How Niche Blogging Increased My Earnings
Darren Rowse has started a One Question Interview Series: What one thing did you do on your blog in 2007 that improved it the most? While he’s given the question to his A-list of bloggers, as always, he has invited readers to weigh in on the question.
2007 was the year that niche blogging proved its worth at Ian’s Messy Desk.
Ian’s Messy Desk has been around for almost eight years. For the first six years of its life, the content at the blog was all over the place. While there was a larger proportion of posts on time management and productivity, I tended to post anything that caught my fancy. By its sixth year, this blog was attracting a consistent, but small amount of traffic and earning a small amount from advertising.
I decided to narrow the focus of Ian’s Messy Desk starting January 1, 2007. Rather than a strict productivity niche, I set up a cycle of posts on personal-development: Motivation, Communication, Productivity, and The Simple Life. On Fridays I posted a random bit of humour.
How has this paid off?
- On January 11, 2007 I passed 500,000 all-time visitors. As of today, that count has passed 820,000 visitors.
- My previous best month was December 2005, with 22,000 visitors. The next best was December 2006, with 18,000 visitors. This December, the count has already surpassed 50,000 visitors.
- On January 1, 2007, I had 124 subscribers, according to FeedBurner. Currently, my subscriber count is fluctuating between 1,400 and 1,500.
- Advertising revenue for December 2005 was a few cents short of $150.00. In December 2006 I earned $228.00 and change. December 2007 has already passed $700.00. Not enough to make me rich, but certainly a nice second income.
- My favourite stat: about 230 comments on posts in the first 6 years and around 740 comments this year!
Numbers aren’t the only story of the year for Ian’s Messy Desk. In 2007, posts from this blog were featured or linked on:
- Lifehacker
- Lifehack, several times in 2007
- Zen Habits
- ProBlogger
- StumbleUpon
- del.icio.us front page and most popular page.
Am I doing everything I can to to improve the ranking of Ian’s Messy Desk? Not yet. (I’ll post a follow-up on goals for 2008.) However, the steps taken have made a big improvement for 2007.
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