How to build a successful niche as a blogger
Blogging opportunities
Publishing is changing quickly as more and more readers migrate from paper-based products to electronic media, whether it’s a computer, a tablet, a mobile device, or an e-reader. Change of this sort always creates opportunities, and in the last few years it’s become clear that professional blogging is one of them.The last decade saw a generation of blogs grow from being side projects and hobbies, into sites with enormous readerships and real revenues.Very quickly blogging has become a legitimate publishing business, and today a survey of the top 100 blogs shows that with a few notable celebrity exceptions, almost all of them are backed by real publishing businesses.
What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall into disrepair very quickly. Blogging is an endurance race, requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.
How to build a successful niche as a blogger
- Although personal blogs often wander through a variety of themes and topics, for a serious blog project you will want to focus on a limited range of topics. Defining a single main area or niche for your blog topic has three main benefits:
It’s Easier to Build a Memorable Brand
- The strongest, most memorable brands are the ones most quickly
and easily understood by consumers. Building a brand for a blog that
changes topics regularly is much harder as the blog becomes harder to
mentally categorize. By contrast, a focused blog is easily simplified
into a memorable idea. So for example it’s much easier to think “Stock
Market Tips” than “Covers topics like the Stock Market, Television, and
Cars.” You can in fact still build a great brand around a bizarre set
of topics; it’s just a lot harder!
Your Readers Know What to Expect
- A focused topic attracts and retains a strong audience because readers quickly learn what the blog is about, and if they like it, then they stick around. They are also more likely to recommend the blog to other people interested in the same topics. If you move between a variety of unrelated topics, you are likely to lose readers who aren’t interested in some parts of the blog, or who simply can’t be bothered to wait for the next post on the topic they are interested in.
It’s Easier to Attract Advertising
- It’s much easier to attract advertisers to a focused blog because
the topic of your site defines your audience. For example, businesses
selling financial advice are likely to see a blog about stock market
tips as an attractive place to advertise given the clear overlap in
audience, whereas they may be more hesitant if the audience match
wasn’t so clear because the stock market tips were mixed with posts about other topics.
Sub-niches
For any topic, you will always have the option of either taking a broad view of the topic or focusing on specific parts, or sub-niches. Here are some examples of niches and more focused sub-niches; breaking topics down further and further. In essence, the choice to focus is really about whether you aim to be a little fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a little pond. If you have limited blogging experience, it’s usually better to go for the smaller niche and dominate there before trying to shoot for the broader niche. Not only will you then have a foothold to use to broaden your site, but you’ll also have a much easier time doing well on a topic with fewer competitors.How to research for a niche
- When deciding on a blog topic, it’s important to take some time to do your research to find out how big the potential audience is likely to be, how hard it will be to make money, who else is out there, and whether there’s a demand for content in that particular niche. There are lots of tools freely available to help you do your homework and it doesn’t need to take long at all.
How Monetizable is this Niche?
- It is important to determine how easy it will be to generate revenue in a particular niche. To do this, we look at what potential advertising exists for that topic. While there are a lot of other ways to monetize a blog, advertising is the best way to test a niche because it’s so universal. Thanks to Google’s Adsense and similar networks, any site can earn at least some money, even with very little traffic.
- As a general rule, if you can amass a large audience and high levels of traffic, it will be possible to generate revenue by selling advertising. However, the sums advertisers are willing to pay to reach a particular audience varies wildly. Consequently, in some niches only the very biggest sites can get the volume to turn a profit, while in others, much smaller players can still do well.
Look for Affiliate Programs
- Affiliate programs are referral schemes offered by companies selling products and services. A typical affiliate program will pay every time you send them a lead who then buys a product or service. This is usually done through an affiliate link that you can embed in a blog post or use on a banner. Affiliate programs are a simple, self-service way of generating revenue. For testing purposes, the presence of a lot of affiliate programs is a good sign for a niche, because when used effectively, they can be quite lucrative. A good place to find affiliate programs is an affiliate marketplace like Commission Junction, Click Bank or Amazon.