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.