Targeting Your Audience | Finding Your Niche | blog post #2

Now It's Time To Decide What Audience You're Going To Reach: Let's Go Niche Hunting 

You'll need a niche for your blog to target. To be successful in anything you need to be a Specialist and not a generalist. A specialist is seen as an expert and a generalist does a little of everything.


If you try to reach everyone with your blogs message you'll end up reaching none.

Some can be successful as a generalist like Walmart but not many. Being a generalist for blogging would be choosing a broad term like weight loss. That market is also crowded.




To narrow it downs lets use Google search. When we put in weight loss and hit search then scroll down to the bottom of the page we see the also try listing...




Any of these search terms are less competitive such as Momma june weight loss pictures or weight loss tips.
Another way I search is by putting in "How To" in the prefix... How to Loose Weight!

Here's A List of problem solving niches to give you some ideas:

 Acne

Back pain relief

Care and cures for sick pets

Criminal and civil charges

Debt consolidation

Depression

Divorce

Divorce consultation

Doctors, Therapists, or anyone else afraid of failing exams (or already failed)

Funerals

Gamblers in debt

General social anxiety

Get clean soon for drug test

Get rid of insects (mostly termites)

Get rid of your pet’s flies

Guys who suck approaching/talking to women

Halitosis aka bad breath

Headache relief

How to get a good sleep (finally)

How to sell your house

Ill people that doesn’t have much time looking for alternative

Internet products for different languages, particularly Spanish

In need of a good lawyer

Job/career change/CV/Resume

Meals for pregnancy

Medical bills

Men who can’t win women (at all)

New parents who don’t know how to stop their baby crying

Obesity aka Lose Weight

Online trades aka Forex

Parents that needs legal help for their children

People in need for advance/fast cash

People looking for business loans

People want to get rich quick

People wanting to get rid of birthmarks

People who are sick and can’t get better no matter what they do

People who ran out of business/about to go out of business

Problems with surgery/complications

Quit smoking

Quit using some drug/pills

Relief/manage stress

Salespeople that are afraid to do cold calls

Save relationship/get your ex back

Students who need money

Toothache relief

Uncontrollable or excessive sweating

What to know before entering marriage (for girls and boys – separated)

Women that need to get slim and lose wight before holidays

Women trying to find out if their husbands are cheating on them

Women who can’t get pregnant

Women with lots of body hair

These search terms also make excellent blog post topics.  Just make sure you keep it niche specific...don't write one post about acne under the Health niche and another post on Divorce. Which brings me to another subject:

How Long Should A Blog Be

When we get into examining the Top 5 successful blog sites I've identified you'll notice one most common thread...They have lots of content.

At one time you could drop a few hundred words of text and you could rank near the top. The 50 or so sites we'll look at are all long blog post over a specific period of time.

Jim and Rick from income school says it takes Google 6 or so months after you have completed your blog articles before it starts to grow. Somewhat like planting a seed in a garden.

They don't use any back linking  to rank their blogs and after about six months Google starts sending them traffic.

That doesn't mean that they don't end up without any backlinks, they acquire them naturally, other sites naturally finding them and linking to them.


  

Alex and Lauren on the other hand uses Pinterest as a traffic source and seems to grow their blog efforts at a faster pace. Jim and Rick suggest to use Pinterest if your topic fits into Pinterest's pin sharing activity.

The people on Pinterest are about 90 percent women and share a commonality for recipes, hand made items and fashion. Doesn't mean they won't pin share other topics but that may be the main interest.

According to the experts I've researched a successful blog should contain 30-45 well written articles with a word count of 3,000 to 7,000 words. The longer the better.

The reason is that Google wants to deliver the best content information to the people searching on the internet. Don't let that large set of numbers scare you off like it did me in the beginning.

Map out for yourself a 45 to 60 day plan for writing an hour every day until your project is complete.

After that your good to go and you can let Google find you after 3-6 months or you can experiment with sending traffic with Pinterest.

Now once you have a niche picked out, here's where you'll need a domain name and hosting and I've got two of the best to suggest for you.

Your Going To Need A Domain Name And A Hosting Company...Lets Go