As fun as it is to blog about whatever you happen to feel like blogging about at the time, serious bloggers realize at some point that being serious – doing the best job you can to help the greatest number of people, involves making sense of all of your scattered posts and finding your focus.
(I mean, sure, there are people who are made to just sort of be “celebrities” – those whose lives people follow for no apparent reason – but even they have to develop some sort of brand, conscious or not.)
“But I don’t want to have to give up writing about ________! I won’t be able to come up with enough posts if I niche! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!”
I know, I know, my inner voice is a bit of a whiner sometimes, too… it also occasionally likes to turn nouns into verbs.
The Problem You Face When Niche-ing
I’m honestly not sure if the process is harder or easier the longer you’ve been blogging. On one hand, you’ve probably had time to explore posting about different interests, writing different types of posts, not to mention learning how the blogging community works – which certainly takes awhile – so you can draw from that experience to help you find your blogging niche.
However, in some cases this might just overwhelm you all the more because you’ve inevitably seen that there is “nothing new under the sun” and it’s really difficult to make your brand stand out from the rest. Additionally, you may have found that you enjoy writing about a lot of different things and you don’t want to have to commit to a more narrow focus.
3 Reasons You Will Actually Love Niche-ing
Niche-ing Means Understanding Yourself Better
For a long time, figuring out our niche felt completely impossible. We loved too many things and didn’t want to be limited or lose out on something. The truth was, our life purpose was simply too vague, and I’ll talk more about that in next week’s post – Finding Your Blogging Niche. Now that we’ve finally been able to really define our purpose, everything feels so much more clear. Everything. And we can’t wait to make those changes here on the blog!
If you niche properly, I promise it will change your life.
Refine Your Efforts
Do you start a million awesome little projects, maybe even big ones, but not really feel like you can put in your whole effort, somehow sort of losing interest when it doesn’t “take” quite right and think your timing must just be off?
Do you often feel scattered with so many different things you want to do and frustrated that you can never do them all?
Floundering around without a niche is basically like trying to stand up on a wildly spinning merry-go-round.
Niche-ing helps you get your barrings. No, it won’t magically make your problems go away, but it will help you get off the crazy train and be sure on your feet.
A blogging niche is walking in a straight line vs around in circles – you still have to do the walking, but now you’re getting somewhere!
Make a Greater Impact
There’s nothing like getting into a shower expecting a nice firm spray, only to be greeted by a weak mist. Frustrating is not the word.
You want people to step into your blog with the “now that’s a shower” feeling. A non-niche-ed blog just doesn’t have a big impact – sure, people get wet here and there, but they don’t leave with that happy-to-have-showered feeling, and likely won’t be back.
A niche-ed blog, on the other hand, draws people in, makes them want to linger, and has them looking forward to coming back. I realize this is an odd analogy… moving on.