In the busy, noisy, content-riddled world of the internet, it can be difficult for customers to find your message. You’re doing everything right: you have a blog, you use keywords (without overstuffing them), and you optimized your content for search engines. You’ve even employed infographics and videos to keep things interesting. But have you tried niche blogs?
What Is a Niche Blog?
A niche blog is a blog that is created to target a specific audience. If your business focuses on something specific like arts or music or vegan recipes or whatever, your goal will be to find websites and other blogs that also focus on these topics and ask if you can create a guest blog for them.
The goal of a niche blog is to talk directly to the people who may be interested in what you have to offer instead of them (hopefully) finding you while doing an organic search (although this is nice too!). You are in essence using another blogs’ audience to promote your product.
Jessica Dais, Sr. Content Marketing Specialist at TakeLessons Live says, “We partner with niche blogs on a monthly basis to promote our latest content. As a startup that focuses on teaching musical instruments and languages, there are a variety of opportunities for niche communities that we can tap into. From these partnerships, we’ve essentially been able to generate more backlinks to our content and grow our following on social media.”
Benefits of Niche Blogging
Getting your information on another blog is a great way to create connections and develop a community as well as leads. When you post on another blog that has the same product or interest as you do, you are engaging and informing those followers, who may not have known you existed, about your business.
When you try to cast a wide net onto customers, you may or may not snare those who are interested in your product. Keywords on your site are incredibly helpful, but there’s no way to know and incorporate all of the keywords searchers may be using, so you could be missing out on finding new customers.
When you can narrow down your search objectives and find blogs that share a common interest with your business, you no longer have to cast your wide net and hope it snags one or two customers out of an incredibly large field. You’ve narrowed down your parameters and found a way to talk directly to people who may be interested in what you have to sell.
Does this mean every niche post you put up will result in sales? Of course not, but you are getting your message and your information out to interested people. Depending on what your business focuses on, that customer base may not be millions strong, but having a few dedicated and loyal customers that buy your products may be all you need to stay afloat—especially if your services are incredibly specialized.
If you want to grow and expand, you need to develop a voice and position yourself in your industry as someone who knows what they are talking about and are trustworthy. Again, this is something that can be accomplished by posting to niche blogs.
Brian Gill, CEO at Gillware Data Recovery, says, “We routinely create thought leadership pieces for other publications related to our industry. Collaborating with other thought leaders can be extremely beneficial. Establishing a voice in your industry is important for anyone who wants to continue to grow and expand. Try to become an authority that others trust and look up to.”
Niche Blogs Are Better than Forbes
Forbes is a leader in business news and a great place to get exposure for your business. But it shouldn’t be your PR target. This is because it might not be where your target customers are. People will see your article or blog on Forbes, but if it’s not something that interests or pertains to them, they won’t go that extra step to find out more about you or become one of your customers.
Sure, there’s the possibility that they may know someone who is interested in or needs what you have to offer and mention it, but when you post on a niche blog, you’re targeting your core audience and customer base. This could prove to be more beneficial because, as mentioned, even though the base might be smaller, they may be more willing to buy your products and tell their friends and family about you.
How to Find Niche Blogs
Let’s be honest: what do you think your chances are of getting published in Forbes? It could happen, but the amount of time spent trying to accomplish that task could be directed to other endeavors. When it comes to pitching a niche blog, your chances of getting published with them are probably a lot higher.
Finding niche blogs is not difficult. You can accomplish the task by conducting a Google search specific to the blogs you are looking for (i.e., fitness blogs, etc.) or by typing in search terms followed by “inurl: blog” so that it only brings up results that are blogs.
Some other sources you can use to try to find niche blogs include ahrefs, ScrapeBox, or Pitchbox. Deciding which one is the most useful for your search will depend on exactly what you’re looking for and if these sites are capable of finding it.
After you’ve found a list of niche blogs, Elizabeth Bradshaw, owner of an online store called Canvas Art Boutique, says she takes it one step further. “I always look at the organic traffic of niche blogs before I post onto them. The biggest questions you need to ask when considering posting on a niche blogs are 1) would my ideal customer be reading something like this based on the buyer persona research that I’ve done, and 2) how much traffic does this blog get? I use a software called SEMRush to get a monthly traffic estimate, based on country. No matter how fitting the niche blog is, if it gets very few eyeballs on it, your efforts won’t be worth it.”
Niche blogs can be a beneficial way to get your information in front of audiences and customers who are interested and looking for the services and products you offer. They are a better target than Forbes for your PR outreach because you’ll be reaching people who want to read what you have to say.
