There are many different blogs posting about how to find a blog niche. They are all quite right for carving blog niches that are persistent in time but most of them lack some factors when dealing with time limited niches.

Time persistent blog niches and time limited blog niches

We can distinguish two types of niche to carve for our blog:

Time persistent niches: Time persistent niches are those in which the topic is constant in time and aren’t tied to fashion, technologies, etc. Examples of these niches are personal blogs or news blogs where topics are the same or handle a variety of topics to maintain the blog alive.

Time limited niches: In these type of niches, time is a crucial factor, as it will determinate the lifetime of our blog. One example coming to my mind is an hipotetical blog about Germany 2006 World championship. After the tournament is finished, probably nobody would be interested in this blog. Other examples are game console blogs or celebrities blogs.

Google Sandbox and time limited niches

With new rules about SEO imposed lately by Google, to get a good positioning on SERP’s we need to rethink de concept of carving a niche for our blog.

Let’s take the example mentioned earlier in this post, the Germany 2006 Soccer World Championship. Suppose I start today a blog about this topic, probably a high paying one (perhaps not in USA, but it does in Europe for example), 6 months ahead the start of the tournament. I’ve got plenty of material to write many posts per day, everyday. A few months later I would have a good bunch of written pages with (mostly) original content. Nevertheless this blog probable won’t be successful at all.

Measuring the time for a blog growth.

Which is the cause of such failure to achieve success? If we recall the sandbox effect can last from 3 o 4 months to a full year, we should have been started our blog at least 12 months before the tournament, in order to get out of the sandbox and be able to have good ranking. The World Championship lasts one month so our blog probably won’t get many visits after the end of it.

This example shows how important is to consider the needed time to develop a blog niche. Whaever is news today probably won’t be tomorrow so we have to take into account these factors when carving for our next blog niche.