One of the many ‘absolutes’ that you have constantly thrown at you as a novice blogger, is that you must stick rigidly to a ‘niche’. Don’t go out of this niche, don’t talk about anything else, lest you drive all your readers away, and if you really must talk about other subjects, start another blog.

Like all of the other ‘absolutes’ this one’s largely rubbish too - one of the beauties of blogging is that it’s you writing about things that interest you, and speaking personally, I engage much more with the bloggers style & personality than the focus of their content (although obviously there has to be some interest there). My Thermal blog is, and always will be totally random, and some of my other favourite reads are also as random as a sack of badgers (that also contains other animals): Untwisted Vortex, eJabs, J-Walk blog - no one subject to focus on, but usually interesting, and the stats aren’t bad at all.

However, if you’re going to setup a blog purely for money making, then without a doubt, niche blogs pay the best. Maki* at the Dosh Dosh blog is embarking on a project to launch 7 new blogs in 7 days, with the aim of establishing them in their niche and monetizing them. He will document his efforts, and record the progress of each one, and share what he learns. Obviously for now he cannot share the URLs of the blogs, as Dosh-Doshs large readership would skew the experiment should he link to them, but I hope in time we get to see them, as I’d be interested to see what they look like.

I never set out to make money blogging, and my current feeble attempts are really just a result off finding out that you can. But the idea of setting up some blogs just to make money (obviously) appeals to me, and given the available space & bandwidth my hosting package offers me, it is very tempting to give it a try. The biggest stumbling block though would be furnishing them with content: both finding it and having the time to put it up. Maki has recently stated that he thinks he’ll be able to post once a day, or alternate days, to each of these blogs spending no more than 1 hour a day upon it. I hope he shares the secret of this eventually, because I spend way too much time on my own posts, another 7 blogs would turn this into a 24 hour a day operation for me!

What’s your view on niche blogging?

Do you think it’s necessary for your main (or perhaps only) blog? Is it only relevant to making money? I guess Blog-Op is a niche blog, being focussed on blogging, and sure, I’m not likely to post up any pictures of my holiday or my kids Guinea Pigs. But equally, I don’t break into a cold sweat any time I publish something slightly different, nor do I research every possible keyword within a post before putting it up. Maybe I should? Would kind of take the fun out of it though…

As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you’ve got any tips to share, or if you’ve blogged about this subject already, comment and link away.

*Why Maki? ;-)