I want to start my own niche blog site. It will be about toast. I am an expert when it comes to toast. I know the best ways to cook it. I know the best toppings to put on it. I know all the different types of toast, and I am the person to see when it comes to picking a new toaster.

My niche site will have no problems gaining interest because just about everybody eats toast, so I will have a huge market. Toast is fortifying too; I have toast most days in the morning when I check my emails and RSS subscriptions. I will have no issues getting advertising for my site, on account of my astounding expertise in the field of toast. All the bread companies will be dying to get advertisements in front of my highly targeted readership. If I want free lance work, I will make good money, because I am an expert in my field, and the value I bring to others will be priceless.

I will coin new terms like “Optimal Toast Heat Window” (OTHW)- which is the period after the toast has popped, in which you must spread the butter if you want it to melt. I am from New Zealand, where most good butter is made, so I will also have opportunities to sell my services to massive multi-million dollar companies like Fonterra, because of my obvious influence within the Toast Niche.

The opportunities are endless. It will be hard work though. I will have to produce a blog article most days. I will have to network religiously with my fellow Toast Niche friends. However, I have no doubt that users on popular social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon will instantly appreciate my work, and vote me to the front page whenever I write an article. Maybe not, maybe I am not an expert after all.

So What Makes Someone a Niche Expert?

Because they say they are? I don’t think so, if that was true then the Blogosphere would be one of the world’s most valuable resources with the amount of “Make Money Online” bloggers.

Because they have a niche site that has a lot of traffic and regular subscribers? Maybe.

Because they were an expert in their niche before they started blogging? Probably.

But what if you aren’t an expert already? Does that mean you can’t be a successful niche blogger? No, but you can strive to be one. Now if only I could find a solid untapped niche to blog about…toast, that’s right!

If you could pick a niche to blog within based purely on the advantages and characteristics within that niche, which would you pick? This article looks at some of the advantages and disadvantages of different blogging niches.

Blogging about Blogging – aka Blogging Tips

Advantages: There are plenty of blogs about blogging out there, so there will be no shortage of other blogs to link to in your posts. It is a constantly evolving niche so there’s always new stuff to write about. Every blogger is potentially your audience because they use what you write about.

Disadvantages: There are plenty of blogs about blogging out there, so it will be difficult to stand out.

Blogging about “Make Money Online”

Advantages: You can be completely soulless and do anything on your blog for money. Paid reviews or copious amounts of internet ads are not a problem here, because after all, your blog is all about making money, and the more money you make the more visitors you get. There’s also no need to think about linking strategy, just try to think of as many ways as you can to get others to link to your site using the anchor text “Make money Online” 

Disadvantages: There are lots of blogs out there about making money online, as it turns out there are millions of people around the world who hate their jobs and want to quit and work from home. However, if you have any aspirations of getting Google hits, John Chow has the search term “make money online” well and truly sorted. Also with all the John Chow copy cat blogs, every man and his dog has placed a claim on the anchor text “make money online”, so you will find it hard getting a good rank on Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

Blogging about Gadgets

Advantages: There is no shortage of affiliate schemes to push products onto your readers should you become successful and want to make money.

Disadvantages: Once again, this is a well established niche with plenty of high authority blogs. It’s going to be hard work making a mark on this niche.

Blogging about your life

Advantages: There is always new content to add to your blog, like what you are doing tomorrow, or what you did yesterday. It could be a good way to keep friends up with what is happening in your life and to avoid using evil sites like Myspace and Bebo.

Disadvantages: Unless you are famous only your friends and family care about what is happening in your daily life, so you have a limited audience.

Blogging about Health

Advantages: There is a lot of affiliate schemes to push various products onto your readers to make you money if you become successful. There is no shortage of people searching the net for health and fitness advice, as it turns out, a lot of the world’s Internet users are rather unhealthy and overweight.

Disadvantages: If you are giving daily advice about health you are going to need to stay healthy. So you will have to lay off the pies, cigarettes, McDonalds and binge drinking and sort yourself out a gym membership… maybe that should be an advantage.

Blogging about SEO

Advantages: There are plenty of blogs about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so there will never be a shortage of blogs to link to in your posts or others to network with.

Disadvantages: It’s a very competitive niche and unless you actually do some experimentation over a long period of time or work for Google…Matt Cutts… you probably only have second hand information to pass on.

Blogging about Business

Advantages: You can promote your own business. Blogs are a great way of creating dynamic content for businesses that may otherwise only have a few static html pages. By updating regularly you can drive traffic to your main site creating customers or buzz around your business.

Disadvantages: Amazing as it sounds, people may not want to read about your business and if you don’t have an existing customer base it may be difficult to gain creditability.

If you are looking for a great paying niche check out stock market for beginners.

I have been thinking about blog traffic quality a bit lately. There is definitely good quality traffic to a blog, and then there’s traffic which isn’t so good. What I mean by good traffic quality, is traffic that comes to the site and does more than just leave straight away. An example of typically poor quality traffic, is traffic from social bookmaking sites. Now don’t get me wrong, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit are great, and they can bring in some serious traffic if you get dugg. However, if you analyze the traffic that typically comes in during a traffic burst from digg, most readers load the page that they came see, then they leave. If your blog is in the beginning stages like this one, you really need to look for high quality traffic, where users want to read more, and will ultimately contribute something to your blog.

An example of some high quality traffic is the recent traffic I got by submitting an article to Probloggers 31 days to building a better blog group writing project. The users that came from this link browsed through my site, many linked to the article and some left comments. Overall, it proved to be very high quality traffic, and worthwhile for this blog.

What makes traffic to your blog good traffic?

In the case above the reason why I feel a lot of the readers from Problogger stayed and read more was that the subject of this blog is very similar to Problogger. Traffic from sites from with in your niche, with readers that will be interested in your content is good traffic to get. That’s is also why it is so important to leave comments on other blogs from with in your niche.

So what was the point again?

Although social networking sites are a good source of traffic, the readers that come from those sites may not be the types that will contribute to your blog or become regular readers. However, readers that come from referrals of sites from with-in your niche are likely to be very good contributors.