Should You Stick to a Single Blogging Niche?

Every so often I see bloggers expressing some apprehension about stepping out of their blogging niche, so I thought it was worth chatting about.

The business-focused blogs

If the main purpose is to make money, niche matters. According to blogging guru Brandon Gaille, the blogging niches that make the most money are (in descending order) personal finance, marketing, food, lifestyle, mommy, and travel. If you want to make money, these niches are good picks. I must admit, though, I still don’t entirely understand what a lifestyle blog is.

However, most of us in the blogging world have other blogging priorities that outweigh any monetary considerations.

Semi-business blog

I’d consider my blog to fall into this loose category that I’ve basically made up. I’m trying to make a bit of money on the side with my blog, but that’s not even close to being the primary purpose. Mental health is obviously my niche, and having the majority of my content within the niche has made it easy to build up strong internal linking on my site. I’ve gotten to the point where my mental health content tends to do pretty well in search engine results.

Mental health is what I know and what I’m interested in, but I have no desire to be crammed into a box, so I also wrote about other things that interest me, like blogging. It’s interesting, sometimes my out-of-niche posts will do way better than my mental health posts typically do. I see it as confirmation that diversity is a good thing.

Blogging for fun

The world is your oyster. You can write about whatever you want. Some people prefer to have separate blogs for separate topics, but that’s totally your call.

Not every post you publish has to appeal to all of your readers. Several bloggers I follow do some short fiction posts. That’s not really my thing, so I often skip those, but that doesn’t make me any less interested in following those bloggers.

Some people will adapt what they’re publishing to match what readers appear to be interested in. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not something you have to do, and not an approach I’ve used with my own blog. If you want to do a Turtle Tuesday series and it only gets 5 viewers on average, you keep turtling away. Embracing your turtle is likely more important than losing a viewer or two.

And if you’re concerned that your turtles don’t fit in with your poetry blog, turtle it up anyway. If your turtles turn out to be a dead end, no harm, no foul.

Release the shoulds

If you’re starting to get stressed because the should monster is telling you how to run your blog, that’s a good sign that it’s time to start ignoring it. Your blog is your space to do your own thing with. So tell the should monster to take a hike, and then have a nice little snuggle with your turtle (or turtle-tastic substitute).

Do you have a blogging niche you try to stay in? How comfortable do you feel stepping out of it?