My Habari

For the longest time, the only way to compete in blogging as a business was to start a blog and own a niche. The more narrowly focused your niche was, the more likely you could find a way to compete and become a resource for people on that topic, but what ended up happening was that many bloggers began focusing in on niches based on the advertising revenue being spent on them, and quickly bloggers found themselves having higher and higher amounts of competition.

One blog network that took niche blogs to the extreme was b5media, a company that I greatly respect. They started hundreds of blogs focusing in on fairly tight niches. They had half a dozen blogs on gaming, a blog for each separate major celebrity, and television series, and they ran like this for a few years before realizing the power of the portal system.

They have since started creating portals for their blogs, bringing together the best content from each niche blog under one brand. An example of this is the recently launched Starked, an entertainment news portal taking the best content from all of their celebrity, television and movie related blogs. This, to me, shows the major shift just starting in the blogosphere, especially where business blogging is concerned.

No one has a single interest. Most people aren't interested in one celebrity, or one television show. They are interested in a variety of people, shows, topics, and have reached a saturation point when it comes to subscribing to RSS feeds, tracking blogs manually, or connecting with writers. People are starting to go back to looking for one stop where they can find all of the information they are looking for in an efficient way from sources they can trust.

If you are starting a new blog today, while it might be more difficult than focusing on a tight niche like a single product or device, you may be better off, instead, focusing on a demographic that you can connect to, and become the number one source of content for.

Become the portal that like-minded people can connect to and trust, and you won't have to ever hear the word niche again. Build a brand, be a trusted source, and connect to people that are as diverse as you are.