7 Benefits of Niche Blogs

 

7 Benefits of Niche Blogs

Presented by Charles L Harmon of My Lucky Colors

There are at least a handful of benefits of niche blogs that makes them a favorable bet for making money. Let’s describe a niche first. I will use an informal definition that serves the purpose of this article.

A “niche” refers to a targeted market where the people in that market have something in common. 

A lot more could be said about a niche, but I will just mention a few more things that can make the difference between success and failure to make money in a niche.

What’s a Niche Market?

According to Wikipedia: A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing.  It is also a small market segment. For example, sports channels like STAR Sports, ESPN, STAR Cricket, and Fox target a niche of sports lovers.

Even established companies create products for different niches, for example, Hewlett-Packard has all-in-one machines for printing, scanning and faxing targeted for the home office niche while at the same time having separate machines with just one of these functions for big businesses.

One could have a niche blog covering any single one of these machines. For example a blog covering just fax machines. It could even be a review blog for various fax machines.

In addition to the people in a niche having something in common with each other it needs to have profit potential if you are going to blog about it and expect to make money. It’s best if it is not saturated with competition, but if it is, depending on the amount of competition and how hard you work trying to beat that competition, it may still be a viable niche.

In the case of heavy competition it will take you longer to see a profit – that is if you don’t give up in the process. In addition to competition, many say the niche should have a pressing problem(s) that you can solve. Also you will read the niche needs to be passionate about whatever the niche is about.

A niche with all the good qualities mentioned above and here would be a really good niche to target:

• Niche members have common problems
• Niche members need to solve their common problems
• Niche members are passionate about whatever their niche is about
• Niche members can afford to buy products and services
• Niche is a narrow segment of a larger niche

The point is to realize the benefits of niche blogs and then find the niche markets you can target and start building your blog. The idea is to provide good solid information and/or products the people in the niche can use to their advantage. Along with that will come profits for you, the blog owner.

 

Niche Blog Benefits

Here are some benefits of having a blog:

• Niche Blogs are essentially niche websites that are actively updated with new content. That’s because your blog will grow as you continue to publish posts or pages regularly to your blog. In contrast, many niche websites are seldom modified or updated after they are created. That cannot be you.

• Because it is a blog it’s much easier to come up with things to say on a frequent basis compared to a regular website where you need to populate it with quality articles or other content which is more time consuming to create, can be more costly to get, and often is much more in depth than frequent blogging would be.

• Blogs are designed to publish and update contents easily once you have them set up, configured and running. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a matter of getting into the habit of writing blog posts and pages and publishing them on a regular basis.

• They are either FREE or not very costly to set up. You can create your blogs easily by visiting blogger.com or WordPress.org and taking time to study and learn the “how-to”. A far better option is to get your own domain name and hosting and set up your blog on your own domain.

• It’s possible to make money with your niche blogs in many ways, such as:
  • Publishing third-party ads in your blogs (i.e. Google AdSense publishing)
  • Recommending affiliate products and services in your blogs (i.e.  Amazon, Clickbank)
  • Selling a product of your own that you’ve made or purchased (with rights to resell it)
  • Charging companies or people to place ads on your website
  • Charging people/companies to place links on your blog

• Blogs are interactive. Visitors, or blog readers, are usually allowed to post comments on a blog post (or article). These comments help to build rapport and relationship between the blog owner and his visitors or members.

• A blog’s syndication feature is a very powerful benefit of a blog. You can syndicate the contents of your blog by allowing other website publishers to publish your feed (or channel) on their sites. This helps to bring more traffic to your blogs.  This is automatically done with WordPress blogs although you can augment it with more RSS feeds to be even more effective.

Since blogs are updated via blog posts and pages, blogs will normally rank higher in search engines compared to non-blog websites, all other things being equal.  

In contrast, you may have to do a lot of tweaking to a niche website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Search engines will visit your blogs more regularly as you blog more regularly. Because of this you can also place links of any other websites you may have in order to get them indexed faster by the search engines.

With these benefits of niche blogs, it makes a lot of sense to consider building niche blogs as a way to make extra money or even to replace a job once the blog income reaches a level higher than your job.

Keep in mind if you do decide to create a blog it is so much easier to do a good job keeping it up to date if your blog is in a niche that you like.

That may not be necessarily true for everyone, but I have found that for me it definitely true. For me, blogs I have had on topics I am interested in almost always get my attention first and they are easier to write for.