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:
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, which covers many things, including technology, sci-fi, gadgets, politics, and Disney.
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.
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.
In essence, the choice to focus is really about whether you aim to be a little fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a little pond. If you have limited blogging experience, it's usually better to go for the smaller niche and dominate there before trying to shoot for the broader niche. Not only will you then have a foothold to use to broaden your site, but you'll also have a much easier time doing well on a topic with fewer competitors.
As a general rule, the smaller your topic area is, the smaller your potential audience will be. To broaden your subject matter you could choose to add multiple topics to a blog. If you do this, it's always best to make them related subjects. For example, an Investment blog about stocks might benefit from articles about other types of stock market investments like derivatives, options, and so on. On a broader scale still, it would also work to have articles about real estate investment since investors often move between stocks and real estate depending on how the markets are faring.
Another broad option would be to have posts on luxury goods such as cars and accessories, the sorts of things that high income investors might like to buy. On the other hand, mixing in articles about blogging would be a much tougher sell as there are no natural overlaps between the two subjects. As stated previously, diluting your topic area presents more drawbacks than gains.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Martin Hughes at 02142011
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