The concept of niche is important in blogging - love it or hate it, accept it or not, it is there.
A definition of niche
Here is my quick definition of niche:
A niche is a container for ideas that relate to one another within one degree of separation.
The idea of niche blogging is that you stay within one degree of separation from your main topic. For example, this blog is full of my tips and opinions about blogging - if I was to start talking about restaurants and Microsoft Linux without relating them to blogging, I’d be stepping outside the niche. I could go to a second degree of separation as long as I brought the thread of the conversation back to blogging.
Niche as it relates to brand bloggers
I’ve been thinking about this being inside/outside the niche issue and how it relates to brand bloggers - people who have name recognition (I’ve called them “the famous” in the past).
One such is Marc Andreessen. I stopped reading his blog for a couple of weeks owing to Opera Mini doing the decluttering/GTD thing for me, and have just resubscribed. I found it interesting that Marc is now leaning more towards matters financial in amongst the Silicon Valley insider talk - talking about the pain of easy money and self-fulfilling economic prophecies.
Marc is the niche - he can basically write whatever he likes and people will read it. Not that he is a bad writer - he is an engaging story teller - but he could talk about catfood or presidential elections and people would still read whatever he writes, because it is him writing it.
It is said that you do not need a niche to be successful or make money and this is true, but the niche helps, even if it is yourself. I have a theory: that the “one degree of separation from the niche only, or two with a one-degree segue” rule applies even to the famous. If they write it themselves, or even just quote someone else, it is them doing it, and they are staying within their niche. This sounds a little like circular logic, I know - because you can never be more than a degree of separation from yourself.
The implication of this is that if you aren’t famous, you probably need to worry about staying within your niche.
How do you stay within your niche and still find enough to write about?
Good question.
My suggestion is to use reframing - here’s an example from my own blogging life.
I write for On Blogging Australia - the niche definition is “Aussie Bloggers and Aussie Blogs”. As long as I write about this combination of topics, I’m staying within my niche. This has included, to date:
- Australian bloggers like Meg,
- What Australian bloggers write about,
- Australian blog lists,
- Comment conversations with Australians,
- Australian blogging communities,
- Australian oddities, and even
- Reframing from Canberra life.
There are a veritable plethora of ideas. Enough that I can never see myself running out of them. I started at a place (blog AND Australia) and went all over the place with it - and mostly, hopefully, I’ve stayed within the niche.
Can you write a list like that for your blog’s niche? If you could, do you think it would help you with content ideas?
One last word of wisdom
The sanity check for niche bloggers should be this: if an idea for a posting is not within one degree of separation from your blog’s niche, then it probably belongs in a different blog.
I (sort of) think that bloggers who limit themself to a niche end up with nowhere to go after a while.
I’m a personal blogger. My niche is me. It always has been, right from the start. However now, I have found myself branching out into different areas - blogging about blogging, for example. I learned so much from my first year of blogging and it would be selfish of me not to share that. But if I did that every day all day, not only would it drive my readers nuts, it would drive me nuts too.
Your niche is a little better because you are Australian, so you can always talk about yourself and still be within your “niche” but I often wonder why anyone feels the need to limit themselves into one niche?
I know one girl who has over ten different blogs, all about herself. She divides her life into different blogs. It drives me nutty. I would like to just read one blog where she talks about herself, not 10 of them! eek! Clearly she has read somewhere that you must choose a niche and never stray from it, so one for fashion, one for gardening, one for health, one for shoes (and only shoes), one for reviews, one for the internet, one for current news, one for celebrities, one for travel, one for tv shows she blogs about and there’s still more.. It’s like a demtel ad from hell! I won’t be surprised if she creates one for steak knives and dodgy exercise equipment next.
I can barely handle one blog. I’d go postal if I had 8. I’ve given up, and out of her 10 blogs I now read precisely.. none.
If you make your niche you, it makes life easier.
Then anywhere you want to go, your niche can go with you.
Speaking of niches, I have been thinking of inviting niche bloggers to jump out of their niche for a day and into mine instead. Would you like to be the first? Talk about life in the country, or yourself, or any topic you like
It may turn into a weekly feature if I can wrangle it. Just shoot me an email if yes. 
Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org/
Hi Snoskred,
thank you for your comment.
Right or wrong, a few months back I made a decision to explore the idea of blogging and take it as far as I could. I studied a lot of different bloggers and thought about my favourite ones. I read a wide range of blogs and some of them are definitely person-is-the-niche ones. Some aren’t - they are very topic-specific. I like both. I have a couple of blogs where I do talk about me, but I tend to only make a habit of posting daily here and On Blogging Australia - this is not through choice, it is because work is extremely busy at the moment.
I will email you about the Life In The Country posting idea - I have an alternative to propose
Best regards, Andrew