Working Blogger

Since Working Blogger will be focusing mostly on niche blogging, it might be good to start fresh, with my own personal definition of what a niche blog is, and what I mean by niche blogging.

The Niche Blog

A niche blog, like any blog, runs on blogging software. My personal preference is Wordpress, because of all the available plugin goodness.

You can run a niche blog two ways:

1. A regularly updated blog.

2. A blog that has a fairly static number of posts.

The choice is yours. My preference is for option 2, because it means once I’ve set up the blog, and posted all the relevant posts, it’s in "passive income mode". Maintenance is still required, of course, and new posts might be made, but not with any particular consistency.

But the driving factor should be your target market.

And the main purpose for each of my niche blogs is to generate relatively passive income in the long-term, so I always know how the blog will be monetized before I begin working on it.

Your Niche

Probably the most important step when it comes to setting up a niche blog is finding a niche. Generally speaking, my niche blogs target micro-niches, rather than large niches. Because I’m an affiliate marketer, the bulk of my niches are product-oriented. Some are service-oriented. Only a few are information-oriented.

Both product-oriented and service-oriented niches are monetized through affiliate links. Information-oriented niches are monetized through contextual advertising programs like Adsense, and advertisers/sponsors.

I never place Adsense on my product-oriented and service-oriented niches.

So what’s the best way of picking a niche?

1. Find a product that sells.

2. Find a service that sells.

3. Find an area where people are looking for information, generally to help them solve a problem.

Once you’ve picked your niche, just ask yourself what you yourself would be looking for if you were a visitor. For example, if I want to buy a product, I want to find a site that gives me a selection of choices and price ranges. 

Niche Blogging

Niche blogging simply requires you to become well-versed in the particular niche you’re targeting. If your blog is product-oriented, then you’ll start by researching the product(s) you’ll be promoting. Research is always the first step.

Keyword research is the other important component of niche blogging. Unlike my other blogging, I begin my niche blogging with a keyword list. I don’t do anything too fancy to generate this list - usually , I’ll just use a free keyword tool, like Google’s.

Whether the list is long or short, I’ll normally write and upload my posts in batches, and schedule them to post in the future.

Once I’ve finished my list, I normally consider that blog to be "finished". Using various promotion techniques, which I’ll write about in later posts, organic traffic will begin arriving. I’ll keep my eye on the income the blog generates, and if a niche begins to look promising, I’ll create a more indepth keyword list that focuses on more long-tail variations of the keywords I wrote about initially, and start writing posts based on this second keyword list.

I’ll also promote each of my niche blogs, using a set promotion routine.

So that, in a nutshell, is what I mean when I talk about niche blogs, and niche blogging.

Well, I’m back - blogger burnout has been abolished, and I’m coming back with a new sense of direction for Working Blogger.

It’s been an interesting time away from the blogging world - during this time, I didn’t blog very much (not at all here) and I didn’t keep up with any of the various blogs I was following. Feeds stayed unread, and I entered into a totally different world.

Basically, the last half a year to ten months, I’ve been exploring the world of “Internet marketing” - by that, I mean that world where people create infoproducts and sell them. It’s been a very interesting journey, but at the end of the day, I can honestly say that it’s not for me. I never even got as far as coming up with an idea for a product, much less creating it and selling it.

I also focused a lot on building up VRE (Virtual Real Estate), most of which were niche blogs. And I’m happy to report that niche blogging has been successful.

But now I’m ready to roll up my sleeves, and plunge back into the blogging world. I’ve missed meeting fellow bloggers and making new friends. I have a lot of catch-up to do, but my time away has been good, in that it’s given me a new sense of direction for Working Blogger.

A New Direction

One problem I always had with this blog was, “what’s my purpose here?”. There are, as everyone knows, a LOT of good blogs about blogging.

But I’ve discovered that niche blogging is where I do my best work. My niche blogs aren’t famous, I’m not known as an expert in various niches, my posts don’t get on the front page of Digg every so often, I don’t get tons of people linking to my various posts.

Instead, my niche blogs have developed into a nice stable source of income. They each make a bit of money - nothing startling - but taken as a whole, it does add up.

And that’s what I’ve been realizing I do know something about. Niche blogging. What it is. What has worked for me. What are the good tools. How to work smarter, not harder, when it comes to niche blogging.

And one of the keys is that there’s a lot of stuff out there - be it SEO, blogging, promotion - that can be tweaked and applied to niche blogging.

The other great thing about niche blogs is that they don’t burn you out. There’s no constant pressure to top your last great article, to network with the right people. You just need to write good, solid (and usually “evergreen”) content - all on your own terms. You post it whenever it’s ready, rather than because it’s been a day since you last posted. And each post continues to work hard for you.

So there you go. I’m back, and I’m ready to start this journey again. I’m looking forward to it!

I know, I know … most likely you all know that, seeing as how I haven’t posted here for ages. But Working Blogger is now on temporary hiatus. I’m playing around with a few ideas for this blog - have one specific idea that I’ve been exploring.

So, until then, you can catch up with what I’m doing over at Adventures in Net Marketing!

Not that long ago, I wrote about the flexibility of blogging and how much I liked the ease with which you can try out new things, and yes, change your mind.

I’m reminded again today of this flexibility, and the power it has to encourage creativity.

I’ve mentioned in the past that Chrissie and I have been working on a new blog together. We already collaborate on a blog and it’s so much fun having a partner that we have a couple of other projects in the works, including this new blog that we had originally planned to launch the beginning of June.

But recently, we’ve both decided to concentrate our efforts on our existing sites and blogs - we are both seeing pleasant increases in traffic on older, aged domains - and it really didn’t feel like it was the right time to put more time and effort into the blog project we’ve been working on.

So for a while, we agreed to put the blog on the side, to be picked up when the time felt right.

Last week, we hit on an idea that lets us blog together, with the same sense of fun and ease that GadgetChick brings us, but in a totally different area. And with just a few tweaks, we realized that we could unshelve our shelved blog project and use it for our new idea - by giving it a totally different, much more fun, far less serious theme.

So now, we’re going for the fun of it all. I don’t even know if we’ll “launch” our new blog properly. Diving in and doing feels right with this new blog. Watch for the link here soon!

Mike Sansone over at ConverStations has a post about his blogging schedule, and I really like his idea of doing a “blogger’s warm-up” first.

Before he begins writing, he has a commenting warm-up routine:

“before I even think about my own post, I invest 15-20 minutes responding to comments on my blog and commenting on other sites. I find this gets me in a blogging rhythm. While commenting - a post formulates that I can bang out in another 20-30 minutes.”

After I read this, I realized I’d been doing something similar myself - just not consistently. But I find that making comments on other blogs and answering comments on my own blogs really does get me into the “blogger’s zone” - ideas for posts will come to me even if I hadn’t had a clue what to write.

I think it’s the combination of reading through my feeds, and also putting my fingers to the keyboard and getting them going. There’s a rhythm that just comes to you as you go tap tapping away in answer to something someone else has written.

Getting into that zone is always a nice feeling.

Mind you, I’m not an early morning runner, and so I doubt I’ll ever find myself beginning a commenting warm-up at 4:45 a.m.!