A Snafu In Niche Blog Monetization

As some of you may know, the iBlogaholic team also designs custom niche blogs via our sister site, TotalTreasureChest.com. One common question we get from potential clients is how to best monetize a niche blog. They all want a basic plan – something to download that will give them all the answers they seek right away. Unfortunately, if you want your blog to be successful, a little more research and planning is going to be required.

Niche blogging, for those who don’t know, is blogging about a specific topic. For example the topic ‘cats’ is a very broad niche. Your blog most likely is going to be buried 300 pages deep in the search engines without some major $$ spent building it up. Building your blog around ‘cat food’, you are now narrowing down your niche and targeting a much more specific audience, that is more likely to find what they are looking for on your site. An even better choice would be to micro-niche your blog further into something such as ‘organic cat food’. Now you have a very specific target audience and can map out a solid marketing and monetization plan.

Gone are the days of building a blog, throwing up a ton of general content, smacking up some adsense ads, and then waiting for your Google cheque. Each blog needs to have its’ own marketing and monetization plan. Too many new bloggers online are looking for an “exact step-by-step process”, but, if you are wanting your efforts to be a success, this crucial stage of your blog creation should not come from a simply “how to” plan.

When deciding on how to monetize your niche, consider not only the niche itself, but your target audience. What are the demographics, age group, and potential disposable income of your market? Is this audience likely to pull out a credit card or are they “tire clickers”? Are they likely to be old-school or new-school? All these factors, and more, determine how you should start planning.

Here is a great example of someone, unfortunately, not planning well…

Two of my children play a popular online role playing game called Runescape. They regularily ask either Jeremy or I to help them google a ‘how to’ on a specific task they need to complete. In doing this, we came across someone with a great blog of tips, offering a newsletter for player advice. We signed up. Sadly, this blog owner had not planned his monetization very well.

His blog content is great – lots of tips, and the boys almost always find the info they are looking for. His newsletter on the other hand is a different story. Every 2 days we receive a hard sell email prompting us to buy his Runescape guide. We’ve politely read through the emails hoping for a good tip, and have always ended up clicking the delete button.

It is a great looking ebook; super graphics, well done sales page, and a decent price point. Aesthetically it was perfect and normally would have sold well. So why did he send an email to his list last week begging people to reply and tell him why no one was buying? Simple – he forgot his target audience.

Runescape primarily is played by 10-14 year olds. Granted there are teenagers and adults as well, but the large majority of its players are young. This is an audience that does not have access to a credit card, without parent approval. Considering mom and dad have already forked over $$ for a monthly membership, they are unlikly in these hard times to be paying for a game instruction manual.

Kids are your “tire clickers”. They surf, find and move on. If they even manage to read through a typically long sales page, they are not likely going to be running to mom to buy it. They want their info and they want it NOW. His efforts would have been much better spent blending contextual ads and/or integrating other popular free trial game platforms into his blog. Instead, everything was geared towards his own guide sales. I feel bad for this fellow, who genuinely seems like a great person. Hopefully he will duplicate his ebook efforts on a more accepting crowd.

The moral of this story is to plan from every angle. Our blog owner above did everything right; he had content, was building a list, had created his own product and set it all up beautifully. He simply forgot his niche audience. Don’t let it happen to you…

== Joanne ==