Is it really that important to have a niche for your blog?
I have been doing a lot of reading over the past few weeks about ways to improve my blogging and increase my readership. Problogger and Blog Herald have both been invaluable in my quest for information about blogging and have some amazing articles which have given me much food for thought. However, the one issue that keeps turning up in almost every single article about blogging is the importance of picking a niche or topic. On the one hand this makes sense, pick a topic you are interested in and knowledgeable about and blog about that topic only. This way your readers will know what to expect when they come to your blog and won’t be confused by a myriad of topics. Then again, what if you are interested in a whole range of things but don’t feel knowledgeable or inspired enough to blog only about one of them?
I fall into this second category. I am interested in gay rights, but honestly, to blog about only about gay rights and gays issues would make me so depressed about the lack of rights GLBT people really have that I would end up in therapy. I also love social networking and Web 2.0, but there are so many people blogging on these issues who have so much more knowledge than I do, that I really can not compete with them. Instead I prefer to sit in awe of them and absorb their knowledge.
I decided to ask the amazing people on Plurk about their thoughts on how important it is to have a niche for your blog. Andrew from On Blogging Australia believes that the niche is over-rated by those of us who will never be professional bloggers, but then goes on to say that many successful bloggers do have niches. I then asked him that if you are not already famous in the blogosphere if you need to have a niche blog in order to become a successful blogger.
Eskimo_Sparky jumped in at this point and responded that he believes that in order to become a successful blogger, in terms of generating traffic to your site, it is more important to promote yourself and write good quality content than it is to have a niche. I like the way this man thinks as you can have a niche but if no one knows you are writing or if your content is crap then you are not going to be become a successful blogger anyway.
Leigh from All for Women and Crazy Meezer thought that finding a niche for the sake of finding a niche is just making it harder on yourself than blogging about what you are truly interested in. She has a very good point. Maybe when beginning blogging you should blog about what interests you initially and perhaps a niche will present itself from there. It could be something that you would have never initially considered.
Now I want to throw the debate open to all of you here. What are you feelings about having a niche for your blog? Do you have one? Did you, before you started blogging, decide to focus on a niche or did your niche evolve overtime? Or are you a believer in not having a niche at all?
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