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Expressing your blog niche

So you’ve found your blog niche and you even know what you want to say in your niche—the more specific, the better. How can you convey that message to your visitors the first time they visit your site?

findniche

Tagline and title

Most blogs have a place for a tagline (in WordPress, for example, this is called the blog description). Find a catchy way to express who you are and/or what you say. It can help to focus on what you can do for your readers, and to keep it brief—short enough to fit in the title element of each page (the name that displays in the title bar and bookmarks of your site—more about headers).

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Header and design

If you can, express your theme or at least your niche in your header through images, your blog name and your color choices. Put your tagline in the header image of your blog, too.

While the header is a great opportunity to express your theme, your content will do it even better. Don’t make your header so large that you can’t see your blog content on the very first page—don’t make people scroll down to get to your content!

About page

Have an about page, first of all. Here you can explain not only who you are and how you’re qualified to blog about this topic, but exactly what you’ll do to help your readers.

You can also put a short explanatory paragraph on your home page (above the fold—in the part of the page you can see without scrolling down). This seems to work best in the sidebar, but I’ve also seen it done in the main post column.

What do you think? How do your favorite blogs convey what they’re about before you even get to the posts?

Photo by Andronicus Riyono

2 replies on “Expressing your blog niche”

I’ll have to think about this… I have spent almost no time on blog layout/design – I figure so many people just use feeders and I’d rather spend my limited time on posts. Plus, my main blog is pretty broad in scope (intentionally so – since I don’t have time to maintain several blogs to post everything I’m interested in posting), and I don’t want to put myself in a box by labeling it too specifically.

So I guess people don’t have a clue what my blog is about unless they read the posts.

I do have a new blog for family friendly book giveaways, and even though we’re still working on the design, it’s clear from the header description what the blog is about.

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