By Rob Mead

These days when most web site owners hear the word “blog”, their ears perk up and dollar signs appear in their eyes. They believe that this is the most important feature for their site and will draw in thousands of new viewers and subscribers to their web pages on a daily basis no matter what kind of content their blog will contain.

I’d like to set the record straight on this myth. Just because you’ve spent 3 hours a day every day last week on writing your blog on the latest celebrity break-ups, you think that soon you’ll be reaping the rewards of a million click-throughs by next month. Wrong! People with celebrity sites that do rank way up in the search engine ranks, such as PerezHilton.com, have been working and tinkering with their sites for years, developing just the right tone and attitude that they need to draw in their vast audience hungering for juicy gossip. They’ve also been on TV shows and radio shows spreading the word about their gossip sites to media celebrities like Howard Stern and Bill O’Reilly. Unless you have the greatest PR team in the world behind you, this is not going to work for you.

I’m going to go over all the topics you SHOULD NOT be writing about first to show you how to stand out from the crowded fields of topics that most readers are too loyal to break away from, and instead try to help you find a niche that will generate the traffic to your site that you need.

Never focus all of your daily bloggings on the following general categories: Movies- Apple Corp- Google-Celebrity Gossip- Blogging- Internet Marketing-Computer Programming-Sports of all kinds- Politics- New home or business gadgets.

Now I know you’re thinking that those topics are the most popular topics on the internet, so how is it possible that nobody else can jump headfirst into the wild world of the web and be successful like Harry Knowles of “Ain’t it Cool News”? You say to yourself, “I’m just as smart as him, and I have tons of knowledge on the movie industry that people would love to read about!” While it is possible to gain new subscribers when writing about “niche” categories on one of these popular topics, it is impossible to be successful when you are just writing general tips with one of these major categories as your only focus of discussion. Let’s say you have an interest and desire to write about the NFL. That is the most popular sport in America today, but if you take a look around at various sites like NFL.com, Sportsline.com, ESPN.com, they have every damn football story already on their sites and millions of people worldwide have all read these news stories and articles on the topics you were going to write about before you even get out of bed. Now how are you going to compete with that? That’s my point- you can’t.

But if there is a minor football league that you really love and might want to start a blog about, just go to Google and put the name of the league in the search bar. See how many general sites cover that league, and then see how many blog sites cover it. If you see less than 10 sites covering the league of your interest, I would highly recommend that you write everything you can about that specific league with your own personal slant to all the stories you write about, and you will generate thousands of subscribers to your site within 2 months time at the most.

Is it starting to make more sense now? Finding your own niche within one of the most popular subjects on the web is the only way for a newbie with no prior experience on the internet to succeed quickly in this crazy cyber world. I have a content-only web site that focuses on just one aspect of internet development and web marketing. It focuses on how to generate great content to bring more web traffic to anybody’s site regardless of the topic or service you are selling. My site does not generalize about web marketing as a whole, my blog covers breaking news on new ways of finding the perfect content for their sites that will help them to reach a wider viewership, and other ways to generate traffic to niche web sites through content only. I then distill that pertinent new information into a series of articles describing the new info in greater detail to my loyal readers. My subscribers only want to know how that new information relates either to their small business or to their online business. My site is not for every business in America, it’s only for new site owners who have been struggling to get any visitors at all, or for site owners who are desperately trying to quit bleeding red ink, and need all the help they can get from me to stop from going broke. That is a perfect example of writing about one of the most popular categories on the web, internet marketing, but finding that niche in the category that not everybody has saturated the web with.

Another thing you must do to generate a loyal audience to your site is to leverage the assets and abilities you already have as a web owner or freelance writer. If you have a following of readership somewhere else, like an online publication, use that fan base to seek out the topics that your readers really want to know more about. If you happen to be a web programmer, use your knowledge of computers to develop new ways of marketing to a niche audience, such as computer programmers who also work with building development tools for the next generation of consoles like XBOX 360 or the Playstation 3. If you really know a topic and are very compelled to write about it, by all means start doing it now! That is the first key to success: desire and motivation.

Let’s examine the most common mistake that newbies are guilty of: being too cheap with their blog site or web site design. If a visitor goes to your site seeking information on what viral marketing can do for his web site, your site must look very professional, or that visitor will get turned off by your web design and go elsewhere for the info. But wait! You say “I have great information on my blog about that very topic! I thought that content was king and that having great content is what will drive new subscribers to my site.” For the most part that is correct. Content is king and will always be king, no matter what new technology brings us in the future. But when people see an unprofessional web site, no content on the face of the earth will keep that visitor glued to your site.

There are so many well-designed web sites that deal with the vast subject matter of web marketing and different sub-genres within that realm, that you don’t stand a chance in hell of gaining a big subscriber base with a crappy web design. You have to make sure that the color scheme is easy on the eyes, that the pop-up ads don’t slow down your loading time, and definitely make sure every new visitor can navigate your entire site easily and with no confusion whatsoever.

Hopefully, this will help you formulate a better plan so that you will have no trouble finding that perfect niche category for your successful blogging endeavors. Good luck!

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