9 Things To Know When Launching A Niche Blog
18. Dec, 2007 
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If you run a blog and you are concerned with its quality, chances are that you become wiser every day. Each and every day you learn new things, you discover better ways of organizing your content, in your wish to offer readers a pleasant and useful experience, hoping to hook them to bookmark your blog. Yet, how often do we forget that our readers don’t have the same experience as we do? We read a lot of blogs, we see them changing, evolving, most of them in the same direction, we got used to see lists of categories, tag clouds or RSS subscription icons, and we understand their meaning instantly.
Do you think you know how your readers behave?
Did you know that more than 300 million babies are born every year only in the US? Do you know what this means for your blog? At least 3 million fresh readers every year. Because most of those children will some day learn how to use the internet. Maybe babies born 10 or 15, or 20 years ago are using the internet today for the first time in their life. If your blog was the first website they found, how well do you think they would be able to navigate through its content?
I have this friend who yesterday saw a website for the third time in her life. The site was one of the blogs I run (which I thought to be perfectly clean, not cluttered, well-organized), and I was asking my friend for feedback. She is supplying all the content for that blog, I’m only functioning as a posting robot for her, because she doesn’t have an internet connection. Yesterday she has seen her blog for the first time.
This is how the front page of the blog looks like (first view and after scrolling down):
Well, the feedback was really striking:
The site appeared to have only one page, I couldn’t find the others. I’m sure they were there somewhere, because you said so, but I wasn’t able to find them. There was no button on the page I’ve seen.
- She didn’t imagine post titles are clickable
- She had no idea what “previous entries” mean, so she didn’t think to click there
- She didn’t click on anything because all she saw was text, and none of the texts were saying “Click here”
- This explains the very low click rate for the AdSense ads that run on single pages (probably not many readers thought to click on some headlines there, so they never saw the single pages)
I’ve never seen something more cluttered in my whole life. Everywhere I looked on the page there were words, so I could hardly focus to read the content because of that. Are you in such a hurry that you have to put everything on the same page?
- She was bothered by the left and right sidebars, because they contained “text” (actually that text were the Recent Posts and Archives on the left, and the Categories and a tag cloud on the right).
I explained what Recent Posts are, and I got the following reply:
Who can be so dumb to put the table of content on the same page with an article? Probably an engineer like you. All books have separate page for the table of content. If people want to see that table, they click on its correspondent button and go there. I want my site to be read like a book, I want to browse through the pages like if it was a real book. On the pages, I want only the content, with no disturbing texts on the edges, no matter how useful you say it is. If you are keen on keeping those sidebars, OK, but please fill them with pictures.
Because her initial brief was that the site should have a header with a photo, I just did it that way. Look what she commented on that:
There is something wrong with the header photo: it looks like a broken TV image. All I saw was a very narrow photo fragment. Did you do that on purpose? I remember I’ve seen the same kind of broken photo on another site. Please replace it with a normal, square picture.
Wow! Again I got the comment that only an engineer like me could chop a photo that way and believe the readers would like to see that on a site. It’s useless to say that I’ve spent about two hours to find those “horrible” pictures for her header (as she wanted photos from Paris, and I’ve never been there, so I had to find some royalty free ones), and to “chop” them in that style.
My point in telling you this story: niche blogs are different
If you are thinking to start a blog in a niche other than blogging, internet marketing or computers, beware at your audience: they see things in a totally different way than you do, so you’d better take a few testing steps before investing lots of work:
- If you want to know how readable your blog is, ask your grandmother to take a look at it.
- If you want to know how appealing your blog layout is, ask a 7 years old child to take a look, while you watch the process.
- If you want to know how to improve your blog, ask your audience for feedback.
- Photos are important. A magazine without photos would be boring. The same way, a site can be boring if the eyes have no support for relaxation. Use pictures. Your readers want them.
- Test, test, test. You have lots of free analytics tools, so you can test every move you make. I’m going now to change my friend’s cooking blog the way she wanted, and then I’ll compare the bounce rates and the number of page views per visitor. If they will improve, then she’s right. If not, we will ask for more feedback and test again.
- Think out of the box. How do your readers use your blog? When do they read it? My friend said that she would take the laptop with her in the kitchen while she would cook following a recipe she found on a website, so the text should be big, to be seen from a distance.
- Don’t be afraid of your readers. They can help you, but you have to ask them for help. Don’t get upset when you get negative feedback. Try to understand the reasons behind that feedback. Many times you’ll discover golden nuggets.
- Don’t bend your ears to everything. Lots of readers mean lots of opinions, and keeping everybody happy is impossible. I’m not going to listen to my friend and remove the Recent Posts and Categories from the front page, because I still think they are in the benefit of her readers. I’ll just move them in the header section, after I replace the header photo with a square one.
- Educate your readers. Newbies are excellent, as they are a source of fresh feedback, but we cannot stay in the Stone Age for ever. Even if your blog is not about blogging, you can still write some articles to let your readers know that what they read is a blog, that they can subscribe to it for free, that they can interact with you and with the other readers, also for free. Teach them how to use your blog. If your content is interesting enough, they will learn.
If you have the curiosity to test your blog with an internet newbie, I’d be very curious if you shared some insights with the rest of us. Thank you in advance, I’m waiting for your comments.
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I’m not one to judge but your friend doesn’t sound like a very good friend. Someone who is entering a new medium should be intelligent enough to understand that any new medium has its established practices and ways of doing things…to berate you for doing something that is already an established practice sounds pretty ignorant.
I understand the point you’re trying to make and it is valid. At the same time, however, It’s impossible to think so far outside the box that we’re actually breaking the established practices of web design and navigation. People who are just now getting on the internet will have to learn some new things no matter what niche they are interested in.
Thanks for the link!
I’m just dumbstruck at your friend’s rather caustic and ungrateful attitude. I can understand that she might be a newbie, but those comments just weren’t nice. It’s tough to build a blog or a site for someone who knows little to nothing about the internet and how sites function. I stopped putting together sites for other people because of the enormous effort it took, and more often than not there was very little gratitude.
My brother has what I’d consider a niche blog. It was designed, by me, with the intent to market his music and to build his editorial writing skills. When he got into blogging he didn’t know very much, other than what he liked. Because he was a good student I managed to mesh what he wanted with good blogging functionality. In a year, his knowledge in blogging has grown, sales increased on his album and his singles, and his writing has attracted just the kind of attention he’s wanted.
The thing we’ve both found important in the development of his blog is feedback. I rather like your thinking about asking your grandmother and a 7 year old for a critique. It may be humourous, but has more merit than one might think. Getting feedback from a diverse group can only serve to help you tighten up your site and teach you better blogging habits.
Great article, Simonne!
When someone says a website should behave like a book, I shudder to think of all the news sites I go to that could behave like newspapers. Yes, a website should be organized, but a book is a static piece that will not change, and a website is constantly changing.
I agree with the other commenters; your friend sounds kinda mean. But you must have a great friendship if you can be that honest with eachother.
Thanks everybody for the comments. I know my friend is extreme and not very flexible, but this case helped me to make a point: try to test your site with people having different background, and different computer usage experience than you do.
Of course I will not make all the changes like she wanted, but I’ll make some, as I’m curious to put them at test. However, I’ll keep the functionality, because as you say, Jason, newbies have to learn the rules.
Hey, Jayne, I didn’t post here what I told her about her computer skills
. You are right, working for such people is hard work, and I’m not doing it, either. This is one of the very few exceptions, and it is not exactly “work”, it is rather helping a friend.
And yes, Ronald, we are talking about a 25 years friendship here, so we can talk like that without getting offended (although I must confess that a few times, during some long travels we did together, I felt like dropping her from the car and leaving her in the middle of nowhere).
There is one more thing tough. If you have an engineering related blog, would you still change the layout of your blog from what it was before? I think not. You can only write about what you know best, and what you know best describes you, and what describes you, makes you, and you made that blog! So leave-it as it is. Your readers will be one of your kind.
If the blog was enginering related, I wouldn’t have changed it. Actually, if it was my blog, I wouldn’t have changed it at all, even if it still was about food. That’s because I would have targeted people who cook AND know how to use computers and internet. However, if we target housewives who have a computer in the house but don’t have too much experience in using it, I would make it a bit more intuitive for them.
Odd that the child birth rate fell so dramatically in 2002. In that year just over 4 million children were born in the US.
A far cry from the 300 million claimed here.
This is very odd, indeed. I suppose there is something wrong with the source of data.
Not sure how reliable this source is, but this one claims about 300,000 new births each day.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060826005652AAwD8pP
Wow! This explains why finding a parking spot becomes harder every day. Thanks for investigating, Ronald.