This post is by Lauren of A Typical Atypical
We all know that the world of blogging is a strange and busy place, filled with everything from amateurs to professionals and a million shades of gray in-between. Making your own personal space in this great mêlée of opinions and photographs is a challenging thing, and nowhere more so than the cluttered environment in which lives the fashion blogger.
The literature out there generally reaches a consensus that to build a strong and interested audience you need to have a niche. You need to approach your topic from a new angle or position, have a totally unique concept, or build a peculiar design. You need a specialism, a qualification, and a function. In short, if you blog about life the universe and everything it seems likely that you won’t be heard.
From a pure point of view, thinking about SEO and link building, this is often sadly true. Having a keyword dense website on a particular topic makes you more likely to show up in searches, in much the same way that a highly relevant domain name will do your standing favours. Writing relevant external articles that link into your site or encouraging like-minded people to reference your work just builds on the effect. This strategy is diluted ten fold if your blog, like mine, covers topics ranging from shoes to thrifting to designer, passing cheese and pets in-between.
It seems that the technical evidence supports niches, the downside is that whilst having a unique position and defined speciality can help you, not everyone suits this way of thinking. This forgets that not only are people generally multitaskers with a range of interests, but that blogging isn’t just for other people. Blogging and writing for yourself, as a personal diary or set of rants about the world is your prerogative, and noone can slate you for not having a boring old niche.
That said, people with niches do tend to do very well. Look at lovely blogs like Already Pretty which focuses in on everyone being beautiful, Shoeperwoman which chats all about shoes, and Catwalk Queen which addresses catwalks and celebrity style. All of these have clear niches and do very well off the back of it.
So, how can you develop a niche if you like writing about all sorts of things? Well, if you are passionate about your blog getting noticed this is a sensible thing to try and do, so why not follow some of this advice?
- Write around a general theme – party outfits, work clothes, all about tights… anything goes and there is bound to be people and companies interested in what you say.
- Write about a specific topic – like Facehunter, this could be street fashion, catwalk shows, copying films stars looks.
- If you don’t want to write about one thing, then why not develop an attitude that runs across lots of topics, like magazine sites Bitchbuzz and Domestic Sluttery. This is a great option if you have a style but not a genre.
If none of these suit you, however, then totally focussed writing may not be for you – and there is nothing wrong with that! I, personally, love writing for blogs and sites with a niche, yet could never begin to focus my personal blog enough. But that doesn’t matter, as my blog is my blog and I still manage to keep up traffic levels. Using your initiative and finding alternate ways to get people reading and returning is more important that doing what the blog experts tell you – so go wild, and be free!
It does feel like everything has already been covered though.
Seems to me that this is a lot harder than it seems. Your readership will, in some way, affect your direction. I find that what I want to blog about and what my readers want me to blog about are not always the same. And my posts have branched out based on suggestions by my readers. I started off with a clear idea that I had two ideas and two only: my style, and the style of the people who live around me. Any additional genres I move into are in direct response to requests by my readers. Which I am only too happy to oblige.
.-= Kionon´s last blog ..Alexander McQueen 1969-2010 =-.