If you’re a niche blogger, here are some tips that would
help increase your effectiveness and productivity:
1. Choose the Right Niche
Choose a niche that you have an interest in, and are
passionate about. This is essential because you will be spending a lot of your
time creating content for this particular niche, and unless you have a deep
interest in the said field, you will struggle to produce content (or rather
quality content) on a regular basis. In addition, having a deep interest in the
niche will also allow you to become an authority figure in it.
2. Define Your Niche
Or, more specifically, clearly
define your niche. If there’s one thing that is essential for effective
blogging or being an effective blogger, it is defining your niche! I cannot
stress how important it is to do this for any and every blogger out there. Doing
so allows you to identify the focus, and define the limits of your blog, and
stay within the limits that you have defined. Niche blogs are ‘specialty’
blogs, and hence need to have a much more focused definition.
3. Choose to Write for an Audience
Instead of choosing a topic, choose the people that you’ll
be writing for. Successful niche blogs are aimed at writing for a specific type
of people, not for a specific topic. Instead of writing on ‘technology’, write
for people looking for reviews of the latest gadgets, or people who want the
latest news on tech. Instead of blogging on photography, write for beginner or
new photographers. Topics can be extremely broad, and can encompass a large
amount of sub-topics; but most importantly, making this mistake will leave you
in the dark as to who you’re writing for. Identifying your target market is critical,
and necessary to write well for them.
4. Have a USP
USP is short for Unique Selling Proposition (Wikipedia).
It is a business term that refers to offering something that is so unique and
so different from others, that people are inclined to come to you, rather than
going to your competition. The same business concept can also be applied to
blogs. You have to give people in your niche a reason to come to you, rather
than a more well-established blog in your niche. It makes you stand-out, and
sets you apart from the others. And ‘it’ could be anything – from the
user-friendly interface of your blog, to its ability to provide readers with
useful information, to offering a cheap alternative to a product/service at a
low price, or perhaps you could simply add your own twist to things…the sky’s
the limit! Remember that with niche blogs, you’re always going to be competing
with others for the attention of a fairly small number of people; you have to
give them a solid reason to come to you. (Additional read about USP here)
5. Define Short- and Long-term Goals
Knowing what you want your blog to achieve in a months’ time
is great, but knowing where you would want your niche blog to be in a years’
time is even more important. Like any other business, your success (or your
failure) will be directly related to your short-term and long-term vision. Think
in terms of the content, the visitors/traffic, the design and other tangible
elements. Think of where you would want your blog to be in a year’s time –
would you want to establish it as an authority blog, or try selling themes,
plugins or eBooks on it, or maybe even offer some kind of a service on it later
on. It is important to have achievable goals that lead you to success.
6. Keyword Research if Your Friend
Keywords are the life and soul of niche blogs. Use keyword
research in order to come up with a set of keywords relevant to your niche and
be able to drive targeted traffic through the use of these. However don’t
expect to be able to compete with the big boys when it comes to these keywords.
You will certainly need to use long-tail keywords – so instead of targeting the
keyword ‘iPhone’, you should be targeting phrases such as ‘restart an iPhone’
or ‘jailbreak an iPhone’ or ‘iPhone 5 specifications’, to name a few. These
long-tail phrases should be closely related to your blog’s content, and will
let you get targeted traffic and compete with blogs with deep pockets
easily.
7. Always Strive for Improvement
And this goes for pretty much every blog out there, but
especially for niche blogs. Always look for ways through which you can improve
various different elements of your blog. How can you improve your content? How
can you diversify into another sub-niche? How can you cater in a better manner
to the growing amount of visitors on your blog? How can you improve you blog’s
design? How can you add to your roster of writers? How can you connect with
your audience in a better way? (For niche blogs with a specific focus,
connecting with audience is essential, and easy to do because your traffic is
made up of visitors who share the same interests as you!)
