Flagship or Niche

by Sapphire (March 18, 2008)

I’ve been reading Matt Jones’ ebook recently (and no, merely linking to it does not qualify me for his contest - I’m linking because I like it), in which he talks about how to monetize different types of blogs. I’m not giving away enough to keep you from downloading the book yourself, but here’s the part where I’m stuck and need your help:

Is this blog a flagship or niche blog?

To summarize how he describes them, the niche blog relies on search engine traffic and doesn’t care if people never return to the site. The flagship blog relies on a loyal audience. Reading it that way made me realize that I’d been trying to make all my blogs into flagship blogs, but the fact is that’s just not a potential they all share. Several are much better off as niche blogs, and there’s nothing wrong with that (in fact it’s probably good to have a mixed porfolio, so to speak), and now I’m monetizing them in the way he suggested, and we’ll see how that goes.

A couple of my sites are definitely flagship, even though they are very targeted to a specific niche - they may appreciate search engine traffic, but their forte is attracting people who subscribe and comment and, hopefully, tell their friends.

But what is this site? I have some loyal readers, and I also have people who show up, thank me profusely for the answer to the Wordpress is_home problem, or whatever I’m ranking highly for that week, and go away never to be heard from again. It’s all good traffic, but which type of traffic should I be aiming for? Monetizing for?

What do you think?

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