If you spend most of your time in the real world, you can be forgiven for never having heard of Ron Paul. But, if you spend any amount of time online and haven’t heard of him, you’ve probably been living in the virtual equivalent of a cave. You can’t go on digg, for example, without his name coming up, even in seemingly unrelated articles. Anyway, in case you didn’t know, Ron Paul is the Republican party’s long-shot candidate for President.

In spite of that, there are still some important lessons that bloggers can learn from Ron Paul.

Manage Your Content. Choose your own words carefully, and review the posts of any guest bloggers before you post them. You see, Ron Paul ran into a little trouble with some newsletters he used to publish. Seems some articles had some racist and other offensive content, leading some former supporters to drop him like a hot potato [language]. Did he approve of that content, or didn’t he? Whether he did or didn’t isn’t the point here; the point is that people won’t believe that you don’t approve of something if you allowed it to run in your own publication (i.e., your blog), especially if you didn’t run it with a disclaimer beforehand. So, make sure to check the posts of any guest bloggers you have. Or, at the very least, make it very clear who wrote the piece and perhaps too mention that the views expressed do not necessarily reflect your own.

You’ll notice that, when posting posts not written by him or Michael Kwan, top blogger John Chow will clearly state in the opening sentence or paragraph who the guest blogger was that authored the piece. That’s a good practice to adopt, and, as I mentioned previously, you might also want to make a brief disclaimer, especially if it’s any kind of opinionated content.

Ron Paul will be forever tainted by the content that he allowed be published under his name. Disclaimers should be made beforehand, as any afterward attempts, unless perhaps they are immediately afterwards, are often taken with a grain of salt. If you’ve worked hard to build a reputation in the blogosphere, don’t let it be destroyed by oversight of allowing a guest blogger to post something damaging.

Build an Audience. Ron Paul has maintained a base of fervent, sometimes wacky, supporters who follow him in his charge against the windmills. The lesson here is that, unlike an election where only the top guy wins, you can still be a big success in a small niche. You don’t have to be the top blogger in the blogosphere to be successful. Number two is just fine. You can be at the bottom of the list of the top bloggers and still be laughing all the way to the bank.

You don’t have to have the largest audience, though it would certainly behoove you to have an audience larger than your immediately family and friends. It will be difficult to monetize a blog when your only readers are your family, close friends and your cat that occasionally sleeps on your monitor.

Blogging is not a winner take all venture. Even if someone could seize 51% of the Internet audience, that still leaves 49% available. Even a smaller percentage thereof can be profitable. Ron Paul had support that barely made it into the double digits, but in some areas of the Internet, it’s easy to fall into the delusion that he actually has a shot at winning. If he couldn’t win New Hampshire, he’s certainly not going to win anywhere else. But, you’re not running for President (probably), so you don’t have to worry about winning any states over to your cause. Single digit viewership online can still be great. There are almost 300 million English speaking people online. If you got 1% of that, that’s 3 million readers! Would you consider that a bad thing?

Never Give Up. While men with more money, like Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards, have already quit the race, Ron Paul keeps on going and going like some kind of real life Energizer Bunny. At this point, and at pretty much every earlier point, he didn’t have a shot at winning. But, he keeps spreading his message, winning over new converts to his cause. Mind you, that message is now somewhat tainted by the issues mentioned before, but he has still managed to retain supporters and win over new converts. The lesson here is that, even if you screw up big time, keep on going! Even if you don’t have a shot at winning the big prize, the smaller prizes are still pretty good. Plus, people will respect your “never say die!” attitude.

So, there you go. Three things that you can learn from Ron Paul, even if you’ve never heard of him until now.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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