Niche or general blogs? Which one is better?

Many new bloggers who are thinking of creating blogs would wonder if they should focus on niche or general topics.  Majority of the experts would advocate sticking to a niche topic. However, what if you’re like me- that so many things in life interest you and you wanna talk about it. Does it mean that for every topic you love, you need to start new niche blogs on them?

After reading about many opinions on the topic, I find Leo Babauta of Zen Habits gave the best advice in his post, Shattering the Myth of Blog Niches: How to Grow a Huge Readership.   He said that it is important to differentiate ourselves from others if we want to grow our blog instead of focusing on niche blogs.  I am glad I found this post before I started to seriously doubt myself if I have been on the wrong track.

This blog has always been a labor of love- a number of writings are jottings straight from my heart. There are so many areas in life that intruged me that inspire me to write about them.  From my traffic reports, I know that readers may come to my blog looking for how to buy bus tickets but stayed around to read the post on taking a paycut to have life of inner quality.

If you are like me, and think about starting your own individual niche sites- just because majority of people say that it’s the best, you would need to consider the following:

• you have to develop your traffic and readership of each niche blog from scratch. So if you have 10 blogs, you need to work to built traffic but getting the world out there to know about your blogs. It is 10x the time you have to invest in
• if your niche is very focused, you may find yourself running out of things to write about. Or that your interest change and you find it a hassle to constantly have to update yourself on the topic.
• unless you are full time into blogging, finding time and inspiration to update 10 blogs will eventually led to a burnout. What started as a passion may eventually turn into a chore.  Because readers tend to expect that blogs to be frequently updated.

Within these past few months, I’ve started a number of new blogs- they may not be exactly niche blogs but they do focus more specifically on a particular topic such creativity, travelling to Thailand, Angkor Wat, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.  Because of the limited hours in a day and the fact that I have a full time job, I find it is not easy to update all at once.  Even if  you hold a full time job, if all your time is spent worrying about content for each of your blogs, then  soon, you would get tired of blogging.  Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you do not end up spreading yourself too thin.

Any site or blog would take time to ‘mature’.  Therefore, do not expect to see overnight traffic increase. There is a particular website (not a blog) that I’ve built for someone last year. The sole purpose of the website is to provide information about a place.  Last month, I went in to add in some additional information. A day or two later, I noticed from the traffic report that the search engine was bringing in organic traffic to the site for visitors who were searching for the kind of information that I’ve updated. Out of curiosity, I googled the keywords that the visitors had typed (they were not really a specific) and I was surprised to find that the website appeared in first and second page of the Google search engine for that keyword.

It is difficult to find a newbie site appearing on the first page of Google almost immediately unless:

• the search word closely resembles the domain name
• some or a lot of black-hat strategy is used- in the long run, it is not viable for long term traffic growth.

I’ve noticed the fact that getting the high ranking in Google takes time.  It takes patience and you have to be driven by something more than monetary gains in order to be still coming up with fresh and original content day in and day out.

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