How to Add a Sub-Niche Onto Your Blog

Have you ever sat around and thought about ways to help your blog community grow? Of course you have. Everyone has. There are literally hundreds of options just sitting at your fingertips to help you grow your blogging community. You could choose to start tossing in some more local news and random facts. You could decide to start broadening the field of topics you’re blogging about. Or you could make the decision to add a sub-niche onto your blog.

Not All Blog Posts are Created Equal

When you’re blogging for the fun of it rather than as a way to attract potential leads to your business you don’t have to worry about what you’re blogging about. It doesn’t matter! You’re only there to have a good time. When you start blogging for a particular niche (i.e. your potential clientele) the rules change. The possibilities narrow. Suddenly you find yourself honing in on current events and updates in your industry. You begin using your own professional experience to put a new spin on what might otherwise be a very boring enterprise. And before you know it you’ve developed a niche blog

Niche blogs deal with a particular industry, but your niche blog for your business probably still has plenty of wriggle room. The catch is, you’re never going to receive the same volume of responses and enthusiasm for every blog post you write. (Unless you do, in which case you’re just that good and really don’t need to be reading this!) Chances are, you’re going to have some blog posts that receive a huge amount of attention while others go by unnoticed.

It’s a cold, cruel world like that

Choosing a Sub-Niche

Those blog posts that generate huge numbers of responses are the ones you want to focus on when you’re identifying a sub-niche for your blog. Sub-niches are when you take your niche and narrow it down even farther. The easiest way to do that is to look at the posts you’re already posting and see what’s getting your readers fired up.

The easiest way to explain this is to use an example, so bear with me. Let’s say you’re a history nut. You absolutely love history, so you decide to go into business selling historical relics. You launch a blog called “A Step in Time: Greatest Moments in World History” in which you regularly blog about the greatest events in world history and the artifacts they left behind. While you’re blogging you happen to notice that every time you do a post on the Civil War you get a tremendous number of responses, especially from your readers south of the Mason Dixon line (where everyone knows the war’s not really over, it’s just taking a breather for a little sweet tea).

This is the perfect opportunity to create a sub-niche. You could choose to target the Civil War as the topic of the blogs you write. Since you don’t want to risk isolating your other readers, however, this is the perfect opportunity to consider capitalizing on the parallel blog strategy. By using the parallel blog strategy and launching a second blog dealing solely with the Civil War you can expand your reading audience to include Civil War buffs who couldn’t care less about the habits of the Mayan civilization. This gives you twice the readers for twice the fun!