What’s in it for you?

Today I want to continue on with the discussion of where to go next with Bloghiker. At the moment, we’re focusing on what’s in it for those of us participating. What’s in it for the featured blogger, and what do the participants get from it?

What’s in it for the featured blogs?

First, I want to look at what the featured blog gets out of it all. The most alluring aspect is obviously going to be a burst of traffic, at least for most people. Beyond that, there’s a great chance for building some relationships and making use of the feedback in the comments. Traffic, friends, and feedback are biproducts of attention. What makes Bloghiker different and special is the sustained nature of that attention (in theory, at least).

What’s in it for the customer? (the readers?)

Now more crucially, what’s in it for participants? Without a large number of participants actively engaged, there’s nothing special about being featured here rather than anywhere else on the web. It’s essential that readers are on board in a big way, and this is more complicated than with the featured blogs.

I think there are three reasons here that someone might really be on board–community, learning opportunities, and finding enjoyable new content to read. You could maybe add a fourth one for altruism, but that pretty quickly rolls into community.

Community is a tenuous thing that requires an active facilitator to make it work, as Jeb pointed out in the comments of the last post.

Learning opportunities come from more posts per featured blog and also require a bit more active facilitation to make it work.

Enjoyable new content doesn’t require much, relatively speaking, to keep it going but does necessitate a limited audience; you’d have to pick a niche or type of blog to avoid alienating a bunch of people when it doesn’t match their interests.

Tomorrow, I’m going to break down some of the possibilities given these factors. In particular, what are the pros and cons of the different ways to appeal to the readers?