I was doing some reading on niche blogging and looking for tips from other people. I was a bit surprised at something I read at OpTempo. In a post titled Niche Blog Beginner Tips, jfc wrote:

Update Frequency Isn’t That Important
The common train of social blogging thought is that you have to be constantly updating your content, usually on a daily or at least weekly frequency, or else you’ll lose traffic. With a niche blog, updating daily isn’t needed after the site has gained a degree of search engine traction. In fact, you may find that if you’ve done things right by accident or design that your traffic will actually increase over time rather than decline even though you’re no longer actively updating it.

I know it seems counterintuitive to those who’ve been doing social blogging. The thing is that over time Google begins to consider your site, due to the way your keywords are constructed and your link building exercises are done, an authority site on your topic. This, in turn, means you’ll get an increasing number of valuable search engine visitors even though your core articles haven’t been updated in a year and may be of limited utility.

I understand that your blog can gain search engine traction over time and that even if you do not regularly update your blog anymore, you will still get a lot of hits because you are already well established up in the SERPs. However, I think that this defeats the purpose of providing your readers with something new to read. In my mind, one creates a niche blog in order to address a need for information in that certain niche. If the most recent content was published a year ago, do you think that your old readers would keep coming back for more? I really don’t think so.

What is your take on this?

We have talked about posting schedule a long time ago. We were not really focusing on niche blogs then but the general idea was to have a regular posting schedule. Does the same thing apply to niche blogs?

I would have to answer a resounding YES to that question. You see, niche blogs may be tightly focused on a specific subject but it does not mean that it is much different from other blogs. The idea behind blogs is to provide fresh content on a regular basis. It does not have to be daily, especially if you are maintaining several niche blogs. If you decide to post daily and you have several niche blogs, you might find yourself having a hard time juggling your posting schedule. In fact, I would say that posting every other day or even two or three times a week would be a good enough frequency for a niche blog.

Another consideration that you have to think about when it comes to content for your niche blog is the possibility of future posting. Basically, future posting is writing entries for your niche blog before you actually publish them. So for example, you can write the posts for the week on a weekend and then just pre-date them. With Wordpress and Blogger, it is not a problem as they allow this. This idea is very important for those who have day jobs and other commitments. This means that they might not have the ability to set a regular schedule during the week.

The important thing is for you to lay down the guidelines for your posting schedule and stick to them.

Two posts ago, we talked about how commenting is important in niche blogging. More so, we emphasized how important it is for you to choose the blogs that you leave comments in; that, as much as possible, you should choose the blogs that are the most popular in your niche.

The next question then is this: how do you determine which blogs are the most popular in your niche? Here are some tips to help you find those blogs. They are really easy and you may actually be doing some of them already.

Technorati
Everyone in the blogging business knows about Technorati. Even newbies are quite aware of what Technorati is and how important it is to building up one’s blog. One good thing that I like about Technorati is that you can download a file of the top 10 blogs in any of the existing category. That means almost no work for you!

Del.icio.us
Here is another simple way to find the top blogs. Just go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

StumbleUpon
I have been hearing about StumbleUpon for the longest time but to be honest, it was only recently that I joined the community. I wish I had done it earlier. There are tons of people using StumbleUpon and the classifications are quite specific. However, there is no single file that you can download like in Technorati. Still, StumbleUpon is a good way to find blogs in a particular niche.

Of course, these are only some of the tools that you can use. Do you have any suggestions as to how to easily find the top blogs in a niche?

Way back when I was writing the posts on getting started on niche blogging, I overlooked a very important thing – your domain name. Now we all know that you can create a blog on Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, etc. for free. Then again, if you are really serious about your blog, then you would want to have your own domain. Choosing a domain name for your niche blog is essential in making it. So how do you go about it?

I am assuming here that you already have chosen your niche – we have already talked about this in detail. Once you have that down pat, you have to generate some domain names that would fit with your overall niche blog strategy. One good thing to do is to choose a domain name that has keywords. This is especially important if you are aiming to get a lot of search engine hits.

So for example, if your niche blog is focused on the Wii, you should choose a domain name that has Wii in it. Of course, Wii.com is already taken so you have to add some other keywords in your domain name. You can try wiijunkie, wiienthusiast, everythingwii, and so on. You would have to check if your chosen domain name is available – that is why you need to come up with several in order to have other options.

There are many domain name checkers on the Internet but I personally prefer typing www.domainname.com (or whatever extension you want) on Google to see if it is parked, taken, or available. Once you have decided on an available domain name, do not waste time – register it at once!

In the previous post, we took a look at the first step in picking your niche, which is to narrow down your interests. The next step would be to assess the potential traffic for your blog. In the interest of monetization, you have to be able to somehow forecast the potential interest that your niche would get.

There are many tools which you can use to determine this point. One kind of tool that you might want to use is a keyword tool – there are plenty in the market. Google has even come up with a new tool – Google Insights – which can help you determine search patterns.

Wordtracker is another useful tool. Ken McGaffin writes about it:

Wordtracker is a great tool for helping you identify and quantify niche markets. Keyword research tells you what people are looking for online and so helps you assess the size of the market for any particular product or service. To explore the size of any market, there are three stages involved:

1. Find the most popular keywords in your niche market.
2. For each popular keyword, see how it is used in longer search terms and use the total predicted volume of searches to estimate the number of people searching for that particular keyword.
3. Add up the total predicted volume of searches for each popular keyword within the niche to give an estimate of the size of the market.

Based on this and your narrowed down list of interests, you can already pick your niche. Do note, however, that the tools mentioned in these posts are only some of the many out there. Do not limit yourself to them.

In the previous post, we took a quick look at how to pick your niche. We looked at two considerations – picking a niche for optimum monetization and picking a niche based on your interest. This time, let us look into more detail on how to pick a niche. If I remember correctly, I mentioned that in my opinion, finding a balance between the two considerations is a good consideration.

So what is the first step? I suggest narrowing down your interests. I am sure that you have at least several interests that you would like to blog about. The thing is, when it comes to starting up a niche blog, you have to focus on one particular topic. So instead of trying to capture a wide range of interests, you should pick out one and focus on it.

How can you do this? This could provide to be a bit of a task especially if you have a lot of interests. How do you narrow them down and actually pick just ONE?

One way to do this would be to search online. Go to sites like Wikipedia and other informational sites. Do a search on several topics that are closest to your heart. Visit many other sites that can provide you with background information on your topics. Once you are done with this background work, take the time to make your decision. That is, pick a few topics that you feel you are most comfortable with. More so, pick a few topics that you think will be sustainable in the long run.

I once heard someone say that there is a place in this world for everyone. I guess we could also say that there is a niche for every blogger. It is a matter of finding the right one. So how do you go about picking your niche?

I have been reading a bit on what other bloggers with experience have to say about this step. In the course of my reading, I found two somewhat different ideas. On the one hand, some bloggers think that if your main goal is to make money, then your main consideration when picking a niche should be to find a niche that is most profitable. That is, people all over the world should be searching for keywords relating to that topic everyday.

On the other hand, some bloggers think that your main consideration should be finding a topic that you are passionate about. The rationale behind this is that you should be able to sustain your writing. More so, your passion will be reflected in your writing if you pick a topic that you truly care about. Of course, it goes without saying that you should be knowledgeable in the niche that you pick.

So which is which? I suggest that you create a balance between the two considerations. It is understandable that you would want to choose a niche that has potential money making opportunities. Then again, if you could choose a subject matter that has both money making potential and is of interest to you, wouldn’t that be a much sweeter deal?

In the previous post, we discussed what kind of blog you should start – a niche blog (a blog focused on a particular topic) or a composite blog (much like a personal journal which covers a wide range of topics). Let us focus on the niche blog for the moment. I mentioned that a lot of blogging experts tend to lean towards the niche blog. Why is this so?

I came across a post on this at Tzuvelli, a blog focused on strategic blogging and monetization. The blogger lists 12 reasons to start a niche blog, I’d like to share some of the most important points (at least from my point of view).

1. Creating a local niche blog creates the opportunity for you to get from behind the computer and go out into the community.
2. Blogging is no longer simply an ethereal prospect but you can truly connect with your readers.
3. If done right, you could leverage your blog to become well known in your community.
4. With a local niche blog, you can leverage those high cost AdWords in a meaningful way. It is easier to write content related to keywords like car insurance, mortgages, lawyers because you can relate it to what is going on in your community It is easier to write about these things because you know what is happening in your community.
5. It will become easier to build a group of local contributing writers to where you could eventually move into an editorial position. Manage and expand.
6. A local niche blog with strong ties to the community would probably be easier to sell. And likely more profitable, since you can get higher add revenue.
7. Depending on your location there may not be very much competition.

What do you think, convincing enough?

All successful blogs started from something small – much like many businesses. If you are just starting your blog and you want to eventually monetize it, you should probably start with one basic question: what is your blog going to be about?

Way back when it all started, a blog functioned much like a diary did. Much like people wrote down their thoughts in their paper journals, bloggers started to write down their thoughts online and shared them with the rest of the world who were connected to the Internet. Today, blogs have come a long way. Many blogs are not like personal journals anymore (though there is still a proliferation of these blogs). In fact, many blogs today focus on specific topics. These blogs are called niche blogs. As the name implies, niche blogs target a specific niche and stay focused on it.

So if you are going to start a blog, what sort of blog is best for monetization purposes? I suppose it really depends on what your ultimate aim is. For example, you just want to make a little extra money on the side. Perhaps for this purpose, you can make your own personal blog which does not really focus on one particular topic. This kind of blog can still make money through pay per post web sites. (We’ll talk about this more later on.)

Many experts suggest, however, that you figure out a specific niche that you want to focus on. They agree that niche blogs are the way to go if you want to really monetize your blog seriously.

In the next post, let us take a look at how to start a niche blog.

For the longest time, we have been focusing on topics with regard to businesses and corporations using blogs to help increase their visibility. It is in fact a very rich subject which we can expound on more. However, a conversation that I had with a colleague the other day gave me ideas.

She is a working mother who is in dire need of an extra source of income. She earns quite well but the burden of her family’s finances and bad financial decisions in the past is catching up with her and really stressing her out. Knowing that I have been involved in blogging for quite some time, she approached me to find out more about it.

Don’t get me wrong – I was happy to help her out. What really struck me, though, was her question: Can I make money off blogging?

Indeed, can one make money off blogging? The answer is a resounding yes! Yet what bothered me – and still does, actually – is the fact that there are people who are new to the concept of blogging and that their primary consideration is to make money.

I can foresee some smiles forming as my words are being read…idealistic, idealism, and rose-tinted glasses are some words that are probably entering your minds right now. What is wrong with that kind of thinking? After all, this is a blog focusing on everything about business, right? So making money as a primary consideration should not bother me.

Then again, I would like to think of blogging as more than making money. I would like to think of this activity as providing content to those who are looking for it. With this perspective, monetization seems secondary.

(Disclaimer: I am planning to focus on blog monetization for the next few weeks so don’t take this post as a rant against it! Just voicing some thoughts out loud.)

Photo courtesy of groovehouse