Understanding the blog niche

Understanding the blog niche

At this point you have gathered a fair amount of information about your competitors and the topic area you are planning to build a blog in. With this knowledge, you are ready to map out the lay of the land and to plot a course for your new blog that accounts for challenges particular to your new niche.

The Niche Pyramid:

As you’ve been analyzing, you will have been slowly putting together a picture of where different sites stand in relation to each other. Let’s formalize that a little.

In every niche you can organize the blogs into a pyramid structure according to size and importance. Take this pyramid to have four levels, marked A to D, with the top level of “A” blogs being the biggest, most trafficked, most authoritative blogs, and then proceeding down. You should categorize these principally according to size in traffic and subscribers.

As the pyramid shape suggests, there are usually only one or two blogs in the A category, a handful in the B category, a fair few in the C category, and lots and lots in the D category. Here is a diagram categorizing blogs about blogging:

Fig 2-6: Pyramid describing the “blogging” niche.

What you will usually find is that A-level blogs generally cover the broadest angle on the niche you are investigating. For example, the top-level blogs in the gadgets niche are likely to be about gadgets in general. One level down, B-level blogs usually have a bit more of an angle. So a blog at this level might be about a particular genre of gadgets, or focus only on gadget reviews, or perhaps only focus on mobile devices. C-level blogs often have a much narrower angle on the main topic, might be newer and less established, or simply may not be as good in terms of writing, coverage, and content generally.

In our blogging example above, Problogger is about blogging in general and is also one of the oldest, most authoritative names in blogging.

DailyBlogTips is close behind Problogger with its daily tips slant, while CopyBlogger takes the angle of being all about copy and writing. Still on the B-level, JohnChow focuses much more on the money-making and affiliate earning aspects of blogging and mixes in a lot of personality. Down at the next level, we have sites that tend to be younger (e.g., BloggingTips), less popular (e.g., Performancing), less frequently updated (e.g., Skelliewag), or with yet other angles (e.g., BlogHerald with its news focus).

Why Niche Pyramids Exist:

There is generally only space in a consumer’s mind for a few brands. This is why you tend to see two or three main competitors at the top of most product lines: Coke and Pepsi, Intel and Athlon, Apple and Microsoft, Google and Bing, and so on. Once a consumer’s needs have been met, there is little incentive to seek out a new product to fill the same need.

A second and sometimes third competitor, can still get their foot in the door, but beyond them, the market shares tend to drop off significantly. For example, Google is top for search tools, and since the deal with Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing is running second, but ask yourself who comes in third, fourth, and fifth? Companies like Ask are a long way off.

So for a new company to break in, the only option is to create a new market by adding an angle. To use the search example again, there are sites that dominate in job search such as SimplyHired and Indeed, or in travel search such as Kayak. These search engines have realized they can’t compete on the broadest top level, but are dominating their own sub-niches.

If we put together a pyramid diagram for search, we’d have Google and Bing at the top. On the B-level we’d have smaller competitors like Ask, along with the niche search engines like Indeed and Kayak and significant but smaller non-English search engines like Baidu and Taobao from China.

Then on the C-level we might have country-specific search engines, newer “Googlekiller” search engines like Wolphram Alpha, old has-beens like Altavista, and so on.

It’s important to realize that if you were to then put a pyramid diagram together for say, job search, then all of a sudden SimplyHired would be on the A-level of this niche, and there would be a new set of Bs and Cs and Ds.

The same reasoning and rules apply for blogs and topic areas. In every niche there is only space for a few top-level sites. They tend to be blogs that have been around for a while, that have done an exceedingly good job, and that have been really consistent. In larger blog niches, the top blogs have often gone commercial either by becoming stand-alone companies like TechCrunch, or being acquired by media companies the way Engadget has been by AOL.

It is extremely difficult to displace an A-level blog, but it is possible. To do this you would need to bring something really new to the table, such as a new format, a new standard for breaking news, build on different audience demographics, a magnetic key personality, new partnerships somewhere in the industry, or all of the above and more. You would also want to bank on the A-level blog stumbling somehow and possibly eroding some of their own mindshare.

What Gaps Are There?

Finding a gap in the market is a fundamental strategy for any startup. A gap is an untapped demand that you can fill to create a viable business.

You want to ask yourself what is the competition not doing? What reader needs aren’t being met? What angles haven’t been explored? What features are missing? What type of content do readers want? The more populated the niche is, the harder this is to do because many bloggers have gone before you looking for the same gaps.

With that said, there are always gaps somewhere that you can exploit to get a foothold. Here are some strategies for finding gaps:

1. Start Blogging in the Niche:

Working in a niche is the best way to see gaps because you naturally get a very strong feel for what is happening there. If you are really committing to a particular niche, you can start a small test blog for a month or two to evaluate post strategies and ideas. Alternately, you can get work writing for established blogs in the niche to find out how they work and what they are doing.

2. What is the Competition Not Doing:

Focus on what isn’t there rather than what is. Maybe the site focuses on one particular country or language, maybe it’s only covering some aspects of the niche, maybe its format is a particular style, maybe the volume of posts isn’t there, or maybe the depth of coverage is missing. Look for missing elements and evaluate them as potential key differentiators.

3. Ask!

Ask other readers what they would like to see. You can do this on forums, in comments, in a blog post if you have a small test blog, or informally by contacting people you know are interested in the niche.

4. Be the Other Guy

A common strategy for differentiating is to position yourself as the antithesis of the top competitor. You can do this by posting opposing opinions, focusing on different aspects of the niche, or simply beating the top competitor to stories. For every dominant business, there is a certain segment of the niche that simply doesn’t like the top guy and is looking for a replacement.

Popular Niches

There are three big benefits to starting a blog in an already popular niche:

1. Defined Audience

When there are lots of popular blogs on a topic, you can be assured that there is a market for the subject. That means if you can produce quality content and market it well, chances are you’ll build a readership.

2. Sites to Get Linked From

One of the big challenges in starting a blog is to find readers and visitors. When blogs in your niche link to you, they naturally send over readers right from your core audience.

3. Lots of Experience to Draw On

If a niche is already popular, then you’re going to find that there is a lot of information out there about what works, what doesn’t, how big the audience potential is, what companies spend ad dollars, what to charge, what posts are popular, and so on.

The big drawback of course is that in a crowded space, it is hard to draw attention or deliver something new. Some basic strategies for working in a popular niche are:

1. Sub-niches

Creating a new sub-niche means taking a different angle to create your own niche-within-a-niche. A great example of a successful sub-niche is the blogging site Copyblogger, that principally focuses on the written aspects of blogging. Sure it’s still about blogging, and from time to time there are posts on other blogging topics, but primarily the site is all about writing.

This focus has grown it to be one of the biggest and best known blogs on blogging.

There are all sorts of angles you can take for virtually any niche. Look at what the established blogs are doing and do something different.

2. Improving Quality or Quantity (or both)

If blogs in a particular niche tend to produce medium quality posts, or a medium quantity of posts, an obvious strategy is to improve one or both. Your aim is to stand out, so if everyone else is producing high quantities of average posts, then you might try producing fewer very high quality posts. If other bloggers are inconsistent, you might decide to consistently produce a set number of posts each day.

3. A Different Style

Another tactic is to find a different style of writing. This might mean highly personable posts, or only list-style posts, comic posts, or opinionated posts. Find a style that suits you and that you think will resonate with your audience. In the next section we’ll look at content plans and evaluate different types of posting and content.

In popular niches your strategy is always to differentiate. How you do that is up to you. If you don’t differentiate somehow, you stand no chance of finding an audience. If you can differentiate, and that differentiation fills a gap, then you will find success. In other words,

your defining difference must meet an unmet demand.

Under-served Niches:

The huge benefit of going into an under-served niche is the potential to hit a home-run and create a new market. The drawback on the other hand is that there may simply be no market for this particular topic, or in other words it may be under-served for a reason. If you’ve done your research,you should know whether a topic has at least some interest, so assuming you’ve found what might be a gold mine, the question is how do you exploit it?

Some strategies for entering an under-served niche are:

1. Hook into Neighboring (Popular) Niches

When you are entering virgin territory it’s difficult to get links because there are no other blogs in the niche. A strategy to combat this is to use related topics to bring the links and then feed those readers into your regular topic. Look for natural crossovers with blog topics on popular blogs and work on developing relationships with those blogs by submitting links, networking with the operators, and writing guest posts.

2. Social Media

If your niche is genuinely under-served, then social media will often work well. Audiences on sites like Digg and Reddit are broad, and submitting links there should find their way to the right people. Links submitted to social media for an unmet demand also have a higher chance of becoming popular since (you hope) the demand is there but the content is not.

3. Search Optimization

If a niche has limited content but high potential, then search traffic should be a good source of early readers. Develop a site with content that is optimized for search engines and do your best to develop linkbacks using neighboring niches as described above.

In an under-served niche your strategy is centered around building and consolidating a readership that doesn’t yet exist anywhere else. This can be challenging if the niche has only moderate potential, but if you stumble on a hit niche that hasn’t been tapped, then growth can be explosive.