When Blogging, It’s Best to be a Big Fish in a Small Pond

It is no secret that blogging can be big business. The rise of user-friendly platforms like Blogger and WordPress has seen an influx of everyday people taking to their keyboards hoping to not only have their voices heard, but who are also looking to bump up their bank balance in the process.

The lure of online money and success is a strong one and while it has acted as an incentive for many, it has also prompted a flood of low quality, carbon-copy, and me-too blogs to hit the World Wide Web.

The pattern essentially goes as follows: someone identifies a popular niche – let’s say dating, for example – and they begin to blog, gather a following and eventually, through ad revenue and affiliate sales, earn some income as a result. Witnessing this success, a swarm of aspiring bloggers will then follow suit, using the first, successful blog as a template, emulating each and every step that was taken that lead to the initial blog’s spike in popularity.

Before you know it, there are thousands of dating blogs online, all looking exactly the same, offering the same information and providing minimal value to the average reader as a result.

What’s my point, you ask?

If you’re looking to carve out a career as a blogger – be it full time or not – sometimes it’s best to be a big fish in a small pond.

All profitable blogs have one vital thing in common: they’re unique. Whether it’s their content, their layout, the comment policy or even the products they recommend, all successful blogs today have something unique and interesting to offer their readers. This is what makes them successful and more often than not, anyone trying to blindly recreate this uniqueness is doomed to fail.

So, what can you do then? Should you toss in your blogging aspirations? Not exactly.

The Internet is saturated with blogs. That’s an inescapable fact. You aren’t going to make a fortune from broadly writing about technology or being a parent or even by doing movie reviews. All of this has been done – to death. Thriving in this enormous sea of blogs comes down to one, fundamental thought process, in my opinion: think smaller.

If you’ve never heard of a micro niche before then I suggest you jump onto Wikipedia because it might just be the piece of terminology that redefines the way you approach blogging and could be the difference between your blog blowing up or going bust. Essentially though, a micro niche is a niche within a niche (don’t worry; I’m not going to go all Inception on you here!)

Let’s use our dating example from earlier. Let’s say you’re really passionate about starting a dating blog, although we already know that the Internet is littered with them. Instead of giving up, let’s look deeper and ‘think smaller’, or more accurately, think in a more refined way. Perhaps you’re a Scientologist; there are a lot less Scientology-based dating blogs online, perhaps you refine your niche and focus on that specific subsection of dating?

The same principal can be applied to practically any type of niche. If you’re a Mom with twins, why start a stock-standard ‘Mom Blog’ when you can launch a site dedicated to all things Twins?

If you’re a movie fan who has a particular taste for the classics, wouldn’t it be better to be the small fish and target all of those people out there, like you, interested in Oscar-winning film reviews?

There is money to be made in blogging – today just as much as ever – you just need to refine your specialty in order to ensure you don’t just drown in a sea of similarity.

Some may argue that thinking smaller is a defeatist mindset, however, in a sea that is absolutely infested with fish – most exactly like you – wouldn’t it be nice (and not to mention, potentially much more profitable,) to simply hop on over to a smaller pond?

Author Bio:- Darcy Stach has carved out a career as a published freelance journalist for almost a decade. A tech aficionado, blog adviser and avid video game enthusiast, Darcy runs her own site dedicated to discussing which is the best pc flight simulator” – a video game genre which has been her favourite since she was a teen. If you’re interested in reading more of her work, you can check the site out.