As expected, SeoBook has another great post on innovation or immitation in web building.
I mostly agree with him, but as a commenter noted, there is still room for immitation if you are a webmaster in a non english country, kinda like me.
For example, in Greece, social bookmarking is still crappy. Not because there are no sites, but because people simply don’t use them.
In my experiments, I managed to dominate the top 3 Greek bookmarking frontpages without even trying, and all I got was 300 visitors. The seo benefit was noticeable though. Those webmasters tried to immitate the success of english bookmarking sites, but they seem to fail, while people ignore their service.
On the other hand, we have our own little Amazon version, called eshop.gr
This site started as an online bookstore, just like amazon, and rapidly expanded to fill up everything, computers, gadgets, office stuff. This was an immitator that took off, because the timing was right, and there was a huge hole in the Greek online store market.
Eshop was an immitator for foreign e-stores, but an innovator in the Greek internet. Now, it dominates that market.
As I said in an older post, the cyberspace is very different in other languages. Practically every professional site becomes an authority on those countries.
So, if you are in a saturated market, innovate or die.
If you are in a murky market, immitate the big guys. It’s the classic “let’s import something that we don’t have here” trick. It works, but it may not always work for you.
Why? Because people are different. The internet has invaded their lives in different stages. Greeks have learned about blogging the last year for example. Brittish are quite used to them.
Noone can really tell you if an immitation will work for your people, you have to trust your gut, and you will never know until you actually try it.
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