JD Arney has a great post over at Performancing that talks about the common blogger advice to "write what you know." While that line is often fed to both businesses and individuals looking to break into the blog world, the reality is that blogging is now a mature enough realm that you can't simply throw up any old blog and make a go of it. Sure, what you know comes into play, but there's more to it than that.

JD makes a great point about the fact that pretty much every mainstream topic has thousands or even tens of thousands of competing blogs. You can't just put up a blog about football or cars or parenting and expect it to succeed.

He writes:

These are excellent points. When I began the Zero Dollars experiment a year and a half a go, a blog became a natural extension of the t-shirt shop that I set up. Initially, I started off simply writing commentary on the latest topical news. While my traffic grew slowly and steadily, it wasn't until more than a year later when I really started expanding into my own personal experiences and exploring new niches that seemed to strike my reader's interests that I really started to see strong traffic growth. It wasn't enough to be "just another blog" about a particular topic. I had to find my voice and my style and learn how to go with the flow based on reader feedback.

The thing about blogging is that it rarely works out exactly how you expect it to. Thus, to be a successful blogger (or to include a success blog in your business) you need to be flexible. Finding out how to present information in a new and interesting way (or simply finding new and interesting information) will go a long way toward helping you stand out in the crowd.