The Theory of Accidental Excellence in Practice
Here’s a new description phrase I’m going to be using on OpTempo for a while along with the shortened version “Accidental Excellence“. What’s it mean? Well, this phrase comes from this research paper by Hoffman and Hoffman: Monkeys, Typewriters and Networks. It’s a good paper on the early days of the Internet and it’s early evolution. How I’m thinking of the term is in the random nature of Google’s search engine algorithms. What it likes today it might hate tomorrow and vice versa. This gives a lot of chance for Accidental Excellence.
I’ve already created some of this Accidental Excellence in my early posts where I followed news trends while trying to get 200 posts in a month. Now I’m going to try for a little more of this by doing some trend following posts again, although these will be more targeted and there probably won’t be as many. These posts may not have fancy graphics like you see in some of my more elaborate posts. It will be a bit of a departure from what I’ve been doing recently.
If you’re a regular OpTempo reader who’s subscribed to my feed, you’ll probably see some more posts about zebras, golfing and other stuff like that drift through. Don’t worry, I’m just seeking a little Accidental Excellence for this blog and I’ll still be publishing articles on niche blogging and other such topics. And, I’ll let you know how well this slight change in direction works. It might even give you some ideas for your own projects.
This may be fun! I was thinking of doing something similar on a blog I was uncertain as to what to do with. I’ll keep following to see your results. I am anxious to see how you keep it more targeted.
Hi Denise,
The main benefit of following trends it is that you’ll get some immediate search engine traffic followed by some long term traffic with occasional secondary spurts. The hard part is that the traffic is difficult to monetize and erratic. That’s why you see me swapping out ads on my sidebar often and why I’m adding in eBay sniplet ads to selected posts.