Start a Niche Blog to Improve Traffic and Increase Revenue

Niche Blog: Increase your Blog Revenue

Increase your search engine traffic with a niche blog
Image courtesy of Justinc CC-SA-20

A niche blog is a blog focused on a very specific topic. Niche blogs are becoming more important due to recent Google search engine updates. "Content Mills" are blogs and websites that have churned out tons of low-quality content. Google is looking for ways to keep this low-quality content out of search results. One of the ways Google is applying quality control in search engine results pages is known as Google Panda. Among other things, Panda punishes sites with low-quality or duplicated content. Panda also seems to reward sites that have original content on related topics. This is one way having a niche blog can boost your search engine traffic and hence your blog revenue.

One reason Google favors sites with content focused on one topic is that these sites are more likely to have high quality material. For example, sites dedicated to a specific topic are more likely produced by enthusiasts and less likely produced by content mills. Content mills typically produce content on a wide range of topics- anything that will perform well in search engine results. The writers of this material are not experts- they just do a little research and put together low-quality pages that use lots of keywords and rank well in search results. Google is trying to ensure that pages with high quality content that are written by experts and enthusiasts rank high in the search engine results.

How to Start a Niche Blog from your Existing Blog Content

A couple of my blogs are on saving money- you may have guessed that from my name. Saving money is not necessarily a good topic for a niche blog since saving money touches so many different topic areas. I write about all sorts of different ways to save money- to a search engine this probably looks like general content. I have posts about bikes, food, computers, cleaning products- all focused on saving money, but on a variety of topics as far as a search engine looking at keywords is concerned. I made the situation worse since I like coffee and had a number of blog posts about making coffee and not really about saving money at all. I decided to move 13 coffee articles from one of my blogs on Blogger and coffee 7 articles from my site on HubPages to start a niche blog on coffee.

1. Move Posts from Blogger or HubPages to Start a Niche Blog
Moving the posts on the topic of my niche blog from one Blogger blog to another on Blogger was very easy. I exported the blog posts to one file that I saved on my computer and exported the template to another file. Next, I imported these files into my new blog. This article explains in more detail how to download your blog posts and template from Blogger.

I set the import post feature so that the posts would not be automatically published. I went through and deleted all of the posts except the 13 coffee posts that I wanted in my new niche blog. Bringing material from HubPages was more difficult. I ended up doing some copying and pasting to create new blog posts in blogger. I also re-imported my images from the original image files, and I needed to recreate some amazon capsules into widgets the blogger can use. The entire process took a few hours to create a new niche blog site with 20 posts.

2. De-index old pages before publishing them on your Niche blog
Before publishing any of the articles on the new niche site, I used Google Webmaster Tools to remove URLs to de-index all of the articles from the old sites, removing them from search engine results. Google does not like duplicate content and will punish sites that it thinks is publishing duplicated content. So make sure your old pages are gone from Google search results before publishing the articles on your niche blog.

I searched for text from each post and made sure the old pages were not in search results before publishing the posts on my niche blog. The de-indexing process took about 8 hours. It is painful to de-index pages that are at the top of search engine results and making money for you every day. I decided that the pain was worth it to achieve better traffic going forward.

3. Publish posts on your Niche blog and submit to be indexed
Next, I submitted my new URLs in Google Webmaster Tools to be indexed in the search engine. I also submitted the sitemap for the new niche blog. It can take anywhere from a week to one month get a new site indexed- your site will not get any search engine traffic until it is indexed. Waiting for a new site to get into search results is painful. Use this time to create some new material for your niche blog while you are waiting for it to be indexed.

Update: It has been 10 days now since I have moved blog posts to a new subdomain to start a niche blog- and the search traffic is still not back. Some of my posts were on page 1 of the search engine results pages on the original blogs, but have not been picked up at their new location yet since moving them. I think a lesson here is to start niche blogs from scratch if you can to avoid the need to move posts and wait for them to climb up in the search results.

Starting a Niche Blog from Scratch

Starting a niche blog from scratch requires discipline and the ability to plan ahead on what articles you will be able to write. Having a library of material to choose from, it is easy to go through and find material that fits your niche blog. If you haven't written the material yet, you need to select a topic that you have experience or expertise to support a lot of content. I would suggest at least 20 articles on the topic of your niche blog. You want to avoid starting a niche blog only to run out of material after 3 or 4 posts. That would be a waste of time. Try to list out your first dozen or so post topics to see if you'll be able to fill the niche blog with enough good content.

Benefits of a Niche Blog

Creating a niche blog has several advantages. You will likely see a boost in search engine traffic. The articles in your niche blog will enjoy boosted traffic, and your other material may get a boost as well since it will be more focused on a topic from the perspective of a search engine looking at keywords in your posts.

Having a niche blog makes it easier for people interested in your topic to find and share your blog. People interested in coffee are not likely to sort through lots of articles about saving money to find a few about coffee. But a site that is 100% about coffee has a much better chance to attract coffee fans and keep them there reading multiple articles.

Another benefit of having a focused niche blog- it is more obvious what to write about next on your blog. The topic of my next post on my coffee niche blog is going to be about... coffee!

Pro Blogging Journal

Wednesday, July 31, 2013