Blogging Audiences and Feedback
Wednesday, February 28, 2007Chris Yeh has put together his theory behind blogging. It’s clever. It makes sense when you read it. In short: the more you talk about, the less focused you are, the less readership your site will enjoy. In other words, if you don’t write for a niche you won’t be “successful.”
If you know my site you may say I’m scattered. I write about business, college, technology, websites, productivity, and personal stuff. If you started visiting my site today you’d figure I had no focus and simply talked about whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.
Which is fine.
All these blog experts say “keep focused” and “write for a niche.” These people go start blog networks or niche blogs… about blogging. Well, not many blog networks are successful (as a whole, the separate entities like Engadget and BoingBoing are) and, blogs about blogging only appeal to, you’ve got it, bloggers. It’s these same people that say I’m doing too much with my own website.
Haha, I agree!
But wait a second, are you sure I’m not focused and writing for a niche?
I’m writing for the people who enjoy business, college, technology… get the point? Imagine my readership as a conversion of venn diagrams. Lifehacker has maybe two circles that define their readers: geeks and people interested in productivity. That means they have a huge pool of readers.
Me? I have a bunch of circles overlap. Thus, my writing finds a much more focused, much more niche-like audience than most people.
Sure, it starts to limit the number of people that fit within the overlaps. But, don’t tell me I’m not writing for the right audience. Don’t tell me I’m covering too much. I’m writing for the people that enjoy everything I write about. These are the people I can chat with. These are the folks I can easily befriend. These are the people I want to connect with through writing.
By the same token, I can’t go over to Lifehacker and enjoy everything they write. I can’t go to Problogger and call any of those people like-minded friends. But, the readers at Devin Reams dot com? Wow. They’re the best group of people on the internet I could ever find.