A lot of blogs succeed because they aim to address a niche area, and provide many high quality posts within that domain. There are a great deal of blogs which simply represent the opinions of the author in relation to current affairs. Then there are blogs like mine, where I try to follow my own interests and add in the occasional niche piece to address some technical issue.
From a reader’s perspective, there isn’t much incentive to subscribe to my blog. If you want to know about the iPad, then there are millions of other bloggers writing about it too. Web design, photography, cycling infrastructure and all the other topics that I have discussed are all covered by more in-depth sites elsewhere.
So what is it I can offer that is unique? This is a question I am constantly asking myself of late, and it has stopped me posting as often as I wanted to. At the moment the people who read things here are people I know personally, but the most inbound traffic seems to go to the posts I have made regarding specific technical issues. The conclusion I can draw from that is that I should focus on technical, highly focussed content that people will seek out. Opinion is easy to find, expertise is less easy to locate.
For the time being I will continue writing about anything that interests me, but I will try to focus more on presenting my expertise as well as opinion. If you have any thoughts about this, please feel free to get in touch or leave a comment.