It is fairly acceptable practice to choose a niche before you start your blog. It gets you writing focused content, it attracts a targeted audience and all round it is a pretty good thing. But some people find a niche too limiting, or for some reason they think they can start a blog without a niche and become just as successful. So can they? Does it really matter if you choose a niche or not? It’s true that there are several advantages to not choosing a niche, but there are also many more to be found by having one.
Why People Go Without
The most common reason that people don’t choose a specific niche for their blog is that they are blogging as a hobby, and are not particularly interested in attracting any specific audience or running their blog as a business. That is perfectly fine – not everyone wants to make money with their blog, and people should be allowed to think they can blog purely for the enjoyment of it.
What is a little more worrying is that some people who do start a blog to make money also don’t choose a specific niche. Such people are often misled by others that tell them making money by blogging is easy, or they think that their daily life is so interesting that they will be able to attract many thousands of readers and monetize that traffic – unless you’re already a celebrity then most people probably won’t care. Most commonly though, people know they should choose a niche but don’t want to feel tied down by choosing just one, so they write about many subjects on the one blog.
What Are The Consequences?
The biggest consequence of not choosing one niche is that you don’t attract targeted readers for your blog – if you aim to make money with your blog then this can become very important down the line. If your content isn’t focused around one subject, then it can also be hard to attract a readership that comes back to visit your blog on a regular basis – so your blog will grow much slower than if your content was focused around a particular subject. A large majority of people also choose to monetize their blogs by releasing their own e-book or other information product. This becomes very difficult when you’re not building up a targeted audience to release that product to, not to mention bloggers usually use feedback from readers to release a product that is sure to meet their specific needs.
What Solutions Are There?
If you have so many interests that you cannot write about just one thing, then you may want to think about starting multiple blogs – or separating your main blog into several specific categories. Whichever option you choose, make sure that you’re building a separate subscriber list for each individual topic. Another possible solution (which I prefer) is to just stick with one niche blog, but write about your daily life and whatever else interests you in a way that relates back to your niche. This usually results in highly original and interesting content, and also prevents you from becoming bored.
These solutions still allow you to write focused content to build your readership and earn you money down the road, as well as preventing blogging from becoming a painful experience for you.
I hope you’ve found these ideas useful. Have you got any more to add? Please mention them, or any other questions you have, in the comments section below…