The Definitive Guide to Choosing a Topic for Your New Blog - Part 2

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography.

This is the second part to a series on choosing a topic for your new blog. In it, I’ll discuss how to grow your blog even when there are a lot of other blogs on the same topic. Read Part 1 of this series.

Starting strongly in a crowded niche will involve emphasizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses. You can use the other blogs and websites in your niche as footholds to growth. Here’s how:

Let your peers provide a platform. Let’s begin with the obvious: your target audience is reading other blogs in your niche, so that’s where you should try to attract them: by commenting, guest-posting, pitching links or becoming a contributing writer on one of your niche’s most popular blogs.

A crowded niche indicates a strong demand.Make the most of this. If no-one is doing quality blogging on a particular topic, it might be because the target audience for such a topic is incredibly small. An empty niche does not automatically indicate an under-served niche.

A crowded niche, however, suggests that it’s serving an audience hungry for information. If you think about your own behavior, you might find that you’re subscribed to a number of blogs in the same niche. A crowded niche would be a death-trap if readers were only ever going to subscribe to one blog in that niche, but that’s simply not the case. Some do, but a lot don’t. Make this decision easier for them by offering something they can’t get anywhere else.

People talk about you

Have you ever noticed that most of the blogs in the Technorati Top 100 exist in crowded niches? Technorati is about links, and crowded niches make it easy to gather them.

If a blogger is looking outward, they’ll link out only to content that is relevant to their target audience. If you share a target audience with a lot of blogs, this means that a lot of blogs also have the potential to send a link your way. This is one area where a crowded niche has an edge over smaller counterparts.

It’s a party – make friends. A crowded niche is full of peers with skills you might not have yourself. Starting an email dialogue with another blogger can lead to co-operation and mutual benefit in future. Bloggers in empty niches don’t have as many options in this area.

Crowded niche = crowded audience. With so many voices trying to be heard, a crowded niche can be overwhelming. To stand out, you’ve got to provide something radically unique compared to everyone else. Alternately, you’ve got to fill gaps your peers have been unable to fill. Shouting louder won’t work. You’ve got to sound different.

Your audience is waiting

Other blogs in your niche are places where potential readers hang out. There’s no neuroscience involved, you don’t need to puzzle out where they’re hiding: they’re right in front of you. Not having to search out your target audience is a luxury many bloggers in a crowded niche don’t appreciate. Every time you guest-post, comment or get a link, you’re building doorways for potential readers to move through.

Follow, but don’t shadow. Other successful blogs in your niche give you a blueprint to follow. By studying them, you can see what your target audience likes, and what it doesn’t like. If you’re blogging in an empty niche, however, you’ll need to learn everything from scratch.

Benchmark yourself against your peers. There’s nothing like other runners in a race to make you run faster. When trying to become popular in a crowded niche, you need to edge ahead of already established blogs. To do that, you’ll need to match the level of usefulness they provide (and then some). Competition breeds excellence.

In part 3, the final part of the series, I’ll talk about the opposite - how to create a pioneering blog on a topic that hasn’t been properly covered before. It’s a situation that presents a challenging but potentially very rewarding opportunity for you.