Is the blogging tips niche for blogs dead? (#)
Everyone and their uncles try to emulate John Chow or Darren Rowse in their hopes of being the next big thing. In fact, some blogs have (jokingly) held polls to determine the best imitator of John Chow and other make-money blogs (guess who won?)
In the process, blogging tips and make-money-online have become perhaps the most saturated niche of all. This makes it hard for new blogs to make an impact, since the existing blogs have several thousand regular readers and loyal followings. A large number of bloggers also believe that there is no room for yet another blogger in the niche, because of the saturation.
While this might be true for laser-focused blogs (for example, a blog which doles out only blogging tips), this certainly isn’t true for blogs that cover more topics. Just because Darren Rowse or Daniel Scocco mostly write blogging tips does not mean that every other blog in the niche should be as narrow.
Solving lack of ideas in your niche
The easiest method to get more ideas for your posts is to think wide. Think of topics that are interesting for your readers. This becomes very easy if you write for your readers and not for the sake of writing.
Expanding to related niches is the easiest way. Some blogs have done that successfully. For example, Problogger has expanded into social media (How to write posts that set StumbleUpon on Fire by Darren) and WordPress (regular short posts as news comes out).
Blogging tips blogs can possibly become “blogs for bloggers”. That is, they could cover everything that a blogger would be interesting in reading - design, SEO, WordPress, useful software and web applications for bloggers, productivity tips for bloggers and so on. This list is by no means exhaustive, but you get the drift, right?
I can only say that no blog will run out of topics if they cater to their readers well. And in the end, that is what matters.
Final thoughts
This post is actually a result of extensive thinking and debating that I did prior to launching this blog. Many of my blogging friends questioned the utility of this blog, saying that there were thousands of other blogs that are older and hence has more exposure.
I had written blogging tips on TechZilo, but in the last few months, I have changed TechZilo to not include anything related to blogging. The reason was that most of the audience were not bloggers. I had planned to make Blog Creativity a place where I could write all my thoughts about blogs. This gained significance as I developed a large number of ideas during the time that I stopped writing blogging tips on TechZilo.
However, I realized quickly that while blogging tips and my thoughts about blogging can be original and intersting, that alone cannot sustain this blog. This is the reason why I changed the tagline to include related topics like design, SEO and WordPress.
On a related note, this blog has hit 120+ subscribers in a month. Let me take a moment to congratulate myself thank each of you for subscribing to and reading this blog. A vote of thanks also go out to Shankar and Abhijeet, who linked to a post each of Blog Creativity, and has probably brought valuable subcribers to this blog.
Techblissonline Dot Com said on May 31st, 2008
Sumesh, I had been reading this for sometime now…I tried contacting you thro. your contact form here but i always get a 404…initially i thought that it is a temporary glitch, but now i feel, it is something that you need to correct…
Abhijeet from Jeet Blog said on May 31st, 2008
Nice post and thanks for the link. Btw you got an extra ‘h’ added to my name.
Links you dont want to miss!! [ Spawners ] said on June 1st, 2008
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Weekend Reading: June 01 2008 said on June 1st, 2008
[...] Is blogging tips niche for blogs dead? [...]
Post authorSumesh said on June 1st, 2008
@Techbliss: I had designed the theme with a link to contact page but forgot to create a page for contact. My mistake
A contact page is online now.
@Abhijeet: I should thank you too for the link
Typo of your name has been corrected.
Muhammad Siyab said on July 20th, 2008
I don’t think the meta-blogging niche is dead. It is saturated for sure, and wading through it is difficult…
but then, you can’t call any niche exactly ‘full’, b/c then there are blogs about almost EVERYTHING on the planet… if you were to start a new one, you would automagically be placed in a ’saturated’ niche, no matter how hard you try to find an uncrowded niche
Hope I get my point across
Post authorSumesh said on July 21st, 2008
@Siyab: I’m not sure that’s the case. For example, when Freelance Switch was started, how many top blogs were present in their niche? How about Problogger, John Chow, Zenhabits etc.? You can see that all these blogs grew rapidly because there were no genuine competitors at the time of their launch.
Thursday Links Roundup #4 - Putting Blogs First said on July 25th, 2008
[...] Is the blogging tips niche for blogs dead? - An argument for the viewpoint that the blogging tips niche is too overcrowded. Quite convincing. [...]
Corey Freeman said on July 25th, 2008
I blog (or rather, my headline says that I blog) mainly about three topics - blogging, freelancing, and design. I think they all kind of go hand-in-hand and I use them to support one another. I honestly am sick of all of the “make money online!” boom and so I try to break away from that and focus on the human element:
‘Who are you? Why are you blogging? Here’s some ideas to think about for the day.’
I also span a lot of topics about not only blogging but maintaining, using blogging/designing in your daily life or philosophies, etc. I agree with your points on widening your horizons.
You Click, You Comment Challenge Follow-Up | Diligent Design said on July 25th, 2008
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