It’s great to diversify your content. That’s what I’ve learnt from a month of blogging. Since writing photoshop tutorials as well as articles about blogging and marketing I’ve received a huge amount of new visitors to the site (in the thousands actually).

If you have just 2 minutes spare please read this article, as I really feel that this is some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever given…

Throughout this post I’ll be using the analogy of a tree to represent your blog or website. Think of your main topic or ‘niche’ as the trunk, and any forms of diversification from this topic as branches. Now, you want to grow your tree (or website) to it’s full potential, which means making it as large as possible - i.e.: a lot of branches. A lot of branches carry a lot of leafs, and a lot of leafs capture a lot of sunlight. I think you see where I’m going with this one - diversifying will increase your website’s traffic.

However, before you raise any objections to this I’m not talking about writing for every niche out there. Your diversifications should all be of some interest to your original niche’s audiences, but at the same time capture new audiences effectively. If a tree grows too many branches too far out sideways it will fall over. Just look at this website, my audience is primarily bloggers, yet I also appeal to entrepreneurs, designers and promoters. The important thing is that I’m not losing any real traffic from my original audience by doing this, in fact many of my blogging audience appreciate the variety in content.

Now, back to the tree analogy. The key reason why diversification is so effective is the idea of branches. By diversifying to a new niche you are creating a huge growth potential. Try to think of your potential markets. In this case my market is huge: bloggers. However, by appealing to those interesting in photoshop tutorials I’m able to reach a second huge market. This will increase my overall chances for growth, as it’s very hard to make a significant dent in any large market. I’m not going to be talked about my all bloggers anytime soon, so why not get talked about my a number of bloggers, a number of photoshop users etc… Looking again at the photoshop tutorials this site offers - I can submit these to say, 5 of the largest tutorial websites. This will drive me thousands of visitors, and quite often people will blog about tutorials featured on these websites. As you can see this creates a kind of exponential growth, which involves very little effort on my part. I’m simply taking advantage of the success of larger websites.

Suddenly I’ll be able to post in niche forums for a variety of topics, again increasing my blog’s exposure. I can comment on other blogs in a variety of niches, networking within a variety of niches and so on…

Some ‘branches’ may start to steal light from others, so it’s important to consider which branches are benefiting your tree the most as a whole. If you’re losing saying 50 visitors from one niche due to your diversifying into new topics, but gaining 200 then surely this is a worthwhile venture.

Another great reason for diversifying is that it gives you more to talk about. Every writer gets stumped for content from time to time. However, by having more topics to discuss you should find it easier to come up with fresh, exciting content for your readers. I find it a lot more rewarding to blog about a variety of subjects than simply going on about the same thing over and over.

I’ll be researching marketing my diversifications properly soon, and trying to gain the maximum possible audience for each niche that I write about. Try and consider your blog for a second. Are you maximizing it’s potential, or are you blogging about the same topics day in day out?