Find Your Niche

It looks like I fell out of the NaBloPoMo rhythm while I was away on retreat, because Friday was a marathon day and Saturday was hard getting back to the real world after three days of inner work.

But maybe that time away from my blog was a good thing, as I had some time to think about my goals and what I want to do with my blogs. I definitely appreciate the comments encouraging me to include other topics in this primarily mom/parenting/kid themed blog, but this seems to run contrary to the goal of having an income producing blog.

Niche blogs seem to be the best income producers for several reasons:

-the audience knows what to expect, and knows that they will find something of interest every day or so, and thus they will become a loyal audience

-advertisers like solid demographics; if they are selling diapers, they need an audience with young kids, not an audience that may or may not have kids depending on which day the post falls on

-your traffic will grow as your blog becomes more keyword rich and therefore more available to search engines

If you are also considering a money-producing blog, here are the steps in order for creating your blog:

-investigate keywords associated with your proposed niche

-check traffic for the keywords to make sure people are actually searching for your terms

-consider a blog name that includes your keywords

-write keyword rich posts

-name your categories with keywords

-include monetization strategies (AdSense, Text Link Ads, etc)

-offer affiliate products associated with your niche

-network with others to get the word out about your blog

-use a pinging service (I use Pingoat) to submit your blog posts

Maki at DoshDosh has written an excellent series of Niche Blogging Tutorials that are required reading for anyone truly interested in niche blogging.

When coming up with what to call the niche for this blog, obviously Russian Mafia Babe is not a particularly popular niche name. But I named the blog prior to the niche search, and I like the name so I'm keeping it. Mom Blog didn't even return one search. But Parenting hits a jackpot, and so does Creative Writing. Work At Home Mom also returns some results.

So, I will keep the theme of this blog as parenting/mom focused, to include creative writing, non-fiction stories, and tech tips for mom (and dad) bloggers. The astronomy and shamanism topics will be posted to Stellar Shaman (good thing blogs are free!) from now on. And of course I also operate Simply Grant Writing and LockBoxDeals-Blog.