Blogging Pointers

If there’s one piece of advice beginning bloggers hear over and over, ad nauseam, it’s got to be ‘Find your niche!’ I wonder if it’s being touted so pervasively that we risk beginners defining their scopes so narrowly that their blogs begin to cave in on them?

Let’s take my most recent independent venture, Fibro Follies, as an example. I could have narrowed the site’s theme - “thriving with fibromyalgia” - even further, of course. I could have targeted alternative therapies for the illness. I could have focused strictly on women over 40 who’ve recently been diagnosed. I could have even narrowed it down to “women over 40, recently diagnosed, who want to combine conservative and alternative therapies and are looking for productivity and energy management tips.”

Phew.

But I kept it pretty open - “people with fibromyalgia who want to do more than just survive, and who want a higher quality of life.” The reason is simple: I’m sick of fibro advocates creating this picture in the public’s mind of those of us with fibro as bedridden and incompetent women who must be cared for. I know the aim was, initially, to show people that it was a real disease. The pendulum swung too far over, however, and this blog is my attempt to bring some hope back to the “fibromite” who wants more out of life and isn’t ready to take to her or his bed yet.

By keeping this blog’s focus fairly open, I’ve created a wide world of potential topics. I can write about alternative therapies, new treatments, medical trials, coping and healing tips, psychological and self-improvement programs, journaling, relationships, nutrition - but all as related to improving quality of life for a fibro patient. This is a scope that isn’t likely to cave in on me and suffocate the blog in its infancy.

Consider what might have happened had I selected a narrower niche - let’s say “alternative therapies.” Well, right away I’m turning away the 30% or so of patients who only consider traditional medicine (that’s a number based strictly on personal anecdotes and experience - which is to say, completely made up - but, still, there are some folks like that, and they wouldn’t read a blog devoted to alternative therapies). I’m also locking myself in; what happens when I’ve exhausted the scope of alternative therapies? I’ll need to resurrect old topics, or find new twists. That’s completely do-able, mind you, but - and this is my point - why make things harder on myself?

The single biggest ingredient for a successful blog isn’t content, as some would have you believe - it’s blogger passion. With that passion, you’ll find the content, you’ll do the work necessary to make the traffic find you, and you’ll keep posting daily as you know you need to. But it’s hard to maintain the passion when you’re so narrowly boxed in to a topic that you run through it in a month or two. Keep the passion alive for your blog the same way you would for your spouse or partner - by finding new things to love!