How to Choose the Right Blogging Niche

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Choosing the right blogging niche and providing consistent content will earn you more site traffic from returning visitors, a steady growth in readership and maybe even blogging income.

If you want to start a blog, the first step to making it successful (and potentially profitable) is to choose a niche.

Why is this so important? Can’t you just start a “My Musings” blog and fill in the blanks with whatever your heart desires? You can—but you’re not likely to be very successful, or earn any money from it.

The truth is that when people search for a blog, they usually have some idea of what they are looking for. Most readers  want to find a blog on a specific topic, rather than just browse for anything that catches their eye.

As over 90% of web traffic is referred through search engines, this is doubly true.  People using Google, Bing or Yahoo are searching for something in particular by definition.

The most frequented blogs are those that find a niche. This is the practice of having an overarching theme for your blog, which is usually obvious from its title.

If you choose the right niche and provide consistent content, your blog will earn more hits from returning visitors, grow in readership, and maybe even set you on the path to earning some money.

The Three Secrets of Great Blogs

The niche you choose should meet three criteria. It needs to be something you’re familiar with, is at least somewhat popular, and has monetization potential.

First, Think Long Term

A key thing to realize when choosing a topic for your blog is that to have any chance of success, you have to post consistently—week after week, month after month, year after year. Even if you maintain a grueling posting schedule, you’ll probably not experience success immediately, in 6 months, or even in 2 years.

Under these conditions, even the Isaac Asimovs of content output might become discouraged. You can avoid this fate by choosing a topic that you have a passion for.

How can you find a blogging niche you are interested in?

By definition, your hobbies are things you enjoy doing, so they’re a good place to start. Blog topics can include anything from cooking to skydiving and extreme sports.

Another source of potential niches is personal goals you are working towards right now, such as earning a doctorate.

If you’re still having trouble coming up with a possible niche, try brainstorming. Although you might associate the term with team brainstorming sessions, you can easily brainstorm on your own.

Open a computer document (or get a piece of paper, if you prefer) and write several questions to which the answers are possible niches for your blog, such as “What do I love doing the most?”, “What do I know a lot about?”, “Which achievements am I proud of?” (an excellent source of possible topics), or “What are the challenges I’m facing in my life right now?”

After you have some questions, spend some time thinking freely. Write the first things that pop into your head, without pausing to judge if they would really make good blog topics. After a few sessions of this, you should have quite a few potential niches.

The first stage of evaluating these potential topics is to consider each in turn and ask yourself if you know enough about the niche in question.

To be a good blogger, this is a must. Many people have an interest in coin collecting, for example, but fewer could recognize a particular unique and valuable coin among a set of common ones.

It’s experts like the latter who are in demand in the blogging world. Your blog’s potential readers are looking for content written by someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Being familiar with a given topic also makes it easier to come up with ideas and write content posts — the meat of the blogger’s trade. Consider, evaluate, and reject brainstormed topics you aren’t well-informed in.

Ultimately, almost any topic can make for a potential blogging niche, so long as there are people who want to read about it. And this brings us to the next part of our selection process.

Second, Consider Popularity

Fundamentally, your content exists to reach as many readers as possible. If your niche doesn’t have much of a potential audience, your skilfully crafted blog will remain a minnow in the sea of web content.

This will be true no matter how talented and enthusiastic you are about your chosen subject. In that situation, you are more than likely to give up without having earned any money.

To avoid this fate, the niche you choose should be one with at least some amount of popularity on the web.

To gauge this popularity, the tools of search engine optimization (SEO) can come in handy. Simply put, SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages’ rankings in search results.

One SEO tool we can use for evaluating our possible blog niches is Google Trends.

One by one, input potential niches you have chosen into the search bar and look at the graphs of their popularity over time, as measured by the number of people searching for them on Google.

The numbers are relative, but they still give a good indication of whether a topic is becoming more or less popular—a niche that’s gaining in popularity is obviously a better choice for a blogging niche.

In addition, by inputting two topics at the same time, you can compare their popularity.

Once you’ve found a popular niche you’re passionate about, it’s on the to the final part of the selection process: evaluating monetization potential.

Third, Money Matters

Although not everyone aims to make money from blogging, or at least not when starting out, it’s certainly something to consider when choosing the best blogging niche for you.

There are several ways to earn money from your blog content. The first and most obvious is through direct advertising such as Google AdSense, and in that case the most important variable is the number of clicks your ads receive (which is largely determined by your total blog traffic).

As I said above, the more popular your niche, the more room you have to grow, and the more money you can potentially make.

When considering other ways to monetize your blog, some research is helpful. Look up other blogs in the niches you’re considering, and see how they make money. This can include selling ebooks and merchandising (which can be very profitable), paid member-only content, and affiliate programs with external companies.

Although you probably won’t have figures for how much money your potential competitors are making, if many blogs in the niche you’re considering are pursuing monetization and look like they’re succeeding, you’re likely on the right track.

Deciding What Matters Most

By now, you should have a short list of potential blogging niches to choose from. Your final choice will be the one that best fits the three criteria of passion, popularity, and marketability.

I would recommend valuing passion most of all. You’ll likely not enjoy the experience of creating content if you’re not writing about something you are genuinely inspired by. This will make you quit eventually.

Once you’ve chosen your blogging niche, it’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts of setting your blog up—choosing a blogging platform and domain, installing a theme, and so on.

While this is beyond the scope of this post, this article has a step-by-step guide—it’s intended for fashion blogs, but the basics are applicable to a blog on any topic.

Some final advice: follow your heart, and keep writing even when it seems no one is reading. Even the greatest blogs start out small.

 

This blog post was written by Irma Stefanova, Fashion Blogger at https://heartifb.com.