Where I went wrong

Today I read a post by Jane May at John chow dot com, The Secrets of Picking A Niche its a good read if you got 7 mins to spare. The article talks about how to pick the right Niche or subject for your blog or upcoming website. It got me thinking about my own Niche blog Games games and more games and I realized where I went wrong.

• Time to reflect I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would like to write about. I wrote a big list of all the things that I enjoy in life and one of them happened to be boardgames. When I started writing the blog I was running a weekly boardgames night where 6-10 would get together every Sunday and play games. I had been doing this for about 3-4 months and I had collected about 50 different unique games and I was always on the search for new games.
• How"s the competition? When I was searching for games to play I found there was basically 2 major competitors, both of them have very old fashion websites cluttered and annoying to read. I would have no problem creating a better web2.0 style site that would function and look a lot better.
• Will you be able to write enough? Tons, games have been played for thousands of years and everyone has there own version of each game. I have been writing about games for 2 months now and I have barely scratched the surface of dice games.
• How can you monetize this topic? It shouln't be that hard, people look for the rules to a games and when they find it they might want the accessory's for the game. Or they might be interested in other versions of the game. Books on games, electronic versions, etc.

So good so far right? Well the last one was hard for me to gage until I had been working on the site for a few months.

• Is your niche on the rise? One of the reasons that there are not too many off line games sites is that not too many people go searching for new games. When I was learning games to write about I asked my friends. When they learned about games they learned it from word of mouth. Not too many people search the internet for rules and if they do they are looking for something very specific. Its also hard to get a community for offline games, once someone has found what they where looking for they leave and rarely come back, with no community its hard to keep the site going and its even harder to get your users to submit content for the site.

So My games site probably will never have a community, and there is almost no chance that people will subscribe to the RSS feed. People come get what they want and leave.

So I should give up right? No! My games site is a perfect example of timeless content, the content on this site will still be valid in 5-10 years or more. As the amount of content increases the site will be come more valuable.

Also I enjoy writing about games, I’m learning a lot and I’m having fun writing about them. I won’t get a community but I will be the only person in the city that knows 10,000 different card and dice games, any game that I don’t know I should be able to make a good guess at the rules. I wont be famous on the internet like John chow dot com but I will be populare in my own city and thats enough for me.