Common sense states that if you’re new to blogging, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to gain an audience if you pick a field that’s not oversaturated with high profile bloggers and thousands of new bloggers writing about the same subject.
If you’re intent on entering such a field anyway (which is great), one easy way to differentiate yourself is to go niche and write about a narrow subject or go stylized and have a unique form of content delivery. Take SEO, for example. Unlike many of the big SEO dogs I think it can be easy to get an audience in a saturated field with a lot of hard work and creativity. The oversaturated fields already have an established blog reader base and a “culture of blogging” (love that term), but that’s not what this article is about.
Basically the idea is this: as the blogging culture of a specific industry matures, thousands (maybe millions) of new bloggers rush to start blogging about the same subject. As the new bloggers are faced with limited success due to increased competition, they start failing to update their blogs and market them aggressively. At the same time this happens, the top bloggers gradually shift their focus to a more and more sophisticated (or experienced) audience, and their regular reader rate increases to thousands of daily / weekly readers.
These two trends continue until the most popular blogs are writing to an entirely different audience then when they started (for many industries, they become either a flurry of news sites or DIY sites with longer, in-depth posts than when they originally began, when they might have been more of an overview or summary blog). This happens at the same time new bloggers are saturating the marketplace with parroted posts from the top blogs.
At this time, a HUGE opportunity is available and a market gap exists that many website owners / bloggers can’t see. It lies in a new style of blog that is writing to a less technical audience who is interested in the subject, not in a DIY, a huge news site or in the long, drawn-out articles the top dogs are pumping out. The largest audience group in almost any field is not the geeks or peers in the same industry, but more of the average demographic of target customer / consumer of what the industry produces. With internet marketing that would be small to midsize business owners, professionals, and their employees (not my fellow SEO geeks or early technology adapters).
If a new blog is launched that can effectively write to the largest audience level and breath new life into the basic concepts / ideas of a field without overloading the readers with too much news or in-depth coverage, they’ll see success.
If you can see where the gap I mentioned is and then keep your blog updated regularly, perhaps introducing something new entirely like video or audio, you should be able to gain a wide audience even in an oversaturated field. In my upcoming posts I’ll try to point out some specific examples to take a look at and dissect.
Technorati
