As you begin your journey to become a blogger, you’ll find numerous articles that’ll mention the word niche.
It is so crucial that choosing your niche is seen as the first step towards your success. It is also one of the toughest questions you’ll face before you start blogging.
In this post, I’ll help you understand what it means, why it is so important, and how to figure out your niche to start blogging.
To help you further, I’ll also explain how you can find your niche and get started with your own blog.
Let’s get started.
What is a Blogging Niche?
A niche is the primary concentrate of your blog.
A niche in blogging is the specific topic on which you will write blog posts. It means you write only on the topics that can relate to each other and your targeted audience.
You targeted audience will have the same likes, dislikes, choice, and interest.
Here’s an example:
If you are a fashion designer and want to start a blog about fashion, then the niche of your blog will be fashion.
Similarly, if you find a website that publishes articles only about Thai food, then Thai food is the niche of that website.
Whatever content you create should be relevant to your niche. The specific topic which targets a particular audience.
Why Is It Important For You To Pick A Particular Niche?
That’s a question you might ask. Well, why do I need to pick a particular niche?
You may blog without sticking to a niche. That’s up to you.
But often, these types of blogs aren’t successful. I remember back in 2015 when I started my first blog, I published completely random content. And barely anyone came to read it, except bots.
By writing on random topics, you make your blog uncertain. At times your reader may find some excellent articles and times your reader might get confused.
There’s no guarantee that someone who read your post about biking would like to see how you went scuba diving. Although there are a good number of travel bloggers that do that, that’s too niche. They won’t publish cooking articles on their blog.
So, by sticking to a niche, you can make sure that someone who comes to your blog first time, might visit it again and again.
Picking a single niche also helps Google and other search engines understand your content and blog. Blogs on a random topic often struggle to get a constant higher ranking in SERPs.
Also, If you launch digital products such as eBooks or some online courses in the future, you will already have a targeted audience interested in buying your product.
Broad or Narrow: What Niche Should You Pick for Your Blog?
Genuinely, It is a question you need to ask yourself.
Because you are the only one who knows the answer.
Too narrow a niche is, the lesser people will come to your blog.
That means you’ll have a little bit lower-traffic if you write in a small niche. But there are benefits too. You’ll drive insanely targeted traffic.
People willing to invest their time and money in your blog content and your product.
If you choose to blog in a broad niche, you’ll have more space for people with different but relative interest. But you need to be careful with that because the more extensive your niche will be, the more diverse your audience will become.
You can start writing about almost anything. You don’t need to prove you’re an expert to blog about something.
Initially, this is not a problem. But as you’ll start to grow big, you’ll find it difficult to entertain and satisfy all of your audience. It will also hurt your SEO a little bit, and It would also become harder for you to monetize your content.
So, it is always better and recommended to start a blog somewhere between your preferred interest and what your audience will like. A niche between narrow and broad. A perfect balance (pretty much like what Thanos said in the Avengers…).
How To Choose Your Blogging Niche (As A Beginner)
Now, you know why it is essential to select and stick to a niche.
But choosing your niche can be very daunting and sometimes even frustrating.
The right way of finding your first niche is pondering.
I’ll try to make it easy for you. I’ll show you how to identify your niche step by step. I found this magical yet practical way while I was filling my year planner.
- Grab a pen and a notebook.
- Find a quiet place and sit back in a relaxed position.
- Start thinking over your expertise and try to figure out what you are competent at.
- Write all of the ideas, topics, tasks, and everything you are good at in your notebook.
You can come up with as many ideas as you want. But make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself.
When you’ve noted down all of your ideas circle out the top 10 ideas you are most passionate about.
Out of those 10 ideas of which you are most passionate about, circle the top 5 of the ideas you think you can write about effortlessly.
Got those 5 ideas?
Now go through each one of those 5 ideas and observe if you can find an identical topic in all of them? A topic that somehow connects each one them?
I know it feels weird, but it works!
All your top 5 ideas are relatively similar in some context.
The context, as well as your top 5 ideas, are your niche options.
But wait, you can’t blog about them… Not yet.
You have to identify if there is an audience present for your topic or not.
If you blog about a topic that you like, but no one else is interested in it, you’ll have no audience. And you’ll not get any traffic, no revenue and no traction to keep you passionate enough for blogging consistently.
There’s a quick and straightforward solution for this situation. You need to find a niche that you are passionate about and is popular too. And the best way to see this niche is by doing keyword research.
See how you can find a profitable niche using a topic research tool:
Step 1
Go to Ubsersuggest. It is a free SEO tool that helps you find content ideas.
Step 2
Type in one of your top 5 ideas you discovered by the process I demonstrated above. Hit the search button to begin the process. Repeat the same process for all 5 of your ideas.
Step 3
Once you have run a search, the tool will show you how many searches (search volume) your ideas generate a month. It will also show you alternative keyword ideas that you can choose as your initial blog posts!.
This report will give a better picture of what niche you should really choose.
You can perform the same search using a different tool called BuzzSUMO. It works a little bit similar to Ubersuggest, except it shows the social shares and mentions as the popularity of the keywords.
Here are a few tips that might help you. Choose a topic which has:
- More than 10,000 monthly search volume.
- That has a ranking chance of more than 60%
- That has the SEO difficulty below 40%
Finding a niche this way will ensure you get decent results in your first few months of blogging.
If you couldn’t come up with any ideas, you can use any of these tools to find new blog ideas. You can also find many niche ideas on Zest.is. It is a tool that aggregates some valuable and popular blogging sites in one content stream
When you’ve found your niche, signup for BlueHost to start a new blog.
For a detailed, step by step tutorial on how to start a blog, check out our ultimate guide to starting a WordPress blog.
You can also join the Project24, a guide that shows you how to find your niche and get started into making money from it.
Simply remember, your niche will decide whether you succeed or you fail as a blogger. Choosing a niche, you are passionate about will help you go from no one to become an expert.
And when you start getting the traffic you’re ready to monetize. Check out our guide on how to make money blogging:
If you choose to blog in a niche just because your friend or your inspiration in doing so, you might end up not doing so well. After all, blogging is all about passion.
Let me know your niche in the comments.
Leave a Reply