Aussie photographer Pete Walsh has taken niche blogging to a whole new level and has started a blog on one of the narrowest topics that I’ve seen a blogger tackle. His topic – the Epson Stylus Pro 4800 printer. Peter upgraded his printer to this new model and is documenting his experience with it.
This is niche blogging to the extreme and an interesting project – over time he’ll develop the most comprehensive information going around on this printer. I’m not sure how well it’ll go at generating an income through his ads but I’m sure it’ll be useful for anyone out there considering buying this printer.
My blog on “neurotheology” (the relationship between the brian and religion) has got to be way up there niche-wise.
I’m planning to start a gadget blog here in western europe (germany). I’m asking myself if it would be better to start just ONE blog like gawker or engadget or if it would be better to start several niche-blogs on the various topics (MP3-Player, Notebooks, PDAs, Cellphones…). Havent decided yet, but both has advantages and disadvantages. Advantage of just one blog would be a much bigger readership and probably lpyal readers that come back without searchengines. Second Point would be, that to become an authority page for google, your site has to be very, very big.
Advantage of niche blogs would be, that they are more specific and therefore rank higher in searchengines and seem more competent to the reader.
What would you do?
Thanks for your great work here at problogger, Darren.
bizarre!
Chris, these are the questions that we all are asking I guess – good ones.
My approach has been to break down my blogs into smaller niches. I think that competing with the big mega gadget blogs would be difficult to do unless you have a profile or huge PR effort to kick it off. However some of the niches are a little more accessible. Having said that – speaking from experience – the niches are being pretty highly contested also.
Yo’re rigth, that for YOU competing against the mage gadget blogs is very hard. but here in germany the situation is different – there is NO mega gadget blog yet. i could (dreaming :) become the gadget mega blog.
Still dont know what to do.
What would you do Darren, if there wouldnt be gawker and engadget?
Whould you split it in parts?
here’s an idea…
do both.
have a series of smaller blogs on niches and then do a mega one that uses the information you find in your smaller ones on a larger scale. They could link to each other for cross promotion.
Just be careful you dont just publish the same content twice all the time as you’ll get in trouble for duplicate content.
on and Chris – make sure they all link to my gadget blogs ;-)
Had that in mind, too. The problem is, that i’m going to post only very short posts (100-200 words) and so it is difficult, if i have sch a post for example on my PDA-Blog to make another post of it in my mega-blog (besides the fact, that it is twice as much work).
Sorry for my bad english and thanks for your time.
I’ve toyed with this idea and I’m thinking I’ll probably do something similar with my specific mp3 player. Some of my abandoned websites make a steady income because their content is still relevant.
I’m wondering if I could dedicated a single day or two of mass-posting on a extremely specific topic and then cut off the blog. Do this once a week or every two weeks on a very refined topic and you could have 50 $1/day websites in a year. It might be the best choice for some younger folks who can’t commit to keeping up a blog for long because they don’t know where they’ll be in a few months (like my post-college self).
Yes the idea of geographical-niche blogs is a good one. There’s a lot of scope for non-English and non-US blogs.
This is niche compared to the mega blogs out there that talk about everything under the sun, however, NONE of them EVER go in depth into a topic.
As a professional photographer, I know firsthand how intricate and delicate the printing process. From choosing inks, to papers, to calibration to all the other misc things that go on, this will be a HUGE blog.
This will be a blog that have no problems coming up with something to talk about, there are a lot of serious photographers using this printer and this blog can be a great clearing house for not only information, but ad and product sales.
I think we need more niche topics on products since the mega blogs can’t seem to cater to that part of the blogsphere.
Thank you for the mention Darren. I was in the fortunate position of having probably one of the first 4800’s in the world, outside of beta developers, so it made sense to blog – too good an opportunity for traffic and a little extra cash – plus I love this stuff!
The traffic is currenlty flowing in at a good rate, no doubt that will die down in the next day or two as more people get the printer, and detailed technical reviews appear online, and the general hysteria around it subsides.
I’m a little disappointed in the adverts adsense is generally showing – not really a fault of adsense in this case I think, it’s showing all it has, which often is adverts for the old series of pro printers or consumer printers, which no-one is that interested in reading about within the context of why they visited the blog.
Anyway, just some random thoughts – I mainly dropped in to say thanks. Back to looking through the web stats!
My experiment with this – http://nokia770.com
The site is up for 3 days, so can’t say whether it’s successful or not.
Since it seemed that so few wanted to ever discuss my chosen topic, I felt it was a safe niche blog to start :) Many visit, but few care to comment. But that’s ok, so long as they walk away with the message intended.
I think that my BlackBerry blog is pretty niche but how do I go about letting people know that it exists?
I think niche blogs are great, as long as the content is fresh.
[…] * Extreme Niche Blogging […]