All Entries Tagged With: "niche"

10 Places To Find Blogs In Your Niche

Carl Ocab, a popular blogger in the Make Money Online niche, wrote a great blog post recommending how to find blogs in your niche. His 7 suggestions were:

1. WhosTalkin
2. Google Blog Search
3. Technorati
4. StumbleUpon
5. Delicious
6. Ask Blog Search
7. Google Reader

I’ll let you read Carl’s blog for the descriptions. Some of these are at the top of my list as well, but I think Carl’s list is a bit incomplete. Here are three other resources you can use to find blogs in your niche:

• Twitter – Twitter is included in the search at WhosTalkin, but if you can go right to the source then I think you can get better information. Use Twitter’s search feature at search.twitter.com and search by keyword. Also, Twellow, a yellow pages for Twitter, is a good source.
• Alltop – Lists the best blogs in every niche under the sun. About as close to an online magazine rack as you can get.
• BlogCatalog – BlogCatalog is the premier blog community. If there is a niche with a blog then you can bet it’s listed here. If not then it’s probably not worth following.

Blog Outside Of Your Niche For More Traffic

I wouldn’t recommend doing this every day, but you can expand the audience for your blog by blogging outside of your niche once in awhile. One way to do that is to participate in worthy efforts like Blog Action Day.

When you blog outside of your niche you are engaging in untargeted marketing. I of course believe that targeted marketing is always best, but there is a place for untargeted marketing as well. The key is to discuss a topic that has a wide, broad level of interest – like poverty. Everyone is affected by at some level. And most of us can do a little something about it or ease the suffering of those living in poverty – if we choose to.

I’d encourage you to write a blog post about poverty today or to write about a non-niche topic on your blog sometime soon. You might even gain new business or new readers just by taking a small risk.

Business Blogging The Multi-Niche Way

Online marketing is about finding a niche and building on it. You could say harping on it. Blog Content Provider has been showing businesses how to capitalize on niches for over two years now. As many online marketers are talking about the increasing difficulty of marketing online, we’re talking about how increasingly easy it is becoming. It is easy – if you know how.

The problem with most companies is they don’t know how. Company after company come to us to start a blog only to find out that there is a power play between the management and the marketing department. The fact is, most company marketing departments are not successful at marketing their company’s website online. They may be great at traditional marketing, but online marketing isn’t traditional marketing.

Off line you can integrate all of your marketing efforts seamlessly under one department. Online, it is better to segregate your efforts into niches. A television campaign that highlights the benefits of doing business with your company can work wonders, but you are better off online targeting each division of your company to the target market that is interested in that doing business with that niche. If you market your company this way then you could end up with 50 or 100 blogs in addition to 50 or 100 separate websites – one for each division of your company. That OK. You’ll be much more effective that way.

You don’t have to set up all 50 of your websites and blogs in one day. Start with one. When you see the results you’ll be amazed and you’ll share your success story with other department heads. We know. We’ve seen it many times. I’m sure we’ll see it again.

Do You Read Other Blogs In Your Niche?

Do you read other blogs within your niche? You should. Here are 10 reasons why you should read other blogs within your niche:

1. Ideas for content – You don’t have to steal someone else’s content to benefit from it. In fact, reading other blogs within your niche will show you what your competitors are doing and help you to come up with ideas for your own blog.
2. Keep up with the competition – Your competition is doing things that you should be doing. And likely doing things you shouldn’t. By reading other blogs within your niche you can gauge what works and what doesn’t.
3. Get a better understanding of your customers – Since your customers and potential customers are reading those blogs and commenting on them, you can get a better understanding of their needs by reading their comments.
4. You can tap into their traffic – By reading other blogs within your niche and commenting on them, you can drive some of the traffic on those blogs to your blog and website.
5. Better optimization of your own blog – When you see something that a competitor is doing right, you can implement that into your own blog optimization strategy.
6. Keep up with industry developments – Let’s face it. Your competitors know people that you don’t. While you might think you are well connected, sometimes you can learn about changes in your industry from your competition because they will write about it on their blogs.
7. Reputation management – Are your competitors talking about you? If you don’t read their blogs then you’ll never know.
8. Know what they’re not talking about – In the same way that reading competitor blogs can give you new ideas about content for your own blog, you can see what your competitors are not doing and beat them to the punch.
9. Networking – Sometimes, your competition can be your best ally. If you have a common interest that has yet to be developed, you can partner to better benefit both of your customers.
10. Join the conversation – There is a conversation going on in your industry about what is important to you, your competitors, and your customers. By monitoring other blogs within your niche, you can be better positioned to join that conversation and to create a solution for problems that are pointed out.

I bet you can come up with reasons of your own for monitoring other blogs within your niche. Why not start today?