What Is Niche Blogging?
By Bryan Clark on Jan 7, 2008 in Make Money Online
The question - what is niche blogging, comes up regularly, and I’m not sure that there is a definitive answer. Is One Man’s Goal, a niche blog? What about Problogger, Shoemoney, and John Chow? The answer is yes. All of these are niche blogs. But these blogs aren’t the types of “niche blogs” we are talking about. Although they fit in a niche, and serve a niche, they are really broad topics. So when the question is asked - what is niche blogging? These aren’t the niche blogs that are the moneymakers.
So What Is Niche Blogging?
Well, it’s safe to say that every blog fits in a niche. Whether it be make money online, sports, entertainment, gossip, or fishing… every blog has a niche. But when the term niche blogging is thrown around, it usually isn’t referring to these types of blogs, because the niche that they serve is quite large. True niche blogging is a small subsection of a larger niche. For example, the big niche would be fishing, and a true niche blog would dissect the ins and outs of trout fishing. So lets look at a few niche’s and see if we can’t find a niche blog to fit inside it’s realm.
make money online - make money with adsense
fishing - trout fishing
entertainment - action movies
gossip - Paris Hilton
All of the categories on the left can get pretty broad, everything on the right is a true subject for a niche blog. You see, the goal here is to take the bigger niche, and drill it down into a smaller sub-niche so that you can achieve higher rankings, and laser target your keyword focus.
When we create niche blogs, we are looking to write content, target keywords, achieve high search engine placement, and make money online. We are not looking for something that involves the day in and day out work of our normal blogs. These blogs should be set them and forget them. These blogs should take a few hours to set up, and then about 30 minutes a month to maintain. They won’t take all of the work that bigger blogs (like OMG) take. The reason? We aren’t trying to build a massive audience. We are trying to build an audience that is made up of 100% search engine traffic.
And over the course of the week, I’ll show you how.
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6 Comment(s)
By Missy on Jan 7, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been tinkering with creating a vegetarian shoe blog, in fact it was my original choice. But i felt (and was advised) it was too narrow a subject.
But it has always been in the back of my head. As you know my main blog (Groovy Veg) is a general vegetarian blog.
I’ve been reading alot lately on keyword research and niche blogs.
Looking forward to your next piece on this area.
By Tummy Tuck Surgery on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
I definitely think the niche blogs with really tight phrases are the way to go. There are plenty of niches to go around so sites like Vic and Court’s (and yours) can continue to provide valuable guidance and not take away any potential success from newbies just starting out.
By Joe on Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
It’s incredibly annoying to read posts that are written solely for the purpose of trying to rank well for your keywords.
You can rank a page that sucks…and you accomplish nothing. Reading this article was like reading one of the script rewriter articles.
Write for the reader…work the keywords in where it makes sense…but don’t write the content around the keywords.
If these kinds of posts are what you intend to continue with then I, for one, won’t be back.
By Bryan on Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
If I were keyword dumping (which I’m not against in anyway, and will do on occasion, as long as the article quality doesn’t suffer), I would be using the keyword at least 5-7% of the time.
I love people that read a post on John Chow and think they are an SEO expert. Complain somewhere else.
By Joe on Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
I don’t read John Chow…but I do see you regurgitating blogger unleashed latest posts.
Shocking…an adsense pricing post 2 days after he posts an adsense pricing post.
It’s your blog…but at least the other guy was writing his own posts.
By Bryan on Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
There is a lot of regurgitation of the same tired information. However, there are so many blogs out there, you can’t possibly write ground-breaking content every single day. The best you can hope for is to write a post that will help some of your readers that don’t know about a particular problem. Each blogger puts their own creative spin on a post, that’s what makes people read one blog, but not another. They like the way we tell the story.
But I’m willing to bet, that with 100 million plus blogs out there. My blog and his, weren’t the only ones to write about Adsense value pricing in the last week.
Next time you want to speak… don’t stand behind your ability to remain anonymous. You should leave a link like any other self respecting person that has a problem with they way I do things here.
I don’t have time to deal with negativity.