How broad should your blog be?

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By Alex on July 23rd 2008 - 2 comments

Derek brought up a good point in a comment he left for me earlier. "It's also easier to blog consistently when your topic is broad... After all, you don't want to get 10 posts into a new blog only to realize 'I don't really have more to contribute to this niche topic', and get stuck posting more about it because you built your blog around it".

Derek nailed it right on the head. How broad, or specific, should your blog be? For example I'm watching a golf commercial right now. The golf niche for blogs might be big, so you decide to write about golf balls. After all, there's nobody else in that niche! So you write a few great posts about how golf balls fly, the best types of golf balls, and whatever else golf balls can do.

After a week though, will you still have enough material to keep blogging about? I can't imagine there are daily news stories related to golf balls. You could get creative and write about how to make golf balls, but chances are you'll end up spending a lot of time researching that information. Time a lot of us just don't have.

Does that mean it's not worth it? That depends on your online money making strategy. If you have a regular 9-5 job and a family, you probably don't have a lot of time to put towards research for your blog. But if you do this for a living, it can really pay off.

Say you spend a week making a new website about golf balls and loading it up with as many articles as you can. Do a little marketing for it and let it build some reputation. Even though you won't be updating it very often, you will be one of few people in that niche with good articles. This means when people do want to know about golf balls, your "super-niche" blog will there waiting for them. This can turn into a decent source of income, and one you don't have to do any work to maintain.

So it's really a question of time and money. Do you have enough time and effort to make a "super-niche" blog that won't get hundreds of thousands of visits a month? Will the money you make from that website make it worth your time and effort?

I'd like to know what you think about creating these "super-niche" or "sub-niche" blogs.

Comments

July 24th 2008 @ 7:09 pm

JEANNE

That's something I struggled with - how broad to make my blog.

There isn't really a niche topic that I've discovered that interests me enough to write about day after day, and yet they say that topic specific blogs are better for a variety of reasons.

What I ended up doing was writing several - a few topic specific blogs and one general "anything and everything" blog. I don't know if that's the answer - I'm too new yet ;-) We'll see how it goes...

July 26th 2008 @ 12:41 am

Derek Ralston

Wow didn't realize my comment would lead to another post, that's awesome!

Jeanne's solution seems feasible... And I think that it is possible to have several super-niche blogs, but the problem would be, what if you just get totally burnt out of the topic? Your blog becomes dead... But if you consolidate all your topics into a broader category blog, your audience will continue to see new posts. Also, for me, I'd rather write posts on a single blog and have a higher number of RSS subscribers, versus writing separate blog posts on a bunch of smaller blogs with smaller number of RSS subscribers in each one.

One problem with the larger topic blog is that sometimes your post topics won't be of interest to a segment of your readers. Steve Pavlina wrote a post about this, after his readers complained that some of his topics didn't interest them. But I think it's a small price to pay to be able to have all your blogging under one roof.

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