How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog
April 26, 2008
@jonathanguinn asks: “I am new to internet marketing and am struggling to find my niche. Maybe some pointers about that would be helpful.”
There are many factors to consider when choosing a niche. I’ve written about many of them in this post - but for me a lot of it comes back to choosing something that you know about, that you feel you can say something useful and interesting on - ie what are YOU about?.
After that I’d take a good hard look at tools like Google Trends where you can track the popularity of different search terms over time to see if they’ve been trending up or down. Ideally you want to find a popular niche that’s growing so that you can position yourself for the future growth.
Other factors of course come into play including the number of other blogs and websites on a topic already (ie competition), whether the topic has monetization streams (if you’re doing it for money) etc - but you can read more aobut them in my post on choosing a niche for your blog.
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When Self Promotion Tips into Spam
April 26, 2008
@jimgoldstein asks: “one things I see bloggers struggle with is blog spam. When self promotion goes to far. “
I agree Jim. There are different kinds of spam - the main stuff we see is the auto-generated stuff that fills our inboxes and hits our comment filters but then there is a more subtle kind of spam - where bloggers overstep the mark on other people’s blogs by promoting themselves to a point where they put others off. I see this every day in the comments on my blogs where the comments left are five words long and only slightly on topic and then there’s a list of 2-3 links as a signature. The comments left are obviously a thinly veiled attempt at self promotion.
The problem with this approach of self promotion is that you can do more harm for yourself than good. If you comments are allowed on your blog the reaction from others who see it can actually hurt your brand. I write about this in 10 Way s to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs.
The key to growing your blog is to create value. Create useful and unique content on your own blog (don’t get caught up in the self promotion game in every 2nd post) and to do the same thing on other people’s blogs. The people’s blogs that I visit from comments on my blog (and others) are those who have something interesting and useful to say - not those who leave links on dull and spammy comments).
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How to Build Community on Your Blog
April 25, 2008
@SmallFishMedia asks - “What can you do to make your blog more of a community?”
There are many things that you can do to build a sense of community on a blog. Here’s a short list of ideas that come to mind:
- Take the lead and be the community that you want your readers to be - readers follow the lead of bloggers in how they’ll interact with each other
- Ask Questions - the key to more comments and interaction on a blog
- Give readers homework - try it, it works
- Give readers a job to do on your blog - bizarre but it works
- Link to reader’s blogs - it’s amazing what impact this can have
- Answer Reader questions - this has real power
- Invite Readers to Take the lead with guest posts, giving advice to each other etc
- Make Readers Famous - celebrate your readers publicly
- Do projects where readers can participate, submit things and be active. The more you have them DO the more loyal they’ll become.
Blog Design - Does it Matter?
April 25, 2008
@mattpacker asks - how important is the design of your blog and how hard a decision do you think it would be to develop a new theme for it?
There will probably be a little debate over this one in the comments on this post because every time I see someone write about design there are two opposing arguments.
On the one side are some blogger who argue that design is secondary and not that important as that it’s content that is what draws people to a blog and keeps them there. This camp often argues that with a lot of people reading blogs these days through RSS that design is less important as people rarely see it.
On the flip side we have the argument that design is very important because it creates a first impression in the mind of potential readers and that it’s around this first impression that many readers base their decision about whether they will subscribe.
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Spy On Your Competition With Firefox’ s Search Status
April 25, 2008
- Google Page Rank
- Alexa Rank
- Keyword density
- Nofollow highlighting
- Backlinks in Google, Yahoo and MSN
- Whois Info
- Wayward Archive Info
- and much more on any website you are visiting,
How to Build Your Blog’s Readership
April 25, 2008
@jeremyjacks asks - How did you get to be a big blogger? And what should I do to get more site hits?” also - @JoshAnstey asks - “whats the best way to build blog exposure?”
I’m not sure I’m famous outside of a very small segment of the internet - but the growth I’ve had on my blogs has come over a long period of time and I would say that one of the ’secrets’ to growing a blog readership is to stick at it and work hard for a sustained period of time. I’ve been blogging 5 and a half years now and have worked a lot of hours in that time.
Outside of hard work (and a bit of luck) there are many techniques you can use to grow readership to a blog. I’ve summarised some of the many articles I’ve written on the topic here on my How to Find Readers for your Blog page. Also check out my 6 part series on How I’d Promote My Blog if I was Starting Out Again. I really believe that the topics covered in that of guest posting (on relevant blogs in your niche), networking, viral content, advertising and social media are a great place to start.
Also - get on Twitter (I know you’re on it Jeremy and Josh but others should) because it’s a pretty hot spot at the moment when it comes on online activity and I think the potential to drive a lot of traffic from there is still only just being realized. It’s a space that is still in it’s early days of development so get in early (even though it’s been a year or two since it launched) and position yourself for the future.
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Social Media Study: Universal McCann Power To The People - Wave 3 Report
April 25, 2008
Is it Worth Getting Local Domain Names for a Blog?
April 25, 2008
@PopularWealth asks - “I’d like to see geo-domain blogging addressed since you ask Darren. I think geo domains, and “local” sites are getting hot again”
I’m no expert on this topic but I do think that there is something to it well worth exploring from my own personal experience. My first domain was LivingRoom which is a .au (Australian) domain.
I blogged heavily on this domain for a number of years and it got a lot of incoming links in the early days of running it and as a result began to rise in it’s search engine authority. What I found was that despite blogging in some very competitive niches (including Digital Cameras) on that domain it got quite a lot of traffic to it from Google. The traffic didn’t come from the global Google but Google.com.au (the Aussie localized version). For a while there the traffic was quite massive (although less so these days as I’ve let the blogs slip to focus more on my main blogs).
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How Do I Get More Relevant Readers for My Blog?
April 25, 2008
@happygirl08 asks about how to - “get more relevant readers to your blog/ mailing list??”
Good question - some bloggers tend to focus on getting more readers of any kind - they don’t really care about who they are, they just want their numbers to increase. So I think it’s good that you’re asking about ‘relevant’ readers because some readers will come to your blog and then leave, never to return, whereas others will come back again and again because they click with something on your blog (I presume this is what you mean by ‘relevant readers’. OK - now that I’ve said that - an answer:
Here’s the question that I encourage you to ask - “where are the readers that I want already gathering in numbers?”
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Having an Opinion: The Secret Sauce for a Popular Blog
April 24, 2008
