Throughout my many years having a blog, as well as reading my favorites through BlogLovin’ on a daily basis, I have a pretty good background in what makes blogs so attractive to their target audiences. The main thing I’ve realized is that the more niche your blog is, the better likelihood you’ll have at attracting the engaged audience you’ve always wanted to. It also helps with SEO, because longtail keyword searches produce more relevant traffic that is likely to return to your site and spend more time there.
Being “niche” means basically that you have narrowed down your topic to a specific area. So, instead of having a blog about exercising, you have a blog about running. Or instead of reviewing alcohol, you are reviewing craft beers brewed in Colorado.
Stay Specific
Yes, I’ve already said this, but if you don’t keep it at the top of your mind, it’s easy to forget. This is especially the case when you start getting advertising opportunities or thinking of other things you’d like to write about.
If you’ve found some success with your blog, remember that it’s the niche subject matter that got you to where you are in the first place, so be sure to stay on track in order to keep growing your audience.
Develop a Community
It’s so much easier to develop an online community with your blog’s topic is as niche as possible. So, instead of trying to build up an audience for everyone with food allergies, sticking to just gluten could bring you a more engaged audience.
That being said, writing content about the niche subject matter isn’t always enough. You have to be active in the community as well. Look for message boards or forums on your topic and post regularly so you get to know other people that are active in the space. Comment on other niche blogs related to you (in a thoughtful way) that will allow people to see you as an active part of the community.
Find the Right Promotion Channel
This is highly related to building up your community through being active in different channels. When it comes to a super specific subject matter, make sure your social media and promotion strategy is on point. It’s not enough to submit a link to one of the main Reddit threads and hope for the best; find the most specific, niche subreddit you can and post there instead.
Similarly, because your content will be so specific, not posting to the right place could come across as spammy or disingenuous. Do your research and become active on the social networks or forums before beginning to post your own content.
Use Visuals
Even if your specific subject matter doesn’t have much competition, using visuals in all your posts (and on social media) will help you stand out from the crowd. Your content may be amazing, but without photos, infographics, or catchy titles to go along with them, it may be getting lost in the flood of information that makes up the internet.
Free tools like Pablo by Buffer or PicMonkey make the process fairly easy, especially if you want to add your blog title (or a quote) to the image. There are also TONS of free stock photo sites available that have creative commons licenses, which allow you to use them for editorial use. Some good ones are Pixabay, PhotoPin, and Death to the Stock Photo.
Try Different Formats
Just as visuals in posts help break up the written content, producing content in different mediums has the same effect. Why don’t you do a video blog once a week instead of a written one? Most computers come with built-in webcams, as do our phones and tablets. Post the video to YouTube and then embed into a new blog post.
Be sure to add proper YouTube SEO and include a brief written description about the video to accompany the post. Videos can also be directly uploaded to Facebook, which some people are finding may bring more views than sharing a YouTube link (due to Facebook’s preference for sharing content that is hosting on their own platform).
If video isn’t your thing, consider doing a podcast or an infographic to share information instead of a long, written post. Yes, you will have to write some content to accompany it, but these different formats have been shown to increase learning comprehension.
No matter what niche subject you want to build your blog around, just remember that it’s possible to get the traffic and engagement any blogger wants for their site. Just provide high quality, relevant information and you’re already halfway there!
Kelsey Jones
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