Blogging For Money: Niche Choices

One of the key decisions when blogging for cash is choosing your niche (your subject matter). I’ve looked at this before, but recent events have given me cause for further thought about what happens when you choose the wrong niche.

Some of my first online jobs were writing posts for bloggers who are in the “business” to make money. Most often, they create a site with a specific idea in mind, put together the basic layout, then hire a cheap writer to post daily content. Sometimes, they’ll buy a batch of articles to fill out the site instead – or as a boost before the paid blogger starts.

Of course, there are also those who “scrape” content: they have a plugin running on WordPress (or other platform) which picks up RSS feeds from sites with similar coverage and automatically posts an excerpt with a link back to the original site. The worst blogs just post the whole thing with no link, or automatically reword each entry a little in an attempt to get a better page rank (otherwise known as plagiarism).

Anyway, one of my longest-running jobs has been posting little news articles on such a blog. It’s nothing incredibly creative, but was designed to bring in some ad revenue (as best I can tell). Six months down the line, the traffic hasn’t picked up, so the job’s ending – which begs the question of why the site had few visitors.

From my point of view, outside the “company” running the blog, I see three reasons:

1. Niche too large

The blog originally had two writers. One covered everything from parenting to travel to car stuff. The other covered films and television, gadgets, science and other geek interests.

That’s an enormous spread of content. Now, while having varied content is a good thing, there are many blogs out there doing each of those subjects individually. By focussing on one topic (or a couple) they attract people who are interested in it.

RSS readers make it easy to bring specific-subject results into one program, for easy handling. Combined with fast connections, that means there’s no longer a significant delay in switching sites: every individual can subscribe to the best site for each of their interests.

Lesson: By covering so many subjects at a relatively superficial level, a blog only attracts the wandering reader, not the subscriber.

2. Niche overpopulated

News sites are ten a penny, as they say. There are so many, it’s a bad choice of market for a new blog. Just look at the search results on Google: any news item has at least a few hundred references. The big stories have thousands.

That’s not to say that the news isn’t a good way to bring visitors – it is. But you need to have an inside line, a specific focus, a defined brand or a strong opinion to make it stand out above sites like The New York Times.

Without strong press contacts or round-the-clock coverage to scoop the breaking items, anything posted will just be second-hand regurgitation. In some cases, this is fine (cf. all those sites that re-post YouTube videos), but with the news it just doesn’t cut it. You’re offering absolutely nothing individual.

Lesson: If you’re covering current events, do it differently. Have an opinion or a specific, obsessive focus. Stand out from the crowd.

3. Reliance on searches

The person running the blog relied heavily on being found through the search engines. This, in itself, is not a bad idea – the vast majority of traffic for a news site will, indeed, come from searches for the topics. However, the site had little SEO in place: the paid bloggers were not asked to use any SEO techniques in their work (a good thing, in my opinion), but there was also no background promotion going on.

Most blogging platforms have SEO plugins. These permit post tagging, keyword tagging and meta data entry (amongst other things), all of which is vital if you’re relying on Google to send you visitors.

The alternative to search traffic is, of course, social traffic: by promoting your blog on Twitter, FaceBook and other sites, you encourage people to visit. Unfortunately, social networking takes a lot of effort and if you’re running five or six (or more) blogs to make a little cash, finding the time for that is difficult. There’s also the question of branding, but that’s another huge subject.

Lesson: If you’re relying on search traffic, get some SEO in place. If you’re going social, build a following and don’t spam. (There’s a great post on traffic by Grizzly over here.)

So how can this help you if you’re thinking of blogging, want to make a little cash and need to build traffic to do it? Let me summarise:

1. Pick one subject, not a whole spread. You can widen your range once you have a following.
2. Be different: whether it’s layout, opinion, humour, brand or something else. You need to stand out from the crowd.
3. Build traffic by SEO, social methods or by being unique. You don’t need page hits, you need subscribers.

Anyone else had experience with bad niche choices?