Are you an incestuous blogger?

In a blog post earlier this month on Copyblogger, they shared quotes from 60 brilliant minds about how to increase your influence online. They were all good quotes, but only one stopped me in my tracks:

“Avoid incestuous blogging. Instead of sticking to one niche, think bigger: what social circles are related to yours?” -@chrisguillebeau

For those who got distracted by the word incestuous (some of us never out grow junior high sex ed…), what I gathered Chris was trying to say is “stop reading/sharing the same stuff over and over and expand your topics”.

Look at your RSS feed list. Like me, you’ll probably realize most of what I read on a daily basis to learn, to keep up on what’s going on and more importantly, to find other ideas for my own blogs are within my own niche. This means the content that we’re reading, learning and gleaning for our own use is the same stuff over and over, just in different words. We (as Chris so brilliantly put it) are incestuous in the content that we share…and is what is keeping us from building a wider audience. We need to stop writing for each other, stop just reading what others like us write and branch out. It may just be the kick-in-the-content solution for finding new and exciting things to share with your readers.

He, in one fell swoop, called us out and told us to knock it off.

I know I’m taking Chris’ advice and adding some new blogs to my feed.

What do the blogs you read look like? Are you incestuous?