Find your Blog Niche

In the comments of the last post on what makes a good blog, Afronuts and LTM talked about the focus of a blog, or the topic/theme by which the blog can be defined. You can also define this as the niche into which your blog falls. Can people think of your blog and match it with a particular area? This could be personal life, poetry, travel, gossip, films,parenting, food etc.

With that said, you don’t have to lock yourself in a box, most of us are quite versatile in our day to day lives, and your blog can be a showcase of this. This is where what I talked about in what makes a good blog comes in again, you must have a defined voice so that whatever you decide to talk about, it still fits into your reader’s perception of you and your blog. With this, there are several ways to define your niche for your blog users.

So you’ve chosen your URL, your title and your description. What next? How do you go about choosing the topics to blog about? How do you know which ones not to? These questions might help.

What is your URL address, blog title or description?

You cannot have a URL or title that says Women’s Lingerie and then you blog about Auto spare parts and mechanics. See, when I navigate to a page called Jewelries.blogspot.com, I should know what to expect. According to those who know, a good blog title should be short, unique and catchy. I didn’t know all these when I set up my blog, so my title is a bit long though by luck I made it into unique and catchy(yeah!).

So, Mynewhitmanwrites.com is my URL and is the same as my blog title. Some people have different URL and title and that is OK too, maybe you want something short for your address, and then you can expand on that in your title. For example, our Madame Sting’s URL is nigerianscorpio.com and her title is “The Smile of a Nigerian Scorpio”.

Don’t despair that you’ve already set up your URL and title, they can both be changed. However, I won’t advice you to change your URL, (too much drama), or your name (me being selfish cos I don’t want to have to lol…). What is easier to change is your description. This is the bit that comes under the title. Mimi B of My world as I see it describes her blog as “The mullings (and sometimes rantings) of a 20 something year old, moody melancholic, book loving, God adoring Nigerian girl.” The description thus tells us what to expect, and leads me into the next question.

What is your purpose for blogging?

On my blog, I tell you in the description that I will be sharing thoughts on life, love, books and Nigeria. Someone once wrote to ask me how they can become a successful blogger like me. Before I shared a few tips, I reminded them that if your blog is like your diary, you might not want 600 followers. But if you’re like 9jaFoodie of Mordern African Cuisine and you’re passionate about spreading the word about African food, then you can go all out.

Here, my purpose is to write, and to share my stories, online or as books, and I want to share them along with my Nigerian self. Since I don’t want there to be any limitations, I promote the blog as much as I can, in several places, and for various audiences. So knowing my purpose makes it easier for me to chose the topics I blog about, the people I network with, the kind of guest posts you’ll see here, among other things. My niche may thus be wide, but there are still things you won't see in this blog, like Auto Spare Parts? LOL...

OK, I'll stop here today. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and maybe you'll be linked in the next post. And please use the Facebook and Twitter buttons to share if you liked or found the post useful. Thanks!