Broad Niches for Blogs

The Pros and cons of Broad Niche for Blog

Pros	Cons
Large depth of content	Might be a bit TOO much to write about if you have limited resources
Larger potential	More competition and often more organized competition

Sub-niches for Blog

For any topic, you will always have the option of either taking a broad view
of the topic or focusing on specific parts, or sub-niches. Here are some
examples of niches and more focused sub-niches:

Broad Niche                             Focused Sub-niche
Blogging                              Professional Blogging
Investment                          Tech Stocks
Weight Loss                         Low-Carb Dieting

                                    Travel                                  Travel in Asia

It is possible to break topics down further and further. For example,
“Travel in China” would be a sub-niche of “Travel in Asia,” and even more
specifically “Travel in Hong Kong.” Both broad and focused blogs have their
advantages and disadvantages.

Niche for your Blog Topic

Although personal blogs often wander through a variety of themes and
topics, for a serious blog project you will want to focus on a limited range
of topics. Defining a single main area or niche for your blog topic has three
main benefits:

1. It’s Easier to Build a Memorable Brand
The strongest, most memorable brands are the ones most quickly
and easily understood by consumers. Building a brand for a blog that
changes topics regularly is much harder as the blog becomes harder to
mentally categorize. By contrast, a focused blog is easily simplified into a
memorable idea. So for example it’s much easier to think “Stock Market
Tips” than “Covers topics like the Stock Market, Television, and Cars.”
You can in fact still build a great brand around a bizarre set of topics;
it’s just a lot harder! A good example of a blog that isn’t easily defined
is BoingBoing (http://boingboing.net), which covers many things,
including technology, sci-fi, gadgets, politics, and Disney.

2. Your Readers Know What to Expect
A focused topic attracts and retains a strong audience because readers
quickly learn what the blog is about, and if they like it, then they stick
around. They are also more likely to recommend the blog to other
people interested in the same topics. If you move between a variety of
unrelated topics, you are likely to lose readers who aren’t interested in
some parts of the blog, or who simply can’t be bothered to wait for the
next post on the topic they are interested in.

3. It’s Easier to Attract Advertising
It’s much easier to attract advertisers to a focused blog because the
topic of your site defines your audience. For example, businesses selling
financial advice are likely to see a blog about stock market tips as an
attractive place to advertise given the clear overlap in audience, whereas
they may be more hesitant if the audience match wasn’t so clear
because the stock market tips were mixed with posts about other topics.

Planning and Researching for Blog

Perhaps the most critical decision in starting a new blog is to select
your topic area or niche. Needless to say, it’s worth investing the
time to research and plan it thoroughly because while choosing the
right niche doesn’t guarantee success, choosing poorly can make
succeeding much more difficult.
In this chapter we’ll consider tools and techniques you can use to
research a blog niche, to analyze competitors, and to gauge how
much traffic and advertising potential it has.

Setting up as a Business with Blog

The first steps in creating your new enterprise are ones that virtually any
business needs to go through: registering the business, getting advice,
and opening a bank account. Here’s a quick rundown of some of these
tasks.

Legal Counsel
When setting up any business, it’s important to know a lawyer who you can
contact for legal work such as writing a privacy policy, trademarking a brand
name, setting up a business structure, drafting contracts for staff, and other
general legal work. Early on, you are unlikely to need their services often,
but it’s best to establish a relationship before the need arises.
Moreover, a quick consultation might give you a heads-up on an issue to
keep in mind for the future. When my company set up our first website, it
never crossed anyone’s mind that we had another company’s trademark
(whose products were heavily related to the site) as part of our own site’s
name. Years later, we ended up having to change the name, hand over the
domain name, and the whole thing was very time-consuming and expensive.
Had we had some simple legal counsel early on, the whole issue could have
been avoided!
If you don’t already have a legal firm or lawyer you have used in the
past, ask around for a recommendation. If you cannot get a personal
recommendation, then find out if there is a local law association or business
development centre who can assist you.
The law firm that I use at work was recommended by a small business
incubator that the government was running in my city. We visited the
incubator while looking for office space, and while we were there asked
the person who ran the organization if he knew any good law firms. As
it happened, they had a lawyer who came in on Fridays to offer free
introductory counseling for startups. We got in touch with him and years
later we still work together!

When you have a company in mind, you can ask for a consultation and give
them a rundown of what you are planning on doing (i.e., opening a blog).
Tell them you want to set up a relationship, and maybe ask if there are any
particular legal issues you should be thinking about this early on. Many
law firms won’t charge for the first consultation (though you should double
check this) so it’s a good time ask any broad questions you have. Always
ask for an estimate for any actual work you discuss before commencing so
you don’t get any surprises.
It’s not a bad idea to meet with a few different firms and lawyers. This
will allow you to find someone you feel comfortable talking to, that you
understand, and that you feel knows at least a little bit about working online.
It will also give you a chance to compare rates if you ask each lawyer to
estimate on a specific comparable job such as trademarking a business
name or writing a privacy policy.

Your Role and Blogging Experience

As an entrepreneur you should be expecting to get your hands dirty in
building your new business. If you are partially or completely bootstrapping
the operation, this may mean taking the approach that hobby bloggers take
and doing pretty much everything yourself. But even if you plan to hire staff,
it’s still good to actively work in one or more of the roles in the business.
In particular, it’s a very good idea to have experience in the writing and
editing capacities. These are the pillars of blogging and knowing them
intimately is not only important should you be short-staffed, but it will also
help you with planning and strategy.
Beyond writing and editing, your role as entrepreneur is really to do
whatever is needed. This might mean high-level tasks like marketing,
accounting, monetization, and management. It will probably also include a
lot of strategy and set-up work. This book will guide you through the many
and varied tasks you will find yourself working on.
If there is one piece of advice I can give that will serve you well in building a
business in blogging, it is to get some experience as a blogger before you
commit money and resources to the project. Even if you are a horrible writer,
even if you aren’t sure what to write about, the experience is so useful that I
encourage you to do it anyway.
It’s very easy to get started, and the difficulties and questions you encounter
will make the following chapters much more useful and interesting. So if you
haven’t blogged before, pick a topic you are interested in and set aside a
few weeks to intensively blog on the subject, to do your best to get noticed,
and to learn about the mechanics of blogging.
At the end of this book is an appendix chapter (The Blog Basics Crash
Course) where you will find an absolute beginner’s guide to blogging,
covering setting up, common terminology, and many other basics. If you’ve
never blogged before, I can’t recommend enough reading through this and
starting your own blog while you plan your larger blog enterprise.

A Simple Arrangement of Blog

The functions described above need to be accomplished somehow in order
for a blog to succeed. How those roles are apportioned between staff is,
of course, flexible. Hobby bloggers for example will often fill all roles by
themselves. However, if you’re creating a blog as a business it’s not a good
idea to tie up too many duties in a single person. Having only one person in
all capacities means you are heavily reliant on that one person not getting
ill, leaving, or otherwise putting you in a tight spot. Here’s a simple staff
structure that could work:

Editor
• Manages writers and contributors
• Edits articles
• Occasionally writes

Writers
• Write content
• Add content to the blog


Web Designer and/or Web Developer
• Set up hosting and blog installation
• Branding and design work
• Customize blog installation
• Make adjustments
• Server admin

Yourself (with the help of specialists!)
• Marketing
• Accounting
• Legals
• Business Registration
• Monetization
• Management and direction

This arrangement would require two main staff members in the persons
of the editor and yourself, one or two semi-permanent freelancers for the
design and development, and then a variable arrangement of freelance
writers depending on how much content the blog puts out each day.
Generally speaking it is best to start with a simple structure and then
expand as the blog expands. Not only is hiring many staff expensive, but in
the early days of a blog there is generally less work to do. Over time you can
specialize out tasks such as marketing or copyediting to have a larger, more
capable organization, but early on, simple is best.
In Chapter 4, we’ll look in more detail at these roles in a blog business, as
well as discuss the differences between freelance and salaried staff, where
to find good people, how to work with remote staff, and other issues related
to staffing for a blog business.