Last July when I bought the domain name www.ablogaboutnothing.com I didn’t really have any ideas or expectations when it came to blogging. I only knew I had things I wanted to say and a blog seemed like a great platform to use to say them. For several months I posted daily sometimes even 2 or 3 articles a day. Needless to say I started to feel a little burned out after a while and slowed down. That slowing down process has been going on since January (2008) on this blog, but I’ve been picking up the pace on two other blogs I own. The first one pet-snakes.com is targeted at the snake owners niche. My other blog is an addition to my business website that I recently added.

Obviously two entirely different niches are represented by both blogs (snakes, and computers) and I decided to give everyone who might be reading this an idea of how powerful niche blogging really can be. I’m not going to get into boring details about traffic numbers or click through rates. While all of that data makes for good coffee table talk it doesn’t tell you what you need to know to get a niche blog off the ground. In this article we will take a look at three things in niche blogging that can either make you or break you. The topic you choose, who finds your topic useful, and your traffic.

Choose your topic carefully

The cliche that we hear all the time about blogging is to choose a topic you “love”. While that sounds great and even makes a great deal of sense it isn’t that simple. You need to choose a blogging topic you can stick with. It’s not enough to simply love the topic you need to be able to continually learn and grow in the topic. It is a daily endeavor. For example you might love woodworking, but you may not be inclined to learn much more about it. That wouldn’t be a good topic for you to blog about if you are trying to target a niche.

When I first decided to try out niche blogging after reading many articles from Maki at DoshDosh on niche blogging to pick up tips I sat down and created a list of possible topics I could blog about and asked myself some questions:

• What interests me?
• What do I know about?
• What am I willing to continue learning about?
• What will help me further my goals?
• What am I passionate about?

Once I answered those questions my once substantial list of possible topics was narrowed way down. I don’t remember the exact number but it went down from around 50 to about 6 or 7. Out of those 6 or 7 I narrowed it down to two to start with. Yes, I do plan on adding more from the list in the future but decided those two (snakes, and computers) would be the best investment in my time.

Make your blog useful

My two niche blogs serve two separate purposes but the point is that they both serve a purpose. The one attached to the business website is just easy computer tips. There’s nothing spectacular about it. In fact any of the tips I’ve put on there you can find in 10,000 different places on the internet. That doesn’t stop people from visiting it. And they come back because the tips are useful. More importantly it is a sales and marketing vehicle for my IT consulting business.

One the other hand is the blog about snakes which is a passion of mine. It allows me to share with others things that I have learned over the years. According to my Google Analytics stats I am around 76.xxx% of my traffic coming from search engines for Pet-Snakes. So you better believe every article I write for that blog is keyed towards ranking and converting search engine traffic. My Google Adsense CTR reflects this effort. I can’t give exact numbers but it is slightly over 2% which is great. Now if only the payout rate was a little better… On the other hand my search engine traffic to the business blog is virtually zero. But I make more money from it both in terms of Google Adsense and in terms of work it brings in.

Getting the traffic

For any niche blog the immediate challenge after getting it started is to generate the needed traffic. I say needed traffic because without traffic you’re writing to yourself and you will not continue doing that for long. There are a lot of traffic sources out there. My main two for the business blog are Yahoo! Answers and Craig’s List. In fact those two sites account for well over 95% of the traffic it generates. Fact of the matter is that trying to rank on a search engine was much more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted for the easy way. For the snake blog I rely on forums that I am a member of, search engine traffic, and reciprical links from other websites for the traffic.

The point isn’t to tell you that you need to use any particular method to generate traffic it is to show you that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The important thing, particularly for a niche blog, is that you get traffic to your site that will find content they can make use of and pertains to their needs. For example I answer a lot of questions on Yahoo! Answers, but I don’t tag my answers with my domain name(s) unless the question relates to my blog. Why not? Wouldn’t it get me more traffic? Probably would, but it would almost certainly be useless traffic to me.

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Tags: niche blogging