Whether you’re blogging for business, self-promotion, or just for fun, creating a successful blog can be an incredibly rewarding experience. However, all too often blogs stall and crash right after they take off. The No. 1 reason for these burn-outs? Failure to engage an audience.
See, a key component to successful blog is to identify and cater to a particular audience. Unfortunately, many novice bloggers begin addressing a broad range of topics. They imagine simply addressing more information will necessarily translate into more readers. In practice this doesn’t work. A blog without focus is like a map without a destination; it’s not very useful.
The formula to securing returning readers is to identify which audience you want to target, understand this audience well, and create specialized content geared toward them. And the best way initiate this is to first identify your “niche.” This simply means to identify the narrow, specific topic which will serve as the main focus of your blog.
Niche Blogging Makes Life Easier
- By defining your niche early, every other decision becomes easier. A solid understanding of your niche helps guide your choice of domain name, the software you use to build your blog, the visual design or theme you choose for your website, and the plugins you use to increase your blog’s functionality.
- Knowing your niche makes it easier to create regular content for your blog. Instead of struggling with what to write (due to an infinite list of topics), a specific niche makes it much more easy to settle on a post’s content. This frees you to spend more time on creative decisions such as how to write and why.
- Focusing on a niche topic makes running a blog easier with limited resources. Perhaps your blog can’t be the defining one-stop destination for reviews on all iPhone Apps, but you may be able to establish credibility as the one-stop destination for all iPhone apps which control washing machines.
At the end of 2011, there were 181 million blogs. While many of these are spam, it’s clear that a successful blog needs to cut through the noise. Fortunately when you focus on a specific audience you are better able to do this. All you have to do is find your niche and your blog will take off for a long and pleasant flight.
Rob S.
L1 Support Agent
