I don’t think it matters if you want to start a blog for personal reasons or as a possible online money making venture, if you want to gain a decent sized and loyal readership following you’ve got to focus in on a specific topic.
The problem is when you start looking at topics (or niches) to start a blog about it can seem like there’s already too much competition out there for you to compete with.
Personally, I view blogs a little differently from normal niche marketing web sites, so I don’t see other blogs as competition but rather proof (if they’re popular) that the topic is an interesting one to discuss–and a new blog will just be an addition to the discussions.
Still, I understand the hesitation or intimidations of trying to step in where one or more A-lister blogs may already exist.
So, what’s a guy (or gal) to do?
Honestly, my first suggestion is to just start the blog anyway if it’s a topic you really care about or know. You’re going to bring something unique to the conversation, and if your passion for the topic is real that should resonate with other topic enthusiasts and allow you to carve a niche for yourself.
However, if you don’t feel you can make a place for yourself against the existing blogs in your general topic of interest, maybe it would be worth while to focus down to a more narrow segment of the topic.
For example, maybe you wanted to blog about electronics because you love gadgets and toys. That’s a saturated topic for bloggers, and there are multiple well known and trusted authority blogs among them.
Well, you could narrow your blog focus to a specific niche of electronics, lets say home video or theater systems. The idea being that if the general broad topic is too vast or saturated, then pick a corner of it and really focus tightly there. It’s sort of a “do one thing, and do it really well” approach to blogging.
And if you’re wondering would there be enough interesting stuff to blog about with a narrow focus like that, let me simply say yes–of course there will be.
In fact, I just did a quick search and found a neat forum at eCoustics devoted to home theater and electronics that has over 1.5 million posts made by over 150,000 members on it. That would be a massive resource for blog content ideas.
And, I bet if I checked MySpace and FaceBook I’d find other groups or clubs devoted to the topic too.
In other words, almost anything you can think of for a blog focus is going to already have places online where people are talking about it; and those places are treasure chests for the blogger in need of a posting idea.
Don’t copy (steal) content from them, but follow the discussions to see what people are talking about within your topic. What resources are being shared? What questions seem to come up over and over again? This will give you tons of ideas for writings on your own blog.
And don’t forget news services too. Almost every topic is going to get some news coverage now and then. Either product news, or possibly news about major players in the topic industry. So follow news services and watch for story ideas there too. I usually use Yahoo! and Google news because I can subscribe to custom RSS feeds based on keywords at each, that way I just have to check my feed reader to see if there’s been anything new published recently when fishing for an idea to write about.
Still, I always look for forums or social groups first just because they’ll tell you what real people interested in your topic are actually talking about or asking, which means you have a better chance of connecting with potential real readers on your blog by basing your content ideas around those interests and needs.
What sources for ideas do you like to use?
Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/brainloc
Email this postAlso See:
Tags: blog writing, idea research
Ok I see this working for an electrnoics market, but what if someone needs to blog about pimple creams? Would u still suggest the same thing? I dont think theres lots of pimple forums to search.
Wayne, that’s a good point. There could certainly be some niches which are too narrow to have forums or groups already online.
Though I would think that suggests the topic or market isn’t a very good one to build a blog in if that’s the case–since the lack of forums or groups online would indicate there just isn’t much interest in the topic.
However, anything that affects lots of people (such as acne/pimples) will probably have content resources out there if you just look for them.
A couple minutes on Google right now found me these 2 forums which would be good for someone building a blog about acne or pimple suffering:
This one has over 4 million posts
http://www.acne.org/messageboard/forums.html
Here there’s about 10,000 questions and expert answers posted under beauty and skin care
http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/health-wellness/
If I were starting a blog about pimples (and I never would, but understand from a marketing perspective why someone might) I bet those 2 resources alone would provide me with plenty of content ideas.
And I found those in just a couple minutes, I’m sure there are a lot more out there if I had looked further.
Honestly, you’re going to be hard pressed to find a topic that’s of interest to people or that affects people in some way which doesn’t have forums, groups, portals and other community type sites online already where you can find content ideas.
You just have to do a little leg work to flush them out.
Nice article.
hmm, nice question :) there are tones of blogs about everything so you can even think of something to be unique :( good luck for you :P
nice post, and very nice question… it’s hard to think up a something unique today…