Niche blog or authority blog - your choice but choose wisely

So you’ve decided to start blogging, and possibly make money from it (heck, everybody else is doing it!), but you don’t know  yet what type of blog will you have. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t just start a blog and hope for the best. You need to have a vision, a direction with it, so you will know from the startup what types of posts will you add to the blog, and how often should you post. What type of traffic do you want to generate and do you want to make sales-sales-sales or do you want to have great readership, with lots of comments/interraction and make great friends in the process?

Of course, you can start a blog and see where it takes you, nothing wrong with that. But if you are serious about blogging, you should know where you’re heading with it.

There are two mainstream directions when it comes to blogging:

• niche blogging
• authority blogging

and it’s good to know which one you’re going to embrace.

First of all what is a niche blog? A niche blog is one that you use to sell products that you post about, or have advertised on the sidebar, in a particularly researched niche. Strong keyword research is MUST there and each post is very carefully crafted, to attract pottential buyers of the products you’ll advertise.  There is much more to it than that, but if you strip it down to the barebones, that’s about it really. Niche blogging  is to make money out of it. The traffic that goes to a niche blog is usually made up of ‘desperate buyers’, those that are ready to purchase. They just need the ‘push’ from unbiased bloggers and reviewers of various products to click on that BUY button. You’re not interested there in casual readers that do not convert and you’re not there for their entertainment. You want to sell.

An authority blog, on the other hand, is a blog that is thriving through its readers. The more you post and the better your posts are, the more traffic it gets. And the traffic doesn’t necessarily need to convert. But it needs to spread the word about your blog, so it becomes well known, an authority on a particular subject. An authority blog thrives on readership. Of course, sales also will come in through Adsense, or carefully placed ads or links with your affiliate IDs (e.g. Amazon links to the latest music CD, or the latest book or gadget), but the blog is not ment to sell, at least not overtly so. Such a blog will be one that people will come to read the latest on the subject, where you are considered an authority. Maybe the most evident such authority blogger is Problogger. His was the first blog that I read on learning how to blog for profit, how to write better posts, how to drive traffic, and generally how to get the most out of my blog. His blog is one of the oldest and more established around. Since Darren, many other bloggers have found also their voices and started their own authority blogs, but Darren is maybe the first well known blogger when it comes to serious blogging.

Of course, not every blog wants to become a new Problogger. There are some authority blogs out there on very small, restrict niches that have a very narrow line of readership, but very devout followers. It could be on the latest trends in jewelry making, on the latest Amazon gadgets, or anything else for the matter. But it needs to be informative, well written enough to not bore one to death while reading, it could be even controversial (even if you don’t agree with the point of view, you will go back to read to see what others answered to that post), amusing, or anything else that draws you to stick around.

So hopefully by now you have a feeling for how you want your blog to develop, which direction it will go. Does it want to entertain, inform and teach others, or does it want to sell to the so-called ‘desperate buyers’? There is no right or wrong answer, both ways are equally great to follow. Both are quite profitable ways to blog, but there will be different ways to write for and cater to the various readers of your blog.