While there’s certainly nothing wrong with seeking and taking the advice of individuals about blogging, don’t let anyone place restrictive limitations on how you blog.  When you listen to advice given by successful bloggers, don’t take that advice as being a law.  You need to make sure the advice offered is appropriate to what you want to accomplish.  When you hear bloggers telling you that you have to limit your blog to a highly specialized niche, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to do it.

I have read in various places that people have a problem with individuals who are willing to cover any topic on their blogs.  They argue that readers will not be able to define what type of blog one has when he or she writes about any topic of choice.  Additionally, they contend that search engines will not find the posts on the blogs of those individuals who write about a diverse range of topics instead of topics in a highly specialized niche.  Revolutionary Paideia proves them to be wrong.  Revolutionary Paideia is a cultural commentary blog providing articles on a constellation of sundry topics.  This blog does not simply focus on politics, relationships, sports, education, music, or etc.—it covers diverse topics on all those categories and many more.

Revolutionary Paideia was featured by WordPress as the second fastest growing blog.  For those successful bloggers who say not having a highly specialized niche will cause your posts to not be picked up well by search engines, my recent post “Open Letter to Todd Akin”  was picked up so well by the search engines that it reached Rebecca Hamilton of the Oklahoma state House of Representatives.  She also blogs and “liked” the aforementioned post on Revolutionary Paideia.

I mention those things about Revolutionary Paideia because it’s one of those blogs that’s not in a highly specialized niche.  In two and a half years of existence, Revolutionary Paideia has amassed well over 250,000 readers.  Therefore, the search engines are picking up the posts quite fine without a highly specialized niche.

Don’t let someone force you to create a relationships, politics, education, sports, music or news blog if that’s not what you want to do.  Never be afraid to go against the recommendations of successful bloggers.  They don’t have all of the answers.  If you have your own innovative ideas, they’re probably going to be best served by not following all of the suggestions of successful bloggers.  Instead of concentrating on a highly specialized niche, produce great content.  Great content will bring readers to your blog.

Some successful bloggers will try to persuade you into writing pieces that fit only into a highly specialized niche because they’re not talented enough write about a range of diverse topics.  Their recommendations for you to not pen pieces on a range of diverse topics emerge from their belief that “some people try to do too much on their blogs.”  Just because people are writing about diverse topics on their blogs does not mean they “try to do too much on their blogs.”

For many of these bloggers who attack people because they’re not able to simply define what type of blog people who write about a variety of topics have, I could attack them for not writing pieces that reflect the use of good grammar and punctuation and careful editing and proofreading.  However, I choose not to do it at this point.

If you’re going to be a blogger who has real value, then let your blog be a blog that reflects who you truly are and what you truly want to accomplish.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison