Step 2: Find your voice and your niche
It’s time for step 2 of Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps. It’s not easy to Find your voice and your niche so let’s take a close look at both issues.
Finding your voice
Finding your voice is one of those things that is supposed to come naturally, but often doesn’t. Personally I’m much more of a math and science guy than a writer, but I’ve managed to find a style of writing that I’m comfortable with and that seems to suit me. And I’ve discovered that the more I write, the more I feel in the groove. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a Zen thing, but that could be a useful comparison. The bottom line is don’t try too hard. Just keep writing and you’ll find it.
Finding your niche
Finding your niche is another matter entirely and this is one of my main challenges with this blog. The problem (and I’m not alone here) is that there are just so many topics I’d like to write about. My interests are eclectic to say the least, but that rarely comes across well in a single blog. I’ve seen some frighteningly unfocused blogs out there where somebody is trying to cover twenty different unrelated topics and it just ends up falling flat and looking scattered. During this “comeback” of mine, I’ve already jettisoned some topics in an effort to keep the posts a bit more focused. Linguistics is gone as a main category and Malawi and Ubuntu were dropped as subcategories. Then I added Blogging as a new main category. I also rewrote my tagline: Web development, new media, open source, and more. I’ll be completely honest and say that I expect to pare down the category list even more in the future. I’ve left Africa as a category and plan to post about it occasionally, but if I end up writing a lot of posts I’ll probably consider spinning it off into a separate blog. I may even drop Open source or spin it off at some point. History shows that focused blogs attract and retain more readers. Sometimes that means making a difficult decision, but one needs to be prepared for that.
Summary
So there you have it. Next I’ll wrap up the series with a post about self-promotion… something that doesn’t come easily to most people (myself included).
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