I’ve read all… most… okay, some of the blogs out there that tell you how to blog. They all The ones I’ve read tell you to start out by finding your niche. I’ve seen several that list seven standard blog categories: How To Make Money, Personal Finance, Health and Fitness, Food, Beauty and Fashion, Lifestyle, Personal Development. Another list adds in Travel, Weddings, and Product Reviews. Of course the Google list of blog categories puts those little lists of seven to ten categories to shame.
There are so many “experts” out there that you’d be moving back and forth like a five year old waiting at the door of a single stall gas station bathroom if you were trying to follow all their directions. But the one thing they all say is, “You have to find your niche.” A niche must be important if that many people can come to a consensus on something in such a divided world. You’d probably have better odds of winning the Power Ball than getting that many people to agree on anything else.
So, obviously picking a niche is important, but what if you can’t decide what that niche is? What if you like ALL the deserts on the desert table, and you can’t just pick one? You try them all, of course, but not NICHES. Nope. Can’t try all the niches. If you can’t narrow the niches, you’re headed for the ditches. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that picking a niche can be a real b**ch.
Trying to discover the niche I wanted to blog in was just as difficult as trying to figure out what new career I could try. In fact, if I could narrow down my interests in a new career, then I probably wouldn’t have time to find a niche in the first place. I had this idea for a blog, but I wasn’t sure what niche it fell into or if it fell in any niche or if it fell in all seven niches.. er ten niches.
It seems to me the most popular niche for blog creators is “How To Make Money,” but the most popular niche for people reading blogs (at least according to Google at the time I wrote this, which probably changed fifteen minutes later) is Music. Yep, sure enough I found another Google list that had Fashion as the top blog category. I saw one list that added Personal Stories to the categories. Heck, I like personal stories. That’s what I write about in my novels. Personal stories, bittersweet tales. Of course, I prefer fiction to non-fiction, so that could be a problem for my blog.
Then I saw it. The Mother of All Categories. Someone listed Multi-Niche Blogs. But… but… I thought the experts said you can’t have multi-niche blogs. SMH. Well, I guess you can. It’s on the internet, so it must be true. BUT then I see what amounts to a Surgeon General’s Warning for Blogs: “Multi-niche blogs are harder to rank in Google and can be confusing to readers.”
Maybe… just maybe… I could have a general niche and then have other niches I explore. Maybe my general niche is Lifestyle Changes and then I throw in some of those things that keep me interested – like travel, hobbies and crafts, writing, and maybe some business. I don’t know. The experts say it won’t work, but like I said before, “I wasn’t all that good at being a pack dog anyway.”
