am I going to specifically target that NEEDS what I have to offer? This is often referred to as your Unique Selling Proposition (what do you offer that no one else does).

My entire site and business need to be built around my unique feature - the thing that I can offer that no one else does. And I have to find ways to convey that difference quickly.

This is true of any business. Chances are, no matter WHAT you choose to do, someone else out there is either doing it, or saying they do even if they don't.

Differentiation can make or break your business, before it even launches. And lack of differentiation is something that I see so often in website business concepts that I consider it to be a major area of misunderstanding in startups.

Written by Laura Wheeler