Finding Your Article Niche
I started my first newsletter twelve years ago.¬† Before I started my newsletter, however, I knew I wanted to write a lot of my own articles, so I had to come up with my niche…my area of expertise on which to focus my writing efforts.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?¬† I actually had no idea what I wanted to write about!¬† I did lots of brainstorming, but it was hard to focus on what I knew best.¬† After all, what did I know that someone else might want to read about!?
After what was probably months of mulling over ideas for my newsletter, I decided to focus on frugal living.  I have to say that was definitely the main focus of my life at that time.  We were living paycheck to paycheck and I was forever looking for creative ways to pinch a penny. 
So that’s how my “Creative Homemaking” newsletter was born.¬† I didn’t pretend I knew everything about creative homemaking, but it was definitely a place to start.
I soon realized the best way to advertise my new newsletter was to write articles and have them published in other newsletters.¬† When I sat down to write my first article, I couldn’t believe how hard it was and agonized over every word of it.¬† The first several articles I wrote were published in several small newsletters and were eventually posted online on my first web site.¬† To this day I still get requests to reprint those articles…isn’t the Internet amazing!?¬† Here is one of the first articles I ever wrote.
The first several years that I published my newsletter and then worked on my web site, I didn’t do a whole lot of writing.¬† It was hard for me to come up with article ideas, and then I found the writing process very painful because I felt so self-conscious about it.¬† I finally signed up as a contributing writer on another web site, so that I would be forced to write an article every two weeks.¬† During the next couple of years this really got me in the habit of writing.
You will find that article writing gets easier the more you do it, it really does!  I went from agonizing over every word to writing all my ideas down in notebooks, and now my mind is always thinking of new article ideas and mulling over what I want to say to the point that when I sit down to write I generally get down most of what I want to say in the first draft.  It took me years to get to this point, but it was well worth it, some 200+ articles later.
Also keep in mind that your article niche may change with time.¬† My web site content is broad enough that I can write about different topics.¬† I wrote about frugal living for a long time.¬† When my daughter hit her teens, I did a lot of writing about parenting teenagers.¬† When I got into scrapbooking, I started writing about that, and the list goes on and on.¬† Don’t limit yourself to one topic…chances are you have more than one interest in life!
And if you have a web site and aren’t regularly writing articles to promote it, you should!¬† Start writing today and submit them to this article directory.¬† Send them to me!¬† I am always looking for new homemaking, parenting, craft-related articles for my sites.¬† Writing and distributing articles is the #1, best FREE way to promote your web site, and if you are not writing articles you are missing a great opportunity to get the traffic you deserve to your web site.¬† Why?¬† Because if you are not already working from home, you can if you take the time to promote your web site.
Blessings,
Rachel Paxton
CreativeHomemaking.com
