Why You Should Write to the Edges of Your Niche
A guest post by Srinivas Rao of The Skool of Life
If you are a new blogger, one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get about how to increase you traffic is “find top blogs in your niche and write guest posts for them.” I want to give you some counter-intuitive advice that I have heard from several A-list bloggers after conducting over 60 interviews: Find top blogs on the edge or outside your niche and write guest posts for them.
The Niches within Your Niche
While there are probably thousands of blogs in whatever niche you write about, there might only be 25-30 that are considered A-list blogs with thousand of subscribers. At some point even if you manage to score several guest posts on some of these blogs, diminishing returns will kick in and you won’t get as many subscribers as you did from previous posts. Talk to people who have written multiple guests posts on Problogger, and you’ll realize this is not the answer to all your blog traffic problems. Sure, it helps, but it’s a small piece of a much bigger picture.
6 Sub-Niches in the Personal Development Niche
For the purposes of exploring this concept I want to use not only a very popular blogging niche, but one that is a perfect example, Personal development blogs. Within the personal development niche there are an endless amount of sub niches that you can write guest posts for.
- Health/Fitness: As anybody who reads my blog knows, I’m an avid surfer. It’s something I write about quite regularly on my blog. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I hadn’t ever written about surfing for a health and fitness blog. I did a google search for top health and fitness blogs and I found one that Leo had actually written about. So, I knew it was quite popular and submitted a post on the health and mental benefits of surfing, which got accepted.
- Personal Finance: I’m not a personal finance genius, but the top personal finance blogs are some of the most popular blogs on the web. Blogs like Get Rich Slowly and I Will teach You to Be Rich have several hundred thousand daily visitors, and guests posts on these blogs can send your traffic through the roof.
- Dating/Relationships: Another area you might not have thought about writing guests post for is the dating/relationship niche. Personal development is largely connected to this niche and the amount of people searching for dating advice online is probably in the millions every single day. Yaro Starak even said that dating/relationships is one of the 3 meganiches of making money online.
- Your Hobbies: Be sure to explore your own interests in a bit more detail. You never know how many popular blogs there are out there that you could guest post for. If you are a musician, find a popular music blog and submit a guest post for it. If you are an artist, find a popular blog about art and write a guest post for it. At this point, I’m convinced there are popular blogs on just about every subject imaginable.
- Productivity/GTD: Productivity is another one of those areas that gets explored quite a bit by personal development bloggers, yet it’s not often that somebody tells you to find a top GTD blog and submit a guest post. Some of these blogs are also the most popular ones on the internet.
How to find the Edges of Your Niche
You might be wondering how you go about finding the edges of your niche. While it might be a bit harder if your niche is extremely narrow, don’t limit yourself. If you write good content and can tie your own experience to the subject of the blog you want to guest post for, then your guest post will be accepted. Let’s say you play guitar and you have a blog about playing guitar. You could actually write a post for a personal development blog about life lessons from playing a guitar, what it takes to learn a musical, instrument, etc, etc. If you want to find the edges of your niche, sit down with a mindmap and start brainstorming all the things that are connected to your subject. Once you figure out what all those are find blogs that tie to those and you’ll have discovered the edges of your niche.
Benefits of Writing Outside Your Niche
New Readers: The most obvious benefit of guest posting in general is the influx of new readers. When you start getting outside of your niche, you’ll reach an even wider audience than you would when posting within your niche. If for example you look at some of the top personal development blogs, it’s often the same people who read, guest post, and comment on all of them. It’s somewhat incestuous. Writing outside the niche allows you to truly attract new readers.
New Relationships: Another thing that writing outside your niche will enable you to do is form new relationships. When I have clients who ask me about how to grow fan pages, audiences, etc, I tell them to consider forming relationships with people who compliment your niche. I have a client who makes Ionic hair straighteners and they give one away for free every single week (search for Bio Ionic on Facebook and you can win). I told them to consider partnering up with mom bloggers, and other bloggers who write about cosmetics. This is just one example. Writing outside your niche will result in some great relationships.
Have you found other ways to reach new readers and audiences outside your niche? Let us know in the comments below.
Srinivas Rao is an avid surfer/personal development blogger at The Skool of Life and editor in chief of Flightster. He’s also the host/co-founder of BlogcastFM, a podcast to help you take your blog to the next level.
30 Responses to “Why You Should Write to the Edges of Your Niche”
Comments
Read below or add a comment...
Leave A Comment...
-
Get updates by email
-
Hi Srinivas. I’ve been learning the truth of this as I travel on the blogging path. I blog in the ‘blogging’ niche, but my first guest post, as well as my first interview, took place on personal development blogs. Our potential for reaching new readers is huge. There are no borders other than the ones we construct.
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 28th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Jean
I totally agree. Running two sites, one which is nothing but interviews and the other personal development I’m kind of amazed at how many different blogs we could write for. Most people never think “I love cats, maybe there’s a cat lover blog that I could write for). I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a huge blog for pet lovers.
[Reply]
Great advice Srini. Too many bloggers don’t venture out of their niche. There are many niches out there and you can always find an angle to talk to their audience.
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 28th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
Absolutely. I think it really is just about finding an angle. I think that you’d be amazed how many blogs you could write for if you did it from the right angle.
[Reply]
Nice post Srini!
I’m new and just starting out so I’m still at that traffic building stage. I read about a month ago that interviewing other bloggers or people in a field related to your blog and then posting the interview is a great way to attract traffic. I was recently lucky enough to interview a popular life and diet coach in my area and I’m just working on the post now.
Even if you cannot get someone that’s already popular (they might be too busy or unavailable) finding someone that’s up and coming could be hitting a goldmine down the road.
Again this is what I have read- has anyone done this? Any tips of advice?
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 28th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
I’m uniquely qualified to speak on this subject in particular. I’ve interviewed over 60 bloggers for BlogcastFM and I would agree that interviewing people is absolutely a phenomenal way to gain traffic. But, I would say traffic is actually one of the smallest benefits of interviewing somebody. More than traffic, interviews enable you to build relationships with people (the key to all your blogging success). WE don’t get huge volume traffic on BlogcastFM yet, but it’s enabled me to build some amazing relationships.
As far as popular people vs up and coming bloggers I have a great story about that. When I first started interviewing people I interviewed a blogger by the name of Kelly Diels. She had 100 RSS subscribers at the time, and not a ton of traffic. That was 6 months ago. Today she regularly contributes to problogger, and makes her living blogging and running her own business. So, don’t underestimate people who seem small now. Everybody who is famous today was once a nobody.
[Reply]
LNicole Reply:
July 28th, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Thank you that was very insightful. I really enjoy meeting and talking to other bloggers like yourself- thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. You’re right about building relationships- there’s so many wonderful people in the blogger world. Hopefully we’ll chat more in the near future. :)
[Reply]
Excellent tip Srini, one that I have followed unconsciously on occasion but will now try to follow more mindfully. I will share that my personal development blog got the greatest spike in visits after I guest posted on a personal finance blog. I tried to extend the benefit by writing a post combining the 2 subjects that was waiting on my blog on the day my PF guest post was published.
I also like the idea of using a mindmap to find new connections. Thanks for all of the tips!
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 29th, 2010 at 1:49 am
Ami,
Definitely. Truthfully I can’t take credit for the advice itself, (just for writing it. It’s something that 2-3 other bloggers had told me when I interviewed them, but I’d never seen anybody write about it anywhere so I thought it might make a useful post and I was lucky enough to have it published here :)
[Reply]
Great advice Srinivas. This reminds me of what Chris Guillebeau said in his 60 second bit for The Influencer Project. His advice was to “avoid incestuous blogging…to increase influence you have to go beyond once circle.”
I loved the advice but wasn’t sure how to go about putting that into practice. Now I know! Thanks!
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 29th, 2010 at 10:21 am
Rob,
I’m glad to help. I think even for myself, one of the things I’m going to do is make a list of all the blogs that that I haven’t yet written a guest post for and see which ones it would make sense to write for and start working on a series of posts for that.
[Reply]
Fab article. I’ve been blogging for over 7 years but have only started looking to expand both readership and writing opportunities for the last couple of months and I’m astounded at all the opportunities around if I stretch myself a little. This is a great way to look at it, and important I suspect not to get too typecast, especially by myself!
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 30th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Wow, 7 years of blogging :) That’s pretty awesome. It’s amazing how one small change in your strategy can make a big difference. I think far too often people create self imposed limitations.
[Reply]
I’ve noticed that some of the most popular blogs I read aren’t very focused at all. They write about two or three unrelated categories of things on the same blog, but they get comments from the same commenters on both types of articles.
One good example of this is Get in the Hot Spot (www.getinthehotspot.com), which is not singularly focused yet very popular. I think people read it with the question “What is she talking about today?” rather than “What can I learn on this topic today?” Both approaches seem to work.
I cover lots of ground, too, although certain topics, like minimalism and blogging, get more attention from readers than some other topics.
Gip
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 30th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Gip.
I know Annabel pretty well and she started blogging at the same time I did almost. I think that you really don’t have to stick to “one” topic. While focus is important, I think what we resonate with is authentic emotional content created by real people.
[Reply]
Gip @ So Much More Life Reply:
July 30th, 2010 at 10:54 am
That’s exactly right. I read Annabel’s blog because she tells a nice story, not because of a niche. If I ever write it, I should have a guest post on her blog soon.
As you would expect, I find that personal improvement blogs have readers who are very supportive. My recent guest post on Arvind Devalia’s blog got me a number of new subscribers and commenters although the amount of traffic, according to Analytics, was very small.
Gip
[Reply]
Srinivas, great advice. While I haven’t done a lot of guest posting – I’ve often wondered about the merits of going outside your niche. I’m glad you wrote about this topic. It’s been very helpful.
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 30th, 2010 at 10:15 am
I actually hadn’t even thought to do this for a while and yesterday I looked at my analytics and it turned out my post on the health and fitness blog was one of my biggest traffic generators. Pretty interesting huh?
[Reply]
Great tip Srinivas. I’ve always written to the edges of my niche. Now can you tell me how to get started on guest posting within my niche? Something must be holding me back!
[Reply]
I love the idea of guest blogging. Major blogs in the personal finance area accept few guest bloggers. I need to take your advice and guest blog on lesser known blogs and blogs outside the field.
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
July 31st, 2010 at 10:20 am
Hey Keith,
One thing you might not have thought of is writing for major brands. Many big brands accept guest bloggers and their blogs literally get millions of hits a day. For example, ING direct the bank has a blog called We the Savers. They accept guest posts from people. One piece of advice I got from Michael Martine from Remarkablogger is that you should consider contributing to maintstream sites like CNN’s ireport, and or even some of the major publications.
[Reply]
I love Dating/Relationships. That’s always a favorite. Thanks for the reminder as I think about the various subjects to include at Yakezie.com.
Best, Sam
The Yakezie
[Reply]
I agree with you. That’s why while I’m a travel blogger, I also write guest posts on career, productivity and personal devt as these stuff are of interest to me.
[Reply]
Hi Srinivas!
I follow this blog from time to time and always get interesting ideas.
Now I will ‘recruit my girlfriend’ to brainstorm ideas to identify topics at the edge or outside my area of work/blogging.
Thanks.
Regards
Andreas
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
August 2nd, 2010 at 10:06 am
Nice :). I guess if I had a girlfriend I’ recruit her as well to brainstorm ideas for my blog. Yeah, there’s really no limit to who you can write for.
[Reply]
This is so right on Srinivas and it gets me fired up to take a whole new approach to guest posting! Seems like a brilliant idea and makes a lot of sense. I recently experienced this when I got a post on eLance on how to outsource. The traffic was huge and all different from my typical personal dev audience. Thanks so much.
Great article,
Scott
[Reply]
Srinivas Rao Reply:
August 2nd, 2010 at 10:07 am
Scott,
I feel you on that. I think that when I posted for that fitness blog, it was an audience I’d never connected with at all so it was really interesting to see the surge of new readers. There is somewhat of an incestuous commenting circle in the lifestyle design/personal development niche. Again, this is a great niche because it lends itself to so many topics, but at the same time we can get tunnel vision about it.
[Reply]
Thank you for yor insight and research. As I start my new blog, I will keep thinking beyond my borders. The possibilities are endless.
[Reply]
nice information about blog writing. Now when i write my new blog I will keep in mind your tips.Thanks for sharing the nice information.
[Reply]