25 October 2008

What is Niche Blogging?

What is niche blogging and why should you care anyway? Well, niche blogging is one of the ways to get your blog a focused stream of visitors and it is one of the ways that you can improve your income from blogging and income from ads on your blogs. It's simply about focusing your blogging onto a narrow subject range so that your blog does well in the search engine results.

Niche blogging is not right for every blog of course. Two of my other blogs for example are very wide in their scope. I blog about anything that takes my fancy on them. They get a good readership and I enjoy blogging on them. They even make me money.

Niche blogging though is about focusing the attention of a blog down to a narrower range of things. This blog for example is in the Internet marketing, publisher affiliate and advertising income niche. This blog is still fairly broad within that niche but it is still a niche blog.

Blogs can be focused even more narrowly on a niche of course. If I focused this blog solely on Affiliate programs for example this would be an even narrower niche. I could then go further and focus even more narrowly on one affiliate program.

The advantage of niche blogging is that you may stand a better chance of coming higher in the search engine results when someone searches for something to do with that particular niche. The visitors who come to your site will be very much the ones who are looking for information about that particular niche. This is of course helpful if your advertising inventory is also focused on that niche.

Personally I like narrowly focused niche blogs for their ability to get focused visitors. I do think they sometimes make it harder to get people interested in your blogging and involved in a "conversation". So. I use niche blogs but I also blog more widely on other blogs, including this one.

There is no doubt though that if you choose your niche carefully and match your niche with well selected Advertising inventory then niche blogging can be very rewarding.

This is why some people get obsessed with "high paying keywords" in their quest to maximise their income from adverts. If you know that keywords related to "insurance" for example pay a high rate per click in AdSense then it seems to make sense to make a niche blog about insurance.

The problem with this is that some niches are very crowded. Many people have thought of this before you have and even a narrow niche blog may struggle to get anywhere in the search results.

The secret, if you can really call it a secret, is to find a niche which is not crowded, and , very importantly one which you will enjoy writing about.

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