Finding Focus

When you are a blogger, for yourself or for a company, one of the best things that you can do to increase the traffic to your site is to find the people interested in your topic. Yes, I said topic. This has by far been my biggest problem in this world of blogging as my interests span the globe in things I am paying attention to and wanting to write about. I keep this blogger site up for technology tips and post when I feel I have something to share here. I also have one that is focused on Mom stuff, a garden site for all that Garden Stuff, and of course I use my KristinBennett.com for just about everything else, it is kind of the smorgasboard of me. Why I do all this is so that I can use the KristinBennett.com to collect all my content, and then I can parse it out or rewrite it to go into the topic specific blogs when needed...how do you go about doing this? How many sites do you have?

Crowdfunding

I just started my first attempt at this thing called crowdfunding today, if you are not familiar with it, it is when you put your idea/project/business up on a crowdfunding site, and people can invest in micro installments to reach your goal. Like the redwoods you see in the picture, it is based on the fact that we are not alone in the world, we are all here together, and the well being of each one of us is a benefit to us all.

It was at my leadership training course that this value was really instilled in me, the fact that we are all connected. Redwoods are extremely tall (that's an understatement) but the roots actually aren't very deep. They manage to stand tall because of the way their roots spread and intertwine to keep themselves and every other tree standing. I'm not a redwood but I'm definitely a redhead and this is an experiment to see if I can get the support that I need to do good. 

So it is in this way, that small donations from a lot of people, can lead to big things.

My first campaign is to fund the redesign of a site that has no funding otherwise, you can see the campaign HERE. Please check it out and let me know what kind of big idea you would like to see get funded in this way! 

Defining Your Blogs Niche

Now this is Marketing! by Russ and Lori, on Flickr

When you decide to start a blog and have the intention of it becoming a high traffic go-to place for people, it is generally good to focus down on a niche, or target market if you will. When you do this, the quality of people you will attract to the site is much higher, and since it is deliberate, you do not need to spend as much time doing it.

I think the best example of this from the work I have done is a site that I created, using the Ning platform, for Mother's diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. It was a niche that I found accidentally, a mom I was chatting with mentioned not having a place to go to talk to other moms with MS and when I did a pretty thorough search online I agreed! There seemed to be nothing there. I saw parents with MS, I saw Parenting forums within MS sites, and that was about it! Later I saw it as a small sub group of mothering sites, but there wasn't a high number of members, probably because the moms at the particular sites were already pretty filtered down to that sites niche.

So back to the story, the site launched and it has been booming ever since, it's been mentioned 2 times in national publications, once in a magazine and once in a newsletter, and also in 2 local publications, a women's magazine and a local chapter mailing.

Easiest way to find your niche is to look around you, talk to the people you know. Think of all of these things and hopefully it'll come to you.

If it still doesn't come to you then just start blogging, as much as you can, and after a week or two (more if you haven't written much) look back over what you have written and see if you notice any trends in your writing. Once you do, you can focus on that.

Obviously if you have a business that does something in particular like a bookstore you probably already have a niche pretty well carved out, your local area + books, but think about what kind of books, what kind of people, maybe it will be about mystery books and tea (might want to serve/sell it too if you do that!) and cats if your store has one of those cats in the window that watches over everything. Something like that gives you both flexibility and also a focus for your blog to fall back on.

So what is your niche?