Top 5 Niche Blogs of 2011

Many people fail to realize just how much work running a hugely successful blog really is. There is so much more to creating a blog that millions of people visit than simply strong writing or an exciting niche. Blogging requires a huge time commitment and an endless amount of effort. For many of the bloggers featured below, blogging is their full-time job and lifelong career. There are many different aspects of each of these blogs that make them such a widespread success.

Food: Smitten Kitchen

Smitten Kitchen is a food blog that offers utterly breath-taking photos, wonderful recipes, and a quirky concept. Deb—writer, cook, and photographer—has created a beautiful, entertaining, and inspiring blog out of her own unique everyday situation. This is where truly exciting niche ideas come from. Smitten Kitchen takes the classic food blog, with mouth watering pictures of desserts and side dishes, and adds the special interest of doing it all from a seriously small kitchen. The blog is very space conscious, making for a truly interesting read whether you’re a foodie or not.

Blogging: Pro Blogger

There are thousands upon thousands of blogs about blogging. With blogging being such a hot topic today, there’s no doubt it’s a great niche area of the web for insiders to profit on. Pro Blogger is one of the most popular blogging blogs on the web. With quality content offering endlessly useful tips about everything blogging related it’s no wonder why Pro Blogger is so popular. Pro Blogger demonstrates a great approach to becoming a successful blogger—pick a topic that you have expert knowledge in. If your readers think that you have something special to offer, they will return for more. Take your passion, interest, or career and make the most of it for yourself and the rest of the world.

Technology: Mashable

As one of the most popular tech news blogs on the internet, there are many things to be learned from a site like Mashable. Collecting all of the latest news on everything and anything digital, Mashable has capitalized and flourished in one of the hottest blogging niches out there. Mashable boasts over 50 million pageviews and 14 million unique visits a month. While the site has been around for quite some time (founded in 2005), its tremendous popularity is still an impressive feat. Mashable combines a hot niche with the blogging no-how and power to manage it right. Mashable isn’t just one guy sitting at home writing about his favorite iPhone apps. There are many many different people employed by Mashable to make the site as powerful and as useful as possible.

Productivity: Life Hacker

Life Hacker is another one of those power blogs that somehow took a broad idea and turned it into a viable blogging niche. Unique in that it covers almost everything, Life Hacker is an interesting site to explore when you are discussing what makes a quality blog. Generally speaking, Life Hacker is a productivity blog. This blog covers topics ranging from more productive ways to exercise to more productive ways to use modern technology. Oftentimes, blogging experts will discourage such a broad and open-ended niche. However, when done right, an idea this malleable can be gold. Users go to Life Hacker to explore what they will cook for dinner that night, to see what their favorite celebrity did recently, and to find the latest news on Windows 8.

General Interest: Hyperbole and a Half

While this blog is by no means as popular or highly visited as many of the previous blogs on this list, Hyperbole and a Half is a wonderful example of a true “blog blog”. This blog is created and maintained by one person and she does it because she has a knack for telling stories and she was able to target the right audience. Allie creates all of the posts that go on Hyperbole and a Half and they are all personal stories from her own life and experiences. So, in this way, Hyperbole and a Half is much like what blogs originated as—self exploration using the written word for all of the world to see. Allie has taken a somewhat vague niche topic (life stories) and created a flow and consistency with her posts. She tells each story with an air of ridiculousness and exaggeration, but it is endearing and endlessly entertaining. Also, Allie illustrates her posts using MS Paint, making for an entertaining and hilarious experience.