This said, whether you are a new blogger looking to launch your first ever blog, or an existing blogger looking to diversify blogs and getting bigger, the first question you need to answer is : “What niche should I go for?” I myself asked myself (again?)  this question, since I am considering launching a new blog soon. I am still at the stage of finding an answer to that question. What niche? Quelle niche? (Oh this is French, sorry) Certainly not in MMO, which is getting busier and busier, but I needed some raw figures and information to see clearer. I don’t mean to go through a tough Market Analysis, but at least have a hint. I somewhat needed to get a complete (or as close as it can get) list of possible blog niches, and one name bumped into my mind : EntreCard.

EntreCard gives a list of 52 niches and gives you the number of blogs subscribed to EC under each niche. EC is for sure still quite new, but is becoming a key service for blogger and gathers a significant number of blogs, so I thought it could be a great resource to establish a rank of the most populated niches. After 15 minutes of work (quick huh?), here’s the result (as of August 7th, 2008) :

Summary : 23150 Blogs split among 52 niches

Top 10 Most Populated Blogging Niches :

1. Personal Diary (1908 = 8.24%)
2. Computers and Internet (1348 = 5.82%)
3. Make Money Online (1304 = 5.63%)
4. Blogging resources (1139 = 4.92%)
5. Art (1093 = 4.72%)
6. Entertainment (1086 = 4.69%)
7. Mixed Bag (972 = 4.19%)
8. Technology (935 = 4.03%)
9. Business (788 = 3.40%)
10. Parenting and Family (771 = 3.33%)
11 To 52 : The Others

11. Internet Marketing (719)
12. Health and Medicine (704)
13. Lifestyle (638)
14. Finance and Investing (555)
15. Travel (552)
16. Humor (514)
17. Gaming (495)
18. Music (428)
19. Hobbies (395)
20. Web Development (393)

21. Fashion (390)
22. Sports (387)
23. Education (380)
24. Writing and Literature (379)
25. Self Improvement (378)
26. News and Media (340)
27. Cooking and Dining (332)
28. Photography (313)
29. Women’s interests (310)
30. Religion and Spirituality (292)

31. Celebrity (274)
32. Marketing (225)
33. Pets (216)
34. Politics (214)
35. Home and Garden (205)
36. Automotive (193)
37. Books (171)
38. Career Jobs (157)
39. Environment (153)
40. Graphic Design (139)

41. Romance (127)
42. Real Estate (124)
43. Movies (109)
44. Philosophy (89)
45. Men’s interests (85)
46. Trends (82)
47. EntreKids (81)
48. Web Comics (68)
49. Science (76)
50. History (53)

51. Law and Legal (41)
52. Expat (30)

What I can see from this ranking is that the Top 10 niches cover almost half the market with a cumulated percentage of 48.97%. It also confirms that MMO (3rd in this ranking) is a niche that is becoming more and more crowded and where it would probably take a lot more time to realize the same profit as in another niche. It is not a surprise that the Personal Diary niche has a frank lead and ranks absolute first, proving that whatever happens, (we)blogs maintain their primary role as online personal logs, where people just share personal thoughts about their life and other random stuff. Computers and Internet logically come 2nd with the increased need of technological information and the quick developments that happen in the IT sector.

Conclusion :
So what I will probably do is avoid the Top 10 guys, maybe even the Top 20 (30?). There are niches out there that are virtually virgin : History, Science, Trends, Careers, Books and what have you. It may be a good choice to go for one of the 31 to 52 niches based on your skills and preferences. After all, it’s a matter of what you are interested in and what your readers are interested in. There is no point of going for a niche just because it’s less populated. But I think it’s important to take that into consideration when making a decision.

I would love to hear your opinions about this. How do you analyze the ranking? What learnings can you get out of it?  

Anyone who has an income-producing affiliate marketing website wants to optimize traffic to that site. Obviously, if people don’t visit your affiliate site, there is no possibility that a sale will be made. In order to drive people to your affiliate site, there are a lot of techniques that can be employed. One of them is link building or external search engine optimization techniques.

When someone is looking for something on the internet, they will generally go to a search engine page. Let’s use Google as an example. They will type some keywords into Google’s search engine and let Google find them some relevant websites. Will yours be one of them? Well, that depends if you’ve optimized your affiliate site for a maximum number of Google “hits,” or occasions that Google will find your site among the very first when someone types in a relevant search term.

Optimize with Relevant Links

There are many ways to optimize your affiliate website for Google hits, but one of them is to provide lots of relevant links to sources outside of your web pages. Google will generally rank sites higher when they provide lots of external links, but ONLY if those links are relevant. Google software has gotten pretty sophisticated over the years, and it will often actually penalize websites that offer dozens of unrelated links from its pages.

Not only will Google penalize websites, may it be an affiliate marketing site or not, whose external links are not relevant, but the users of your website will quickly become disenchanted with your site if every time they click on what they believe is a link that will take them to further viable information about their topic of interest, they might wind up on a totally unrelated site selling something they have absolutely no interest in. Using lots of unrelated links will lose far more customers than your affiliate marketing campaigns are trying to generate.

Links should be carefully chosen for the relevance not just to your site as a whole, but to the individual web page on which they reside. For example, one of the pages on your site may sell books relevant to the subject of your web pages. Maybe you have placed an external link on that page to the personal website of the author of one of the books you are selling. The link will provide interesting information for customers who may be interested in purchasing that particular book from you. Linking to the author’s site will give your customers something extra, and then a return link on the author’s site will send those customers back to you if they wish to purchase the book.

Placing external links should be very carefully considered. You don’t want to link to competitive sites that could actually take business away from you. You only want to link to “value added” sites where your customers can find something they can’t find on your site, such as some added information or perspectives on their subject of interest.

Always Get Something in Return

External linking should be a two-way street whenever possible. For example, you may link to someone else’s site if they return the favor and link back to yours. As in the case above, with our author, it would only be wise to link to his site if he did not offer any competing links for purchasing his book. For example, you don’t want to send people to his site, only to have him link them to Amazon to purchase his book.

All external links should be routinely updated and verified. Maybe at the time you linked to that author’s site, he did not offer an online shopping cart for his products. But a few months later, he decides to upgrade his site with those items. You don’t want to still be linking to his site if he’s going to be stealing your customers once they get there. So, make it a routine practice to check out all links every month or so to make sure they are still acceptable to your site’s overall purpose.

You also want to ensure that those links are active. Nothing is more frustrating than to link to a site that no longer exists. You don’t want to put your customers through this frustration, so respect their time by verifying any external links appearing on your site.

With this said, I added 2 other programs this month :
- PerformancingAds : This is one of the newest and fastest growing Ads Network among bloggers. It serves 125×125 banners and pays a lifetime referral commissions. I an having a great offer for you to join this program during the month of August. Don’t miss it.
- MarketLeverage : One of the newest and best Affiliate Network. I am trying it with a Leaderboard that you can see in the header of this blog, promoting FREE Business and Technology Magazine Subscriptions. Iwill give it a try and see how it gets.

With focus, I didn’t make more money. I just made the same with less effort. Now, off course $12.79 is not money, but I want to show exactly how much I earn and not fake it, so that when I finally start making enough money, I will have a great story to tell So guys, stay tuned and be part of history. And don’t forget to Sign Up for PerformancingAds and have me buy your first ad. More details abou this offer in this post.

After the first post about some interesting plugins that help you manage and increase your RSS subscriptions, I am back with a list of WP plugins I use for comments.

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On the other hand, what often relucts bloggers (especially the new ones) from signing up to this kind of networks is the difficulty to get that first sale. I am offering that! Not only is the subscription to PeformancingAds free, you also are sure to have at least one sale, which makes all of this story a 100% benefit deal.

Plus, they have a Lifetime referral program, which can earn you 5% of each sale your referrals make. Awesome huh? So, with no more delay, go ahead and  Sign Up for PerformancingAds. After you subscribe, make sure to leave a comment here to make it easier for me to browse for your blog and buy my ad.

Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers :
This is a very useful plugin for Feedburner users. It goes into your FB account and sends a friendly email to the unconfirmed email subscribers. In fact, a lot of readers would start the subscription process by entering their email adress but they never confirm by clicking on the link of the confirmation email. With this plugin, it’s easy to send them a friendly email and increase the conversion rate of email subscribers.

What Would Seth Godin Do (WWSGD) :
This plugin allows you to place a reminder for your NEW readers, on the top or in the bottom of a post. You can set the number of times the message appears so it’s not intrusive. Very useful and very easy plugin. If you are new here you can see it in action on the top of this post, and you can use it to subscribe to my RSS feed now. 

FeedBurner FeedSmith :
If you are not a Feedburner user and would like to start using it (which I recommend, I think it’s the best tool for RSS management), without losing your current RSS subscriptions, then this plugin is for you.
This plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed.((i)).

In order to install those useful plugins, click on the one you want in order to download it, unzip the file and upload it under your “/wp-content/plugins” directory.((ii)). Then go to you WP admin, Plugins tab, and activate the plugin. Congratulations! It’s done. All you have to do now is go to Options, or Dashboard (Depending on the plugin), to adjust settings and configure your messages, etc.

I hope these plugins can be helpful for you. Next post in the series will present plugins that deal with the comments on your blog.  So stay tuned for it. You can subscribe to my RSS feed to be sure not to miss it.

Do you use any of these plugins? Do you use others that can be useful for RSS subscriptions? Feel free to share.

1. Quote from the author
2. On the hosting server, through FTP or your admin interface, eg. cPanel. Ask your hosting company if you don’t understand what I am talking about

Goals for the month of August 2008 :
For the month of August, I am setting some goals :
-> Reach and exceed the milestone of 100 RSS subscribers, finally : I have been struggling with the RSS count so much and it’s the blogging idol that motivated me to do the effort. Now I don’t want to stop in the middle of the road. I need to work on this crucial aspect.
-> Reach the Top 200K in Alexa : I am now at 874k. Two months ago I was at 300K, but with my procrastination and laziness, I dropped to 1 million plus. Now it’s getting on the low again and I am planning to move things faster in the same direction.

As you notice, I put no revenue goals. I must first manage to get the basics before I move to setting goal on revenues.

I will share all my techniques and strategies here on the blog, so that everybody could benefit from the positive and negative learnings. So I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed to be sure to miss nothing from it. (This is already one of the techniques, I hope you’ll make it work :))

I would be very happy to hear from you on what strategies you are using if you have similar goals, or even if you just wish to share what you know.

It feels good to be among the winners. And the text link I won is worth $10 which is the price of such a link on Mr Javo’s blog.

The contest was launched by Javo in order to increase his RSS subscriptions for the Blogging Idol contest. It’s a scrambled word contest, where he sends a new letter of a 10-letter word to discover with every new post, and this letter is only visible through the RSS feed. So all I did was  putting the letters together after 9 posts and guess the word : DEDICATION. And I was among the first 3 to guess right.

So thanks to “dedication”, I actually won. Which is a nice life lesson given by this contest and Javo. Dedication is what makes a loser a winner and what makes difficult endeavors easy. And it’s very true in blogging as in general life matters.

This also drives me to talk about the contest as a powerful tool to reach punctual goals. Javo is doing great in increasing his RSS count and I think the contest contributed a lot.

Anyone has something to share about how dedication made him succeed in something? Or about contests and how they helped achieve some goals?

This will help creating a network of reciprocal readers, and serve our blogs by increasing their subscriptions count. Uniting can help our smaller blogs reach their various goals. And if you could spread the word about this initiative, it would be great and we can create a community just like “U Drop, I follow” that helps increase our readership. Of course, anybody willing to join the initiative commits that he/she is going to do his/her best to offer quality content to readers. It’s not just about numbers; everyone is looking for good articles and for an added value. Anyone willing to join the community, please leave a comment on this post with your URL, so that I can keep a list of everyone offering the reciprocal subscriptions and make them easier to find.
So go ahead : Join the community and subscribe to my RSS feed. I will get back to you within 24 hours and will subscibe to your RSS. I also created a little button for the initiative, that anyone can use on his/her blog to show (s)he’s a reciprocal subscriber.

Thanks everyone and let’s grow those numbers.

I can see a lot of benefits for bloggers out of this partnership :
- It encourages readers to leave quality comments.
- It gives more opportunities of networking among bloggers since they will start to comment more often on each other’s blogs.
- It brings diversity to the way bloggers can earn Entrecard credits.
- It enhances the overall quality of comments throughout the network, since bloggers can rate each other’s comments and thus pushing everyone to control the quality of their comments to avoid being badly rated.
- It brings an added value to our blogs by allowing us to see the commenting activities of our commentatorson other blogs and thus introducing us to other discussions happening on the blogosphere.

So, I encourage everyone who hadn’t already installed SezWho on their blog to do it and be part of the experience. Here is the announcement post on the Entrecard Blog, that explains the partnership more in details and gives a plain step-by-step guide on how to join.