There has been many discussions within the online business world about staying on topic for search engine optimization reasons. One problem with this logic is you are not creating content for your audience. The same thing with picking titles which have search traffic. This is fine for search engine optimization, but really does not satisfy the audience. With the amount of competition in any given niche one extremely important factor to your lasting success will be repeat business and to receive repeat business you must please the people that come to your presence. To please your audience on occasion you will need to go off your topic.
Now when I say go off your topic I don’t mean writing about something completely unrelated. If you are running a blog about cooking there is no reason to write about poetry or something else that has nothing to do about food. You may stray off topic to write about health or another topic that is at least some connection with your own topic. Your audience will come to your blog for certain information and that is what you should be focuses on giving them. Finding out what they want and need can be done by using email, facebook, twitter, and other social sites. You should also be looking on your competitors blogs and sites to see what they types of content they are producing.
When you find a need that your audience has you should attempt to fill the need even if it means going off your specific topic and straying into topics that are related. Now I can’t tell you how far you can stray off topic this will have to be done by you. It is easy to see how certain content pleases your audience. When you write about something off topic keep a close eye on your feed and stat counter. These will let you know if the content went over well with your audience or if the content was not well liked. If you notice a higher bounce rate than usual with the new content that you have produced then you should probably stay away from that genre.
One important note about keeping visitors and readers is content production. One of the biggest reasons I stray somewhat off specific niche content is running out of things to say. Tapping into a different niche which is closely related also taps into hundreds or in some cases thousands of possible new article and blog post topics. One of the biggest reasons visitors come to your presence is for information and they want the information to be new and helpful. If you hit a wall when finding new topics on your niche straying off niche is better than not producing new content. Write as much as you can and you will notice that people will begin following you.
