If you notice some of the most successful (ie, A Whole Lot of Traffic) blogs on the web, one of the things you’ll notice right away is that they have a very specific, often narrow, niche, to which they cater nearly exclusively.
A new one, only 5 days old, is FontLeech. Yes, it’s a blog about free fonts. And five days into its existence, it’s getting attention all over the blogosphere.
Another great example is Cooking for Engineers. A great idea; a site for geeky, left-brained types who happen to cook; it got so much traffic when it began to be noticed (a link from Slashdot helped, with that) that it was down and out, temporarily…
In some cases it may seem that the narrower the niche, the easier some of these sorts of blogs became noticed and well-known. This is no surprise to marketers, who are well aware that it is a lot easier to interest a specific group, than it is to interest everyone.
Apparently, though, I’m not smart enough to follow this advice myself. I just can’t seem to keep my posts on one topic for too long. Sure, for a long time they’ll be on Linux, or some programming language which caught my attention — then it’ll go to marketing, or church, or business… or blogs.
I guess my target audience is summed up in one of the quotes I recently added to my quote database:
People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like. (Abe Lincoln)
I can see how the narrow focus is working for some of these blogs, out there, but apparently I can’t bring myself to restrict this one to any one niche. Oh well; whoever enjoys whatever it is that I’m doing will hopefully continue to enjoy it, and I’ll just keep doing it.
:-)
