Niche Blogging
By Matt Jones on Jul 5, 2007 in Blogging Tips
The concept of Niche blogging isn’t something new. Every blog is in a niche, whether the author intended it to be/is aware of it or not. A blog niche is simply an area of the blogging market. Some of the largest niches include personal blogs, celebrity blogs and tech blogs.
Why Knowing Your Niche and Knowing Your Product is an Absolute Must
Blogging is just like any other business and should be treated as such.
Keywords - I previously wrote how it is essential to have a list of keywords ready for use in a blog before any posts have even been written. Having pre-planned keywords is essentially “knowing your product”, which gives you the ability to market it with search engine marketing.
Specialisation - Readers your blog need Focus too. As you all know there is a massive amount of high quality information on the web and the chances are you can’t provide a better source for all of it yourself. For bloggers, information is their product and specialising in an area of interest or expertise gives greater chances for success.
Niche Blogging Strategies
I’ve already said that every blog is in a niche, but the phrase “niche blogging” implies the use of multiple small blogs in very tight niches, usually using Google AdSense or affiliate programs for monetisation, as opposed to E.g. selling ad space to an advertiser for ‘link juice’.
Strategies:
1. Developing a flagship blog combined with smaller blogs that are highly related to the niche of the flagship blog. This allows the flagship blog to be used to send traffic and link juice to the other smaller niche blogs. The danger here is that producing the content for the flagship blog and the related blogs could get very repetitive and it may become difficult to decide which blog it is best to publish a post on. From my experience at trying this I always ended up publishing on the flagship blog and let the small niche blogs fall into disrepair.
2. Have multiple blogs in many difference niches with a personal blog to have some fun on. This is the style of Garry Conn and seems to work well. The danger I see here is that the ‘personal blog’ is very time consuming and has little monetary reward, but it does make up for the somewhat more tedious task of setting up many sites.
3. Have no flagship blog and relying solely on small niche blogs. Money aside I would never try this method because having a single popular blog is what I find rewarding, not only because of the community that develops around it but because the blog itself can be something to be proud of.
My choice
Having sold my old blog for $1000 I am now moving up a level and blogging ‘full time’. Blogging Fingers is my flagship blog (although at the time of writing this is still in the very early stages). I have plans for several smaller unrelated niche blogs which I will set up after a month or so once Blogging Fingers has found its feet. I am therefore using strategy 2 with a twist by using Blogging Fingers as the personal blog, which is perfectly true because ironically blogging is what I enjoy blogging about!
Conclusion
If planned out carefully, niche blogging can be very lucrative. Ultimately the idea of “branching out’ like a tree is the perfect analogy; start at the bottom and grow/learn until you are ready to branch out and there will be little reward at first. Branching out allows for more leaves to grow (income streams) until you have reached to top of the canopy where bigger animals/business opportunities will want to co-operate with you, which you can profit from.
Technorati Tags: Niche blogging, flagship blog, small niche blogs
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Matt,
You have an identity! Welcome back! Nice sale too!
Thanks Garry It’s great to be back!
Yeah, Welcome Back! I love the domain name…you must have been researching in your time off.
Thanks Jennifer
Lot’s of research has been done and still is! You can see blogging fingers is still ‘under-construction’.
Hi , and welcome back Matt
Nice to see you with a new blog Matt, good luck with it!
Thanks Maki and CristianR, it really is great to be back
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Matt,
Thanks for the insight. It seems like having a totally pre-planned niche, keywords and top down strategy could really launch a blog from the beginning. I hope I can take some of your tips on starting a “flagship” blog of my own. I’ve got some ideas already.
How much time do you spend blogging daily? Are you still in school?
Suzanne, my About page has information about me. I am blogging full time, although it is not all on this blog, e.g. managing and promoting BlogLignt.ning takes a fair amount of my time, but everything is moving forward nicely.
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