Blogging Tips from Julie and Julia - Find your niche
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What exactly does "find your niche" mean? Well, if you want to emulate Julie, you should try to write in a niche with broad appeal, but find a special interest within it. Okay, that probably sounds like contradictory advice. Be broad, yet fit in a niche with a special interest? You must think I'm crazy, right?
Well, let's look at Julie's blog again. She's a foodie. There are tons of foodies out there; heck, I'm a bit of a foodie myself. Put “food blogs” into Google without quotes around it and you'll get 322 million hits. You are never going to rank for something that broad (though if you do, let me know; I love to be proven wrong).
But Julie chose to focus on French cooking. Specifically, she chose to focus on cooking a la Julia Child. Put “Julia Child blogs” into Google without quotes and you still get more than two million hits, but Julie Powell's “Julie/Julia Project” is the first result the search engine returns. The large niche is food, but Julie found a special interest within it that spoke to her, to which she could write with passion.
So take a close look at your field and consider what aspect of it you love the most. Say you're in real estate, and you really love matching people to the houses that suit their needs the best. You could write about the different kinds of houses buyers need at different stages of their lives.
Not exciting enough? Perhaps you could talk about how those with different interests find different house features important. Maybe one couple needs a room that gets a lot of light because one of them is a crafter, or a growing family needs a big backyard for the dog, and so forth.
Or maybe you're in the business of restoring cars, and you have a soft spot for rebuilding 1960s muscle cars. You could talk about what it takes to do a complete restoration of a 1967 Ford Mustang convertible (a gorgeous car, by the way). Get the picture?
In the next part I'm going to discuss some things you can do to make sure you're on the right track, encourage visitors to stay, and help keep yourself on track to achieving your goals. So be sure to check back tomorrow. Until then, bon appetit!
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