BlogNetworkWatch

I just read a very interesting blog post by Yaro Starak over on Entrepreneur’s Journey (9rules member) about Niche Blog Networks and how a network of blogs around a single industry or topic could be quite lucrative.

Many blog networks, including the some of the biggest such as Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media are collections of widely varying blogs generally unrelated to each other less the blog network itself. The goal of most blog networks is to increase viewership of each blog via affiliation with the other blogs under the umbrella of the blog network. Most blog network members have links to all the other member blogs in the network. One of the benefits here is that search engines love backlinks.

If you were to create blog network around a niche that all blog networks share, not only would each member benefit from backlinks from each of the other member blogs you would get extra Google juice for being linked to by a site with related content. Additionally, the likelihood that a blog visitor would continue on to another related blog in a network is significantly higher. You would also probably have more conversation between blogs via comments, trackbacks, and ping backs. In fact, the sense of community between network blogs on the same topic could be significantly higher than on networks with unrelated content.

My guess is that if done correctly, niche blog networks could create a sense of community that rivals message boards while maintaining their structure which is very attractive to search engines. The comments sections of these types of blogs could be some of the most lucrative real estate from an advertising standpoint that we have seen in a while.