Knowledge and Passion in Blogging

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | Niche Sites with

If you plan on blogging then you should know that you’ll be writing a lot of articles and creating a lot of content. Plan on at least 1-2 hours every day researching and writing about your niche. Needless to say, this means there are two factors that could be VERY important in deciding what niche you want to pursue. These two areas are knowledge of the niche and passion for the niche.

Knowledge will be very important, especially when starting out. It is important for several reasons. First, a good deal of knowledge will let you crank out a lot of content in the beginning which is important for getting pages indexed in the search engines and getting initial visitors to your site. There is a saying the on the internet “content is king” and it is so true. If you get 25 visitors a day with just 50 pages of good content imagine how many visitors you’ll get once your site grows to 500 or even 5000 pages of quality content. You can almost be sure that the more content you have the more visitors (and backlinks) your site will have.

Secondly, knowledge of your niche will help you to be perceived as an expert in your niche. This is so important in building trust with your readers and often can be the element that keeps them coming back. Think of it this way, if I am just starting to learn forex whose blog do you think I will want to read - the guy that makes mistakes in terminology and whose posts are shallow, without concrete examples? Or the guy who obviously knows how to trade forex, whose posts make it clear that they are experienced and knowledgeable about the subject area? I think you chose blog #2, just like I would.

Knowledge is definitely important, but perhaps even more important is passion about your niche. This is what will keep you digging for even more knowledge about the subject, will push you on those days you might not feel like writing and will definitely shine through in your writing. People will be able tell when you are passionate about your subject, they will know that you care.

Passion can also drive you to jump into a subject that you might have no knowledge of and still write with authority. When you care deeply about a subject you’re driven to dig out every bit of information you can get. Writing from this perspective is often successful because as a newcomer you’ll approach the subject area without any preconceptions. So, if you have passion about a subject but no knowledge you can still be quite successful.

Now take out your spreadsheet that we developed in the last lesson - Developing A Keyword List - and fill in the columns for knowledge and passion for each of your 3-5 niche areas. Tomorrow I’ll be talking about niche demand and you won’t want to miss it because this will tell you if your niche(s) are too broad, too narrow or just right.

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