Exciting news! I have moved blogs. I am in the process of slowly moving all the posts over. Please join me at MomOffTrack.com.

I have been busy interviewing lots of amazing bloggers who monetize and work with PR well over the last week (in between being sick, house hunting with my mom and attending services). So, I am THRILLED to have Rachel back with us this week talking about her AHA! Moment in how to stand out from the crowd.

There are hundreds and hundreds of mommy blogs out there, blogs filled with griping, blogs filled with humorous stories, blogs filled with delicious looking food and recipes.  There are so many blogs out there.  How can we make our blog stand out?
This is the question I asked myself for a number of weeks.  I worked on my layout, on my fan pages, on interaction… and then I realized I missed the point!  What will make my blog stand-out from the masses is finding a niche and building in it.

To do this I first have to ask myself, what am I interested in?  What would be the easiest thing for me to write about.  I obviously picked my kids, that is why I am a stay-at-home-mom, right?  Now in the realm of kids – that’s a really big market of moms who are also interested in “kids”.  How can I narrow down the field of my “niche”, all mommy bloggers have kids!  Can I limit it by age range?  How about by a special circumstance (like raising a child with food allergies or step-children, etc)?  Can I narrow my focus in my presentation style (ex: mommy-goof ups, or expert tips, or photo documentation)?  Once you have an idea of your niche or what the purpose of your blog is going to be you should come up with several search-able phrases that fit your niche.  I like to think of myself as a blogger to moms of preschoolers.  The search-able phrases that I came up with are: “Fun learning activities” or “learning activities for preschoolers” or “preschool arts and crafts”.  Now is the fun part.   We get to figure out if people even care about that niche.  It is one thing to create a niche about “learning activities for preschoolers” but if no one wants to read it, I might as well just keep a private notebook at home, rather than maintain a public blog!

To find out if your niche has any value, check out the Keyword tool from Google Adwords.  It is free!  Type in your key phrases and add the cost per click (CPC) function.  Then look, are people searching for that phrase?  My keyword phrase “learning activities for preschoolers” is rarely ever searched and when it is the CPC is low, meaning it is not a valuable term for me to be investing my time and energies on – I probably won’t be able to find advertisers willing to sponsor my posts.  I can change it to “kids learning activities” or to “preschool learning games” and suddenly people are actually looking for the information.  For me, I blog so people can read it!  By tuning my blog towards a niche market I am able to get traffic that is looking for what I have to offer and will hopefully come back as I fulfilled their informational need.

The final step, once you have figured out what niche would interest you and what phrases you would target, is to come up with 50 potential posts.  Just brainstorm and fill up a notebook sheet.  Are you having problems coming up with 50 ideas?  Well, maybe you should change your niche to something more interesting to you.  Happy blogging!

Rachel is mommy to three preschoolers and blogs about their learning adventures, fun kids activities and tips that help her keep her sanity at Quirky Momma.  Have any blogging questions?  Feel free to contact her via twitter @quirkymommasite