Blog readerships: How niche is too niche?
The more time you spend researching blogs to get ideas for your own — whether it’s personal, for your business, or for a business you’re writing about — the more you’ll understand that there’s nothing too bizarre or recherché to publish on the web.
At least for a few months or a year.
Many blogs don’t last much longer than that. And it’s not only a question of content, voice, or commitment.
Kind of like Shark Tank, the American reality TV show where fledgling entrepreneurs stand on stage pitching their (mostly doomed) business ideas to a group of self-interested investors who may or may not decide to help them.
Ideas like Squirrel Boss, an “interactive squirrel-proof bird feeder,” BedRyder, a car seat for the back of your pick-up truck, or Throx, Edwin Heaven’s disastrous “thriple” sock set.
You get the idea.
It was Steve Jobs who said it was the marketer’s job to tell consumers what they wanted. On Shark Tank, entrepreneurs have to prove there are actually consumers for the ideas they’re pitching.
Blog success, like a Shark Tank pitch, rarely relies on a visionary idea that gives readers something they didn’t know they needed. It’s more about identifying your readers and reaching them.
The good news is you don’t have to reinvent the blog to have a successful one. But you do need to spend a little time figuring out how not to become the blogging equivalent of Edwin Heaven.
You need to find your market.
Finding your market
Finding the sweet spot between the overly niche and the “been-there-done-that” isn’t necessarily intuitive. But looking at some successful (and less successful) blogs will give you a better idea of what people are actually willing to read.
When we say successful, understand a devoted and active readership, not necessarily registration in the Library of Congress and hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly advertising and donation revenue like Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.
If you’re not sure how big a readership your favorite blog has, you can also try the Ryan Gosling in Disneyland with Cats Test (patent pending).
Yes, there was actually a blog devoted to Ryan Gosling in Disneyland with cats. (It’s gone now, alas, but will thankfully live here until Tumblr empties its cache.) The cats are all photoshopped. Ryan Gosling, a popular victim of memes, is also photoshopped. That’s about all there is to know about RGIDWC.
I probably don’t have to tell you this, but Ryan Gosling in Disneyland with Cats never reached the donations level where someone was sitting down with a cup of coffee to have a good think about who their ideal visitors were and what kind of voice they wanted to project and how they might eventually monetize the concept.
To put this in Shark Tank terms, Ryan Gosling in Disneyland with Cats is somewhere in between Squirrel Boss and Throx.
Is there a correlation between bad ideas and failed blogs?
I’d imagine there is.
Does this mean that Ryan Gosling in Disneyland with Cats was a bad idea?
Not necessarily. It’s just a blog that wasn’t sustainable.
Unlike Lego Academics, a long-lived Twitter account that uses Lego constructions and captions to vent the everyday frustrations of academics, the market for photoshopped images of Ryan Gosling and cats in Disneyland was too niche. I’d also throw out this: the variations of Ryan Gosling hanging out with felines in Disneyland probably aren’t enough to fuel a blog over time.
The take-away
To pen a sustainable blog, you need not only readers, but enough content to maintain interest for the long haul.
This means that you have to be able to develop your content over a period of time in a way that is both engaging and informative for your readers and — please don’t discount this — for yourself. It’s possible, after all, that the creator of RGIDWC just got bored and the blog self-imploded through sheer inertia.
Ok, you’re saying, I’m not going to make a blog with Ryan Gosling and cats. But I’m not a frustrated academic either. How do I know if my idea is sustainable?
I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but you don’t know. No one ever does.
But if you find a concept that means something to you and you have the dedication to develop it, if you figure out who you are and who your audience is — if you do all that and you keep at it because you’re determined to be heard, then you will probably have a sustainable blog.
