I’ve given a brief introduction to niche blogging and now I’m going to write a little about the process of actually creating a niche blogging masterplan you can follow for coordinated efficiency and overall success.
Reviewing my experience with niche blogs, I’ve realized that you need to have a clear personal goal as its easy to be sidetracked by factors that are not a priority at all.
Having a long-term perspective is essential as well, especially if you want to make these niche blogs a profitable source of revenue.
Creating your own Niche Blog Masterplan
There are basically two main options here: Quality or Quantity. While they aren’t mutually exclusive, these are essentially two divided routes, each with their own growth patterns, marketing techniques and monetization strategies.
Let’s split this up and take a closer look at each method.
Quantity or the Brute Force method
This means creating as many niche blogs as possible (till a manageable limit) and writing one post a day or every alternate day on each of them. Your profit strategy is simple: To create multiple blogs, hoping that each of them will pick up search traffic and hence ad clicks.
This method is commonly used by many Made-for-Adsense blogs or websites, which aggregate or scrap content from blog feeds or search engines like Google blog Search.
I’m not suggesting that you do the same thing because these types of blogs are not profitable, despite being fully automated.
Traffic source: Your main emphasis is on gaining regular search traffic through the gradual development of many long-tailed keywords.
Development plan: Create content on a regular basis to keep the blog fresh.
Monetization Goal: To get as many ad or affiliate link clicks as possible through targeted traffic (i.e. search engine visitors.)
Link building/Marketing strategy. Article or Press Release submissions to article directories for backlinks and possibly Pay per Click advertising if you are mainly monetizing through affiliate programs.
Benefits: Less pro-active work needed. Most of the time, you’ll just need to consistently develop content. Less emphasis is placed on actual networking and blog marketing.
Disadvantages: Difficult to manage and time-consuming unless you hire bloggers or writers to create content for these blogs on a long-term basis
Quality or the Flagship Method
This means creating one or two niche blogs at one time and spending time on building your brand and site reputation. The goal is to become an expert on the topic, which naturally draws in referral traffic and links as well.
Traffic source: The emphasis is on both search traffic and also defensible referral traffic through social networking sites, forums etc.
Development plan: To build a regular audience around the site. It is important to integrate your blog within a community and this involves socializing quite often with your fellow bloggers. A minimum of one post a day is optimal.
Monetization Goal: Common methods used includes Adsense and other affiliate programs. This is not much difference between this and from the brute force method, except that you’ll have more potential for direct ad sales as well.
Link building/Marketing strategy: More emphasis is placed on emailing pitches to other notable bloggers in your niche or developing the occasional linkbait for social websites.
Benefits: The ability to branch out into ever smaller niches and bringing your audience with you. Higher potential for overall traffic and hence earnings if the flagship blog becomes popular.
Disadvantages: Flagship blogs need a lot more personal energy because you’ll need to do a lot more marketing of your own material while interacting with the general community.
Picking the Right Niche Blogging Strategy
I’ve decided to go with a blend of both methods above and plan to build the niche blogs to to suit my personal skills.
For instance, I’m very familiar with most social websites/networks and I’ve decided to make sure that the overall style and content of each blog is palatable and attractive to social website audiences.
This also means that instead of just waiting for search traffic, I’m going to throw out a weekly linkbait article and promote it through social media websites and networks.
Seven blogs is a good initial number for me because I do eventually plan to outsource the content creation process by hiring writers or initiating a simple Adsense revenue share program.
This number of blogs is also manageable and allows me to easily measure their progress. Should I feel the need to create more niche blogs, I’ll probably develop them through the initial seven, which I plan to build into medium-sized blogs, each with their own loyal audience base.
Personally, I can blog very quickly on a wide variety of topics and updating these blogs daily should not take more than an hour if you know how to efficiently source for information.
I think its important to base your niche blogging strategy based on the following factors:
Time. How much time do you have everyday to blog?
Interest. Are you at least mildly interested in the topics you are writing about?
Personality. Do you like interacting with other bloggers and marketing your content? Or would you prefer to just focus on your content and let the search engines find you gradually?
Expertise. How well do you know your chosen topic? This determines how easily you can create content or interact within the community.
Long term growth. Are you patiently in it for the long haul or are you just interested in making a few quick bucks?
Budget. Will you be willing to invest money to grow your blogs or are intent on keeping costs as low as possible?
Seven Day Niche Blog Challenge: Day #1 Update
I’ve just started my first blog yesterday and it took around three hours to do up the entire blog. Most of the time was spent on doing research on the specific topics and checking out other similar websites.
I won’t reveal the domains for all the blogs now because I don’t want the niches to be overcrowded. Dosh Dosh has a fairly large audience and disclosing this would be detrimental to any actual ability to measure each niche’s profit potential.
I do however plan to reveal the revenue earnings and the topic at a later date so you’ll get a rough idea of the potential that each specific niche holds.
The next few posts will deal with how to choose an appropriate blog niche and domain/blog name as these are the main issues I had to deal with while setting up the first blog.
