This is one of the biggest challenges you will have building a blog, and that is how broad or narrow do you go when writing.
This of course depends on the mission you have set yourself building a blog. If you haven’t thought about what exactly your mission is then you run into difficulty measuring exactly what you are trying to achieve with your blog. It can be quite simple but needs to clear state who you are talking to and why. For example, Dog Lovers with Labradors is an audience.
Once you understand who your audience is you can get a better feel for what type of blog you have and the topic you can settle on. Simon Dickson has his list of types of blogs:
- The ultra-personal – me and my life and I
- The expert - a subject matter expert like Problogger
- The corporate - blogs that are designed to create subject matter experts for companies
- The project noticeboard -a community event or project used to build awareness
- Real Time Magazine – like Engadget, Gigaom and Kiwibloke.
- The list of links – otherwise known as meta blogs, they create lists of other peoples content.
- The not-a-blog blog – static content such as press release sites that omit commentary.
For example here is Neerav Bhatt:
Most articles on the Rambling Thoughts Blog and Road Less Travelled Blog are researched, written and published by Neerav Bhatt along with irregular contributions from guest writers.
- My aim is to inform my readers about topics that they won’t read about elsewhere
- My philosophy is to take the Road Less Travelled and explore niche topics others ignore
- I aim to write 1 or 2 quality articles/week rather than dozens of useless articles echoing other people’s statements about stale and unoriginal news items eg: american celebrities, iphones, gossip etc.
He has a good quality blog that has good traffic and he makes a living off them. He has found a niche and a voice.
How Deep and How Broad?
Daily Blog Tips has a good discussion on this here:
Suppose one blogger has got multiple interests , like Books, Gadgets and Cars. Will he get more readers and traffic when he writes about them in separate blogs, or if he writes about all of them on a single blog?
Basically if you have a wide interest domain you have plenty of people to talk to, if you are too wide you cannot cover the gamut of information. For example, you cannot cover electronics, it is too wide unless you have a team of writers like Engadget. What you can do well is say the Sony Playstation 3 and it’s community.
However I would hasten to add, don’t get hung up on making your mission perfect. Rough out a path and start writing. Your audience will tell you what path to head down, it will come to you over time.
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