Blogging Lessons from Hip Hop Artistes

I like hiphop. I think it’s cool and the rappers are lyrical geniuses but that is not what this all about. Rather it is all about something these guys do that can be applied to your life and of course your blogging experience.

Most hip-hop artistes have different styles of doing their thing and if you listen hard enough, it gets to a point when you can distinguish them from another or identify who’s song you are listening to before you hear a second word.

Lesson 1: BE DISTINCT
Bloggers should be unique just has we all have different finger prints.
If someone looks at your blog or reads your posts at different times and thinks “Hmm, I have read something like that on xxx’s blog before” then I think we know who the copycat blogger is.

Search deep within your soul to find the message it wants so badly to pass across in the blogosphere and just let it flow out from deep within you.

This leads me to point 2. These rappers know the benefits of being consistent even as they separate from the hip hop mod. Before you can be consistently distinct you need to find what the rappers call your juice or what is popularly known as your MOJO. I call it your inner energy. It will keep you going on strong all through the cycles of life. This is the thing that has kept Snoop Dogg relevant after over 2 decades.

Lesson 2: FIND YOUR INNER ENERGY
Find your blogging MOJO and set it ablaze for it will sustain you over the long haul.

Hip Hop artistes (especially the gangster rappers) know how to build a cult of followers. In the mid-nineties, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G “beefed” each other till they both ended up dead – this is nothing to emulate but do you know that these guys in the process magnified the East Coast – West Coast culture in America’s Music industry? Even in Nigeria where I live, there was a loyal followership of either side.

Lesson 3: BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY
As a blogger, you need to build your community. Check out Nicholas Cardot and James Richmond.

These awesome bloggers are gradually building their blogs readers into a community of loyal readers.

Will it not benefit you if you do the same on to your readership?

Rappers collaborate. I personally do not like to listen to an album for a long time because I tend to get bored but when the album is made up of the main rapper and so many other featuring, believe you me, I am motivated to listen and when I do I usually do not get disappointed – most of the time anyway.

Lesson 4: COLLABORATE
Create an avenue for bloggers of different backgrounds to post content on your blog. Of course this works well only after you might have built a sizeable number of regular readers.
This will give you a couple of days of to quench and burn out building up and you will also spice up your blog with a different style of thought of the guest blogger.

If you are a newbie blogger, seize every opportunity to do guest posts. This is good for the stage you are at – the bottom of the blog ladder. If you have good content, the established blog platform you are leveraging on will EXPOSE you more than ever.

Established rappers look for new talents to develop. Once they have achieved a certain level of success, rap artistes begin to look for upcoming or struggling but lyrically sound rappers to develop.

Here are a few examples:

Jay-Z/Kanye West;
Dr Dre/ Eminem;
Eminem/50 Cent;
50 Cent/ G-Unit.

Lesson 5: BE A MENTOR
Some examples of this MENTOR/PROTEGE relationship in the internet marketing world are:

Jay Abraham/Rich Schrefen;
Rich Schrefen/ Alex Jefferys;
Barry Dunlop/Dean Hunt.

In the blogosphere:

Darren Rowse/Yaro Starak;
Yaro Starak/Leigh Peel will be it.

What do you think of these lessons from the so-called Gangster rappers?