Blog Expansion: How, Where and Why

by Robb Sutton

There comes a time in every bloggers life when they hit a plateau. This can happen for one of about a thousand reasons, but one of the most common is that you are just tapped out. You have done your job…expanded your network…reached just about everyone you can reach…and now you are starting to run thin on content ideas and sources of new subscribers and readers. It is a pretty normal occurrence actually, but there are answers and ways to get over that hurdle and continue to see growth through expanding your offerings.

As any business grows, it naturally flows towards other areas of any given sector and adapts to changing times. Your blog is no different. Over time, you are going to tweak your offerings to accommodate your ever changing environment. Be ready, you are going to feel a sensation of…”this is not where I saw this heading”, but…know that expansion and adapting is a good thing over time and you can end up with something much bigger than you had originally planned.

Blog Expansion: How Do I Expand My Blog?

It is time to plan your blog expansion. You have your hard hat on and you are ready to rock out a new section of blogging to keep seeing long-term growth…but where do you start and what are your options?

Expand Your Niche – The most common form of blog expansion is to expand the topic you are blogging about. I actually recommend that new bloggers pick a fairly narrow niche to see good short term results, so as you start to saturate that niche, you can expand out from that and build on your success. If  you are blogging about how to grow vegetables in your home garden, it might be time to start writing articles about growing flowers or herbs in the home garden to compliment the vegetable content. The trick to expanding the content in your current blog is to have it closely related to your current content. Typically, setting up a new category and churning out the new articles will do the trick.

Add Different Niches Within Your Broad Topic – With Mountain Biking by 198, I knew I was not going to be blogging solely about mountain biking once things really started taking off. Eventually, I was going to need to expand into other cycling sub-niches to really grow and build a solid resource. But…you just can’t throw in a bunch of road and commuter content into a mountain biking site. While it may apply to some riders, it will most likely put off the mountain biking purists. So…this equaled making new sub-domains. Each sub-domain is going to look like a different site (with own ads, rss feed, etc.) but they will all be linked together under one main domain (mountain.bike198.com; road.bike198.com; etc.). Are there other fields of your topic that you could grow into? This may be a great option for you as well. Ex. see Tutsplus.com and MacCreate.com

Forum Sites – While forum sites can be difficult to start up, they can be an incredible resource in your blogging. Have you created a community around your blog that is actively leaving comments? It might be time to give your readers a place to talk about related topics in your industry. Over time, a forum site added to your blog can be a HUGE asset. Keep in mind…forum sites require a lot of work to get started. If it gets successful…it can be self managing through moderators and be a huge source of traffic for your blog.

Blog Network – Feel like blogging about something else entirely but still keep your current blog running? Maybe it is time to dial back on the daily posts, blog on your current blog a couple times a week and get started on another interest. There are many, highly successful bloggers who have created their own network of blogs that may or may not be related to each other. (oneninety8) As you see success in blogging, you learning curve for creating another successful blog will be much shorter. The trick is not to completely ignore what made you successful to begin with by following the new and exciting. You need to keep up the blog that brought you that success or you will end up spreading yourself too thin and lose everything.

As you can see, there are several options that can keep the “newness” of blogging alive and continue your expansion process to keep building up your business. Each of these options also help your readers as you continue to put in the work necessary for long term growth and a valuable resource online. Successful blogging is all about testing out new ideas and continuing to adapt your content to a quickly changing environment.

Those bloggers that continue to stick to the game plan they have on the day they installed Wordpress…are going to have a hard time if they continually block out the needs and wants of their readers.

Image by Wayne National Forest

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12 comments

Mike December 4, 2009 - 8:18 am

This post really got a lot of ideas flowing through my head.

I really like the subdomains idea. I don’t exactly see how I would use it right now, but I have some light bulbs going off.

I’m waiting for my blog and mailing list to grow some more before I add the forum. There’s several forums in the coffee niche already, but there’s room for one for average coffee drinkers.

And the idea of a blog network has been on my to do list for a while. It’s probably going to stay there for a while longer until I’m really happy with the coffee blog, but there are several other blogs that I’d like to do, knowing what I know now.

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Robb Sutton December 4, 2009 - 10:10 am

You have already done some of this by expanding into coffee equipment. You are on the right track.

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Srinivas Rao December 4, 2009 - 11:10 am

Rob,

This is great stuff. I’m a personal development blogger, but I’ve even found myself writing about blogging tips and things like that. Obviously my surfing blog incorporates not only reviews, but life lessons from the water, eventually reviews of surfing spots and more. Thanks for sharing this. I’ll probably be referring back to it several times.

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Robb Sutton December 6, 2009 - 9:48 am

Anytime Srinivas!

I have found that action sports (my end is mtb/cycling) really give you a calmness and objective look at life that translates to off sport activities. A lot of my blogging ideas come while I am on the bike.

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John Paul December 4, 2009 - 11:50 am

Great tips Robb.

With all the plugins and tools we have out now, blogging in more then one blog is alot easier, as long as you stay to a posting schedule.

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Robb Sutton December 6, 2009 - 9:49 am

It is a lot easier than it used to be. The flip side is a lot of people can get more focused on the tools rather than the blogging.

Schedule is crucial…something both you and your readers can work with.

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Sarge | BeginnerBlogger.com December 4, 2009 - 9:10 pm

I can’t see myself hitting a plateau with my blog anytime soon. I have so much I want to try out it’s crazy, yet really exciting!

I did reach a plateau however in my working career – to the point where I left my full-time job just last week to pursue a career online and create a better lifestyle for myself. I’m excited! 🙂

I like the idea of expanding your niche – which leads me to the idea that I should perhaps pick a more focused niche, dominate that THEN expand. Not go the other way around going too broad to start with and narrowing down. It seems like the wrong way to go after reading this post.

Thanks Robb 🙂

Sarge | BeginnerBlogger.com

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Robb Sutton December 6, 2009 - 9:50 am

Congrats on leaving the 9-5!

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zuwairiaiman December 5, 2009 - 12:41 pm

great info… thanks for sharing.. hope can get all the ideas here and apply it well

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How to Start a Blog December 20, 2009 - 11:47 am

I definitely have to say – a paid, self-hosted blog is the way to go. It is always annoying having to tell your friends “yea, my blog is at …blogspot.com or …wordpress.com”. It really isn’t that impressive if you can’t OWN your blog.

I have setup well over 30 blogs by now and have gone through the technical setup process so many times I could do it in my sleep : ). If you would like me to set it up for ya, I do it for free.

Happy Blogging!
– John

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Robb Sutton December 21, 2009 - 6:30 am

If you are going to take blogging seriously and try to make money at it…a self hosted site is the only way to go. If you are just sharing pictures and thoughts with friends and family…you can really use just about anything.

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Codeme June 25, 2011 - 7:28 pm

I have been blogging since a long time but i got his IDEA on blogging on Computer Science Stuff mainly development part and i started a blog called “Code 2 Learn”. I started it in JAN’11 n for me its a success as it has got now more than 14k pageviews. For a blog of my kind to succeed is big thing for me. I wanted to ask you how can i expand my blog??

I have a FB page with 140 followers and increasing a twitter id ie http://www.twitter.com/code2learn and i hv join forums also.

thanks,

http://www.code2learn.com

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