What Kind of Blog Are You?
The blogosphere is growing in leaps and bounds, and it’s showing no signs of stopping. It has become a beautiful community of friends, an even playing field for successful networking, and a veritable gold mine for advertisers. But because there are so many blogs out there, the party is teeming with people, and it’s getting harder to find the people you’re looking for.
Photo by Sophie Saller
The blogs who find their crowd are the ones with a laser-sharp focus. In blog-speak, it’s simply called a niche.
What is your blog’s niche? Does it even have a niche? Or does it, but you don’t have a clue how to define it?
Let me be bold and say that there are an awful lot of blogs out there that are trying to do too many things. They’re trying to update faraway friends about their family, to change their reader’s political persuasion, to share their passion for their newfound hobby of hamster-watching, and to make money.
Writing about everything and nothing is fine if blogging is purely for fun – it’s a great creative outlet to have a place to wax poetic and spill out your brain’s stream of consciousness.
But if you’re trying to make money, or even just be the go-to resource for a specific topic, you need to narrow, narrow, narrow that focus so that it stands on the head of a pin.
You want your readers to know what you’re about. You want them to identify your blog as a place about something specific. It’s been said that you have four seconds to tell a new visitor to your site what you’re about. Does your blog do that?
Let me emphasize again – it’s perfectly okay for your blog to simply be about you if blogging is your hobby. Go with it! Make it your little corner of happiness. But if you want to earn a few dollars on the side with your blog, it will come a bit easier if you find your niche.
In essence, I’m saying that blogs usually come in two main categories:
• a Cat Blog – This term comes from Seth Godin, who coined it to mean a blog about your personal life. You share the funny things your toddler says, the latest with building your new backyard deck, your cat. A cat blog. This isn’t meant to be an insulting term – I have a cat blog. But here, you aren’t really terribly concerned with things like ranking well with Google via SEO, or getting a big subscriber base. You just want to keep your parents and old college roommate in the know about your family’s daily mishaps. And that’s great.
• a Niche Blog – This is a blog about something specific. These are blogs about cooking, or kid’s crafts, or personal finance. I also have a niche blog, which is about life hacks for home managers. This is often where you want to do things like rank well with Google, earn a side income, and build up your readership. You’re passionate about a particular topic and you just have to get your thoughts out there. This kind of blog can definitely be fun and laid-back, for sure, but in some ways, it’s also a business.
There’s nothing that says you can’t have two, or three, or eight blogs – so instead of making your one blog about everything you care about, why not have several different ones? That way, if your hamster-watching blog takes off, you can be the expert blog in your niche, the go-to resource for all things hamster. The grandparents get the grandkid photos, and the hamster enthusiasts get the, well, hamsters.
So what kind of blog are you? Decide what you’re about, narrow it down to that topic, and go after it.
As I write about blogging here on Blissfully Domestic, I want to be a resource for you. I want to know your blogging questions! I want to throw out my ideas for both cat blogs and niche blogs. And I want to help you find more enjoyment in the blogging process. The blogosphere really is a blessing, especially for the stay-at-home mom, who now has a place to network and socialize with other adults from home.
January 11, 2010 11:13 am 1 Comment
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By Finance, July 7, 2010 @ 9:58 pm
I can see that you are putting a lots of efforts into your blog. Keep posting the good work.Some really helpful information in there. Bookmarked. Nice to see your site. Thanks!