Features of niche blogging

Features of niche blogging

The popularity of niche blogging among new marketers can be attributed to several factors, including cost, adaptability and generating traffic.

Cost

The most significant reason for the popularity of niche blogging is the cost. Niche bloggers can quickly and easily create a blog for free. In this way, the marketer can determine the viability of the selected niche before making a large investment of time and money.

Adaptability

Because people's interests often change over time, it is important for a successful marketer to stay up-to-date on current trends. By using free services, the niche blogger can quickly adapt to the changing market and create a new blog marketed to that niche.
Adaptability also refers to the ability to update the information on the niche blog at will. A great feature of blogs is the ability to add new articles on a daily, or more frequent, basis
Also each post is akin to a stand alone webpage allowing the blogger to create articles independent of each other.

Generating traffic

In order for a website to be profitable, it must have visitors. Normal websites require search engine optimization or paid advertisement in order to gain visitors. Blog services like Blogger, on the other hand, incorporate Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Using this technology, the niche blogger can inform various online directories of the blog's existence. They, in turn, provide links to the blog. Visitors to these directories are then exposed to the blog's listing and may choose to visit the blog. Thus, the directories act as a marketing tool for the niche blogger. Link exchange systems such as Addiply.com also allow bloggers to give and receive advertising clicks or views by the penny's-worth, without the imposed minimums of AdSense. Simpler still is the use of a Blogroll of similar blogs with some reciprocation.

Niche blogging

Niche blogging (CanE, UK /ˈniːʃ/ or US /ˈnɪtʃ/)^[1] is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market. While it could be argued that every blog is, in some form, a niche blog, the term as it applies to marketing refers to a particular kind of blog.
Neither blogging nor niche marketing is a new concept. However, only in recent years has the concept of a niche blog come into being.
Usually, niche blogs will contain advertisements of some sort (pay-per-click or products or both). In some cases, the purpose of the niche blog is to incite the reader into visiting another website which may then attempt to sell the reader a product or service.
Niche blogs are sometimes referred to as splogs, but this is a misnomer. Even though the desired end result for the niche blogger is to make money, the niche blog itself often contains valuable information. Most pay-per-click advertising is content-sensitive, so it is vital to the niche blogger to have useful content that is related to the chosen niche.

Eltonian niche

 

Eltonian niche

In 1927 Charles Sutherland Elton, a British ecologist, gave the first working definition of the niche concept. He is credited with saying: "[W]hen an ecologist says 'there goes a badger,' he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal's place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, 'there goes the vicar.'"^[5]
The Eltonian niche encompasses the idea that the niche is the role a species plays in a community, rather than a habitat.
 

Hutchinsonian niche

Hutchinsonian niche

The shape of the bill of this Purple-throated Carib is complimentary to the shape of the flower, enabling it to exploit the nectar as a resource

The Hutchinsonian niche views niche as an n-dimensional hypervolume, where the dimensions are environmental conditions and the resources that define the requirements of an individual or a species to practise "its" way of life.
The niche concept was popularized by the zoologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson in 1957.^[6] Hutchinson wanted to know why there are so many different types of organisms in any one habitat.
An organism free of interference from other species could use the full range of conditions (biotic and abiotic) and resources in which it could survive and reproduce which is called its fundamental niche. However, as a result of pressure from, and interactions with, other organisms (i.e. inter-specific competition) species are usually forced to occupy a niche that is narrower than this, and to which they are mostly highly adapted. This is termed the realized niche. The ecological niche has also been termed by G. Evelyn Hutchinson a "hypervolume." This term defines the multi-dimensional space of resources (e.g., light, nutrients, structure, etc.) available to (and specifically used by) organisms. The term adaptive zone was coined by the paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, and refers to a set of ecological niches that may be occupied by a group of species that exploit the same resources in a similar manner. (Simpson, 1944; After Root, 1967.)^{[citation needed]}

Ecological niche

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The flightless dung beetle occupies a niche exploiting animal droppings as a food source

In ecology, a niche (CanE, UK /ˈniːʃ/ or US /ˈnɪtʃ/)^[1] is a term describing the way of life of a species. Each species is thought to have a separate, unique niche. The ecological niche describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (e.g., by growing when resources are abundant, and when predators, parasites and pathogens are scarce) and how it in turn alters those same factors (e.g., limiting access to resources by other organisms, acting as a food source for predators and a consumer of prey).^[2]
The majority of species exist in a standard ecological niche. A premier example of a non-standard niche filling species is the flightless, ground-dwelling kiwi bird of New Zealand, which exists on worms, and other ground creatures, and lives its life in a mammal niche. Island biogeography can help explain island species and associated unfilled niches.

Online Niche Marketing

 

Online niche marketing

An often used technique for affiliate marketers is Internet-based niche segments of larger markets. Niche websites^[5] can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted customer base, giving the affiliate a small but potentially continuous source of revenue. This technique can then be repeated across several other niche websites. A bigger niche is harder to market as the expense of online advertisements increases according to the popularity of the keywords used (on Adwords and YouTube, for example).
Some niches may become saturated with marketers, increasing competition and thus reduce the slice of the pie available to each competitor. One solution is to find smaller, "undiscovered," but still profitable, niches, usually by searching out the best keywords to target. These lower cost keywords are called long-tailed keywords, as in the long tail of secondary keyword phrases that usually follow the main keyword in popularity of number of searches conducted by internet users. Because some are so obscure as to have few or no clicks per month, the trick is to find the right ones to target.
 

Niche Audience

 

Niche audience

Technology and many industrial practices changed with the post-network era. There is a new drive for niche audiences because audiences are now in much greater control of what they watch. It is very rare to have a substantial audience watch a program at once, with few exceptions such as American Idol, the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Still, networks do target particular demographics. For example, Lifetime targets women and MTV targets youth. In this context of greater viewer control, networks and production companies are trying to discover ways to profit through new scheduling, new shows, and relying on syndication. This practice of "narrowcasting" also allows advertisers to have a more direct audience for their messages.^[3]
In the fashion industry a growing trend is to have shop-in-shop setups where big stores promote niche brands inside to draw in new demographics. ^[4]