How to Find Your Blog Niche
Have you found your blog niche?
Is not being able to find a niche for your blog dragging you down? There are so many industries and topics to choose from, aren’t there? And which one matters because of how much profit you can make, right? It can drive a person crazy! Has it driven you crazy yet?
Don’t go crazy… It’s not as difficult as it looks. I can help you find the perfect blog niche in this article, and that’s why I wrote it, to begin with. Let’s get you niched up with ease.
What is a Blog Niche?
A blog niche can be simplified as a specialized area of expertise or a topic.
Bloggers are typically either niche bloggers or non-niche bloggers. A non-niche blog would be a blog whose posts are about all distinct kinds of topics with no real focus. Most personal bloggers are non-niche bloggers. Bloggers who focus on a niche will post about specific topics.
This blog focuses on blogging topics. The niche of this blog is “blogging.” It’s an example of a broad niche topic because I cover various aspects of blogging.
However, if I wanted to niche down further, I could cover a specific topic in blogging. Many bloggers do that. We’ll get more into niching down further in this article.
A niche is simply a topic or industry that you specifically focus on with your blog.
Why Find a Blog Niche?
If you want to make a personal blog about life and you have no intentions to make the blog popular or make money with it, then it’s fine not to choose a niche.
But if you want to create a popular blog and if you want to make money with your blog at some point, you’ll need to focus on a niche.
A niche will help you focus on a specific topic. It will make it easier to concentrate on a target audience. It will make it dependable to be able to earn money with your blog. With a niche, you’ll have an audience waiting to see the content you produce and people ready to spend money on your blog.
People are not favoring and spending money on blogs that have no real organization or topics that they’re focusing on.
If you want to make a business out of your blog, you’ll definitely need to have a good niche for your content.
Examples of Popular Blog Niches
There are many different blog niches on the internet that are popular and profitable.
It doesn’t always mean that those niches will be right for you. We will get more into what niche you should choose in the next section of this guide.
But for now, let’s take a look at some of the most popular and profitable blog niche topics being used on the internet.
- Personal Finance – In this day and age, people are always looking for ways to save and spend their money more efficiently. You can help them with a blog based on personal finance tips. Some of the sub-niches could include taxes, debt management, credit cards, real estate investing, stock market investment, cryptocurrency, and retirement.
- Health and Fitness – Everyone wants to have a healthy and fit lifestyle, but they often need help and advice from those who are good at it. A health and fitness-related blog is a perfect niche to start for this. You can get more specific by focusing on topics like running for beginners, indoor cycling, healthy eating, and supplement decisions.
- Food and Drink – Food and drink blogs are some of the most popular types of blogs on the internet. This is a competitive niche because it’s one of the most profitable ones on the internet. So, you’ll definitely want to focus on a sub-niche like specialty coffee, craft beer, desserts, grilling, budget eating, and diverse cooking in the home.
- Travel – The travel blog niche is another popular and very profitable topic to concentrate on. If you travel a lot, you can easily turn a travel blog niche into a full-time gig. But you still might want to focus specifically on a sub-niche like local travel destinations, budget traveling, bike touring, glamping, and international travel.
These are only a few of the popular and profitable blog niche options available. But I don’t want to list too many because, in the next section, we’re going to choose your best niche, which might be different from the ones listed above.
How to Find Your Blog Niche
Finding your perfect blogging niche might sound like a challenging task. However, it’s not that difficult if you keep strategy in mind. Strategy is simply planning for the future of your blog.
The first step is identifying your biggest interests, hobbies, and passions in life. Mine have always been blogging, cycling, hiking, and creating online communities. Identify these passions and write them down on a list. Focus on the ones you care about the most. What ones do you associate with every day?
Next, you need to determine your expertise around the passions you’ve listed. I’ve been blogging for over two decades. I started blogging before it was called a blog. I’ve been cycling and hiking for around 12 years, and I do it multiple times a week. I even have my own guided hiking and biking service. What is your expertise around the topics you’ve made a list of? How well do you know those topics?
And finally, try to determine how often you could talk about each of the passions you listed. I can talk about blogging, hiking, and cycling all day long. I love doing those things that much. If you feel the same way about the passions you’ve listed down, then you’re one step closer to discovering your perfect blog niche.
But finding the best niche doesn’t stop at identifying a topic that you’re extremely enthusiastic about. There is a little bit more to it.
Is Your Blogging Niche Marketable?
Your potential blog niche needs to be marketable in order to make it on the internet.
From your list of passions, you need to research each one to determine if a market exists for them. So, do each of them have an audience? Go where your audience may be. This will include:
- Social Media – You need to ensure that there is a good-sized audience for your potential niche on social media platforms. Check each platform to see what kind of audience is present.
- Online Communities – Check various online communities like discussion forums, modern communities, newsletters, Quora questions, and Reddit to see if communities exist for your blog topic.
- Competition – Research the competition around your potential niche. There should be competition for it; otherwise, you might choose a low-audience niche that will be extremely difficult to market.
Too many new bloggers make the mistake of thinking that a niche is too oversaturated. There is plenty of room for everyone on the internet. You just have to find your unique value, which we will get into later on in this guide. Competition is important, and you want to make sure that there is plenty of it.
You should also research the current content gaps for your potential niche. What areas of expertise, problems, or unanswered questions are present in your niche? If there are gaps present, it will be easier for you to start blogging and trying to fill in those gaps.
Once you determine if your potential blog niche is marketable or not, you can move on to the next crucial step – profitability.
Is Your Blog Niche Profitable?
Your blog niche needs to be profitable. You might not have a plan to make that much money, but as your blog grows, you’ll have to pay more to keep it online. You should at least have the goal to keep the blog paying for itself.
Profit is important for blogging. It’s important in many ways, including:
- It allows you to cover the costs of the growing expenses your blog will have as it becomes more popular. I pay over $200 a month for my hosting service. My blog is currently paying for itself, plus giving me profit.
- Profit helps you make more money to better your life. You can treat it like a supplemental income or even make it your full-time job if you work hard enough for it.
- A profitable blog will continue to keep the blogging industry profitable as a whole. Blogs that make money help ensure that future bloggers can still turn a profit with their content. You’ll help the blogging community as a whole by having a profitable blog niche.
You’ll need to first determine the ways in which you can monetize your blog. There are many different options for profiting with a blog. You can use one, some, or even all the options if it’s appropriate.
You can sell advertising or even use an advertising service like Google AdSense, do affiliate marketing, sell digital or physical products and services, sell membership to an online community, or even do a paid newsletter. There are a multitude of ways to make money blogging.
Do some research into your competition for each potential blog niche you might consider. Determine what they are doing to make money. Ask yourself if you can do the same thing but offer a more valuable benefit than they offer.
If they’re making good money with their blog, then that means that there is a good chance you can be doing the same with yours.
Niching Down is Important
Once you determine what your potential list of niches can be based on how enthusiastic you are about them, if they’re marketable, and if they can turn a profit – then you need to also ask yourself if you need to niche down.
Niching down is when you choose a more specific topic within your main niche.
On my upcoming cycling blog, I’ll be specifically focusing on cycling tips for beginner cyclists. The main niche will be beginner cycling tips. That’s a good example of using a sub-niche.
My hiking blog is a locally focused sub-niche. I specifically focus 90% of the content on the Shawnee National Forest and State Parks in southern Illinois, which is where I live. I have been able to dominate this market in my area and even built a well-known hiking blog as a whole because of my efforts to niche down.
If there is an area within your potential blog niche that you know a lot about, consider making that area the focus of your blog as a whole.
Niching down is typically how you stand out in a crowd. If your niche has a lot of competition, it will be difficult to be seen as an expert in that niche because there are so many experts out there. But if you specifically focus on a sub-niche that isn’t as competitive, you can be known as the expert of that sub-niche a lot quicker than the broad niche.
Niching down can always be a pivoting move that you decide to do later in your blogging career. It won’t be such a notable change if it’s a sub-niche of what you are already blogging about. So, don’t feel like you need to rush into it, but if you’re ready to niche down, then you should definitely do so and start building that expertise up.
Becoming a Blog Niche Expert
After you choose what blog niche you want to focus on based on all the steps you took to find it, there is one more thing to do.
You need to become an expert in the niche.
You don’t have to be an expert right off the bat. But you definitely should enhance your expertise around your niche.
The more people in your audience see you as an expert, the more likely they will flock to your blog. But you can’t just be any typical expert.
You need to be friendly and easy to have a good relationship with. You need to be fine with answering the same questions over and over again. You need to compliment people and build a community of followers who trust and love you. Many blog niche experts fail at this – don’t be one of those.
Becoming an expert isn’t that difficult, either.
You just have to dedicate some time each day to learning something new. You can learn something new in ten minutes or ten hours. Just dedicated a little bit of time each day. But how do you get the information to learn something new? Another easy solution:
- Newsletters – Subscribe to every newsletter you can find that relates to your niche. Scan through each issue and look for something new.
- Blogs – Subscribe to other blogs in your niche. Read what they have to say and pay attention to what is being asked in the comments.
- Courses – If you can find some courses based on your niche topics, take them. Take free and paid courses and learn something new.
- YouTube University – YouTube is a fantastic way to learn something new about your blog niche on a daily basis. And it’s free at that.
- Social Media – Subscribe to various competitors on social media. You can learn more about your niche from those who are already experts at it.
- Keyword Research – You should research keywords you want to target with your blog content. This will help you become an expert on those topics.
- Podcasts – These are wonderful for learning something on the go or in the gym. Listen to ones about your niche, and you might learn something new.
- Practice – Practice makes perfect when it comes to becoming a niche expert. The more you engage in your niche, the better you will be at it.
And finally, get out there and get involved in your community. The only way people are going to know about you is if you are seen in the community.
Final Thoughts About Blog Niches
The most crucial step of blogging is choosing the best blog niche for you. But you can make a dire mistake if you don’t follow the standards mentioned above. Luckily, the steps above make it simple to find the best niche that works for you.
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About the Author
Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers who follow this blog. Shawn also offers various services for extra help in content creation and blogging.
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