How Niche Can You Get? Or: How Niche Is Too Niche?
Interesting report from an AlwaysOn panel over on Between the Lines with regard to “Power Blogging” (I guess not even blogging is immune from becoming hyperbolically super or powerful!).
I particularly fixated, as I am wont to do, on Peter Rojas’ (of Engadet fame) comment that bloggers should choose “a niche or area you want to focus on. Find the smallest area you can find and own that niche.”
This discussion always makes me wonder if bloggers who want to be successful – which we can define as gathering a reasonably sized audience around some type of content – are “allowed” to post outside of whatever niche they happen to choose. For instance, in 2007 I’ve focused (nearly) exclusively on discussing “web 2.0″ topics, blogging, social news, and how the mainstream media is adapting to the online environment. Does that mean that I can’t or shouldn’t post about my favorite campus comedies of all time, or the 2008 presidential election? Would that alienate whatever small audience I had just won over by focusing on some notion of a niche?
Or should bloggers drill down further than that. I could in theory write exclusively about strange MySpace blogs (an absolutely killer idea for a standalone site, by the way, in my view) to the exclusion of everything else. Unfortunately my restless nature prevents me from doing that, but that’s a free one for all of you niche-seekers out there.
Lots of questions on a late Tuesday’s eve. For a final shot of good times, Elizabeth Spiers of Dead Horse Media recommends that power bloggers post somewhere between eight and twelve times per day.
So much for sleep, and power on, bloggers!
Recent Entries
- Electoral vote maps: embed ‘em
- Mathew Ingram on crappy ad links: they look like ass
- Live chat is fun… if there’s a live event on worth chatting about
- You too can (sort of) interview Sarah Palin
- The ‘08 election gets a Twitter
- Great, quick, digestible slide show about FriendFeed
- A good rule of thumb: bring the show back “after these words from our sponsor”
- Dwigger: one of the most interesting social media experiments of the year
- Google’s tentacles, Microsoft’s nothingness, Twitter’s geek borderlands, Cuil’s illing
- Mashable redesigns (and it’s good!)
