Not always, but sometimes. Especially when the story is already popular, and you're trying to pull off a blogger's "Dumb and Dumberer."

This idea recently became clear to me. A couple of weeks ago I began noticing headlines on the front page of the paper that seemed oddly familiar. A closer look revealed that the publication was reporting on stories I had already read about online, the day before.

Of course, perspective gained from a passage of time is helpful for interpreting events. But because I had already read about those stories previously, the paper couldn't hold my interest.

For different reasons, bloggers can also fall into the trap of reporting old news. It's deceptively easy, because technically the news isn't old at all. But there's a lag between the time the story breaks, and the time someone reads about it on the average blog.

Sometimes it can seem like a good idea to repeat what the big names are saying. After all, they're successful because they make good choices, and their choice of what to blog about must be brilliant right? So you post your take on things. But if you don't have a unique perspective, and you can't offer much more than what's already been said, you can sabotage your efforts to appeal to readers.

Say a surfer reads the story you read on the big name blog. Later he visits your blog. Same story! Boring. Exit, link right.

Certainly, if you're the first with a brand new update on a matter that has already been covered, then by all means get Dugg! But most of the time doling out a rehash of the same old ideas isn't the most compelling way to post.

So the lesson here is to be as unique as possible, in subject, in perspective, and in timing.

I know, everybody who's anybody has already heard of BlogRush. Well, I finally got around to getting this site in on the action, so I figured I might as well give a quick rundown of the service.

If you've got a decent blog, it might be a good idea to sign up for BlogRush. They provide a free, simple widget that earns you traffic. It doesn't interfere with AdSense, and every time someone loads a page from your blog, you earn 1 BlogRush credit. Why? Because that page load included a load of the widget, which itself showed 5 links to other related blogs.

Each time the widget is loaded, you earn another credit. And all those credits you continue to accumulate will be used to get your latest blog posts shown as links on other people's BlogRush widgets. One credit earned equals one showing of a link to your post.

The really interesting part comes when you can manage to refer a good-sized group of people. BlogRush keeps track of everybody you refer, and everybody they refer, on and on for 10 generations. Every time anyone in your referral network earns a credit, you will earn one too, or a fraction of one if they are a certain number of generations away. John Chow at one point had accumulated 10 million credits! Of course, results like that demand incredible traffic.

What I like about the widget is it's easy to add, it's low maintenance, and it's designed to be clicked by anyone, including the blog owner. Free, functional, fantastic.

For those of you who've been planning to sign up (or who just decided to), I'd be grateful if you'd do so through my referral link.

The key to a successful web site, many would say, is traffic. One important and often overlooked way to attracting visitors is to showcase remarkable ideas.

Today I read about Seth Godin's 2003 book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. At the purple cow area of his site, he allows people to read a couple chapters for free. The first chapter details how he went about marketing the book. Early on, his strategy heavily relied on getting the people interested in the book to share their interest with others. And he wanted to be remarkable. So he sold 12-packs of his book and shipped them in milk cartons.

There was a big risk in that method, as you'd think not many people would be willing to pay $60 to spread an idea. But the gamble worked, and the reward was huge. The Purple Cow took off.

That got me thinking about how it can be easy to forget the need to be remarkable. In fact, I think it's ingrained in many of us not to be remarkable! In school, you're taught to run with the pack, to fit in at all costs. But to succeed in business, you must be unique. You must be special. It's very interesting that traditional conformity must often be unlearned in order to make a name in business.

The idea of a purple cow got me thinking about the need to differentiate. The internet is saturated with copycats, both intentional and accidental. In order to get the amount of visitors that can make a site successful, that site must be worth visiting. It must be remarkable.

I've had this idea before, in lesser forms, and every time I come back to it there seems to be another piece of evidence supporting it. Maybe some of you've already thought of this or read about it somewhere else.

This is what I've realized so far:

In the story of Jesus, an angel comes down from Heaven to the Virgin Mary, and tells her she is blessed because she will give birth to our savior, Jesus Christ.

In "Terminator," Kyle Reese comes back from the future to Sarah Connor, and tells her she is destined to give birth to humankind's savior, John Connor.

John Connor = J. C. = Jesus Christ
Kyle Reese = The Angel
Sarah Connor = Mary

Heaven, like the future, cannot be easily reached. Visiting either place requires special circumstances. To get to Heaven, one must at the very least die. To get to the future, one must continue to live and allow around 40 years to pass (40 years from 1984, before Judgement Day was shifted around in the sequels).

Makes sense right? Well, here's what I don't get. If John Connor, Sarah Connor, and Kyle Reese each represent a character in the telling of the birth of Jesus, who is represented by… [voice of young John Connor] Miles Dyson!

I don’t normally buy a lot of ebooks, but a few months ago I decided to get myself a copy of “Day Job Killer.” Part of the reason I bought it was because the web site was saying how some “whiz kid” teamed up with a guy and found all the secrets to making money online. I thought, “Come on, what secrets?” And besides, who in their right mind with the kind of information that allows someone to make literally thousands of dollars a day would be willing to share?

But I kept wondering. Maybe there were secrets out there that I just didn’t know. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll buy this book, give it a quick read, and hopefully learn a thing or two. Well, it took a little longer to read than I expected, since the copy I got was 69 pages long. As Bill and Ted would say, “69, dudes!”

Anyway, I was surprised to learn some things in that book that I hadn’t ever heard of before. There really were secrets out there, if you can consider something you personally don’t know a secret. But maybe lots of other people didn’t know that stuff either. That could very well be, since much of it wasn’t obvious. I mean it made sense once you thought about it, but it’s too intricate to spontaneously occur to most people. Well, to me at least.

So what secrets did I learn? Well, I learned a trick for getting your Google AdWords ads to the top of pages without simply throwing gobs of money at your campaign. I learned ways to think outside the box when it comes to finding sources of traffic to your site. I learned a method that can be used to convince the buyer of a product to go through you, the affiliate, instead of right to the source. That way you earn commissions on sales that are practically guaranteed. And I learned some devious ways to use affiliate links.

I don’t think I ever would have come up with those ideas on my own, and I haven’t read anything like them anywhere else. I think the information must be the kind that is kept hush-hush outside of the guidebooks themselves, since it’s somewhat sneaky, and can be highly effective in the right hands. It’s like why tell your opponents the secret to your success? At least charge for it.

I tried a few of the techniques, the ones I was comfortable with, and I got some mild results. I could have tried using everything I had learned, but a couple of the tricks didn’t fit how I thought of myself. I think another reason I wasn’t immediately successful was because I didn’t take the extra steps to research things a bit more. I was in the mood for fast results, so I limited myself to just going the basic route. I think the guys that make the most money using the techniques in Day Job Killer are the ones who go the extra mile and tweak everything.

That’s probably why the creators are willing to sell the info. If most people don’t do what it takes to make the systems work, then the people who do have nothing to worry about. No competition.

This post contains affiliate links.

Have you ever wondered why a search of certain sites will bring up one result up top with links throughout the domain, and then another result for a random page? Why bother showing that second result?

Today I found out. At BlogStorm, it was shared that although many people perceive this search behavior to be bug-related, it is in fact intentional. In fact, many people actually do not see the first (Sitelinks) result at all, which is why a second, different (some might say "normal") one is also available.

It would seem to make sense why some people are blind to Sitelinks results, as not all sites have them, and ads are sometimes placed in that area.

The second listing is believed to be the most recently popular (or perhaps most linked to) page in the site.

Do you sometimes unintentionally overlook that first Sitelinks result? I honestly can say that I have. I'm so ashamed. :)