How to Narrow Down Your Niche for Blog Profit Success
It seems impossible to narrow down your niche in blogging.
You’re afraid of being too narrow. You’re afraid of missing the opportunity to profit from other areas in the niche. But a broad niche is way too competitive to focus on. It’s so hard to choose what to do that it’s almost worth just giving it all up.
But in reality, it’s not worth giving it up because that missed opportunity might have gotten you paid and on your way to being your own boss.
Instead of giving up, you need to learn how to narrow down your niche, especially if you want to become a profitable blogger.
And it doesn’t have to be that difficult, either. In this free and easy-to-follow guide, I will show you exactly what to do to narrow down your blogging niche so you can start focusing on getting paid.
Why is it Important to Narrow Down Your Niche?
You’d be surprised how important it is to narrow down your niche in blogging.
Enhanced Focus
When you narrow down your niche, you allow yourself to focus harder on a specific topic.
A broad niche requires you to focus on a large amount of topics. You’ll spend more time trying to cover topics than knowing where your true expertise lies. It isn’t a good idea to focus on every single topic within a niche.
It’s important to be an expert on a specific topic. By narrowing down your niche, you can accomplish this task.
You must choose a specific topic within your niche so that you can focus on becoming an expert on that topic.
Improved Audience Targeting
When you narrow down your niche, you also narrow down your target audience.
In a broad niche, you really don’t truly understand who your audience is. This is because a broad niche covers too many topics and has too many segments of audiences for each topic. It’s difficult to determine who your true audience is when it’s that broad.
When you focus on a specific niche, understanding who your audience is becomes much easier. This allows you to target the right kind of readers with your blog content.
If you don’t narrow down your niche, you’ll never truly understand who your content is for.
Increased Niche and Authority Visibility
By specifically focusing on a certain topic within a broad niche, you make yourself more easily visible.
If you focus on a broad niche, you’re competing with the rest of your competitors. This makes you a needle in a haystack. It will become more difficult to be seen and noticed within your niche.
However, narrowing down your niche enhances your ability to be seen more clearly. This is because you’re focusing on something specific with a specific audience rather than a broad niche with a wider audience.
Narrowing down your niche allows you to become an authority much easier and faster.
Easier Engagement and Loyalty Impact
You’ll gain an easier approach to engaging with your followers when you narrow down your niche.
If you focus on a broad topic, it becomes difficult to engage with your audience. This is because you’ll struggle to identify which members of your audience you need to engage with specifically. A broad audience is too large and makes engagement confusing and complicated.
So, you should narrow down your blogging niche to focus on a specific segment of the audience. This allows you to engage directly with that segment and creates an easier loyalty impact between you and your audience.
Engagement is extremely important in blogging and niching down will help you accomplish this importance.
Better Conversion Rates
By narrowing down your blog niche, you’re able to convert readers into acting easier.
Focusing on a generic blog niche means you focus on a generic audience. You don’t fully understand your audience’s needs and wants. How can you understand them when their details are so broad?
But when you narrow down your niche, you focus on a specific audience. This allows you to better understand that audience and the details required to convert them to action.
You want your audience to perform actions such as subscribing to your mailing list or purchasing your product or service.
Easier to Innovate for the Niche
It’s easier to innovate when you narrow down your niche in blogging.
This is because you have a specific topic you’re focusing on. A general or broad topic has too many components to innovate. You could never really please the entire audience.
With a specific niche, you can innovate very precisely. You can create a core product or service specific to your specific niche.
Niching down lets you innovate easier to be able to make more money with your blog.
Profit Focus Opportunities
When you narrow down your niche, you’ll have a better understanding of how to make money with your blog.
Blogging about a general or broad niche is hard enough because it’s oversaturated. Trying to make money in that general niche will be one of the hardest things you do with your blog.
Focusing on a specific topic makes it easier to make money. You can strategize, you know your audience better, and you have fewer things to implement into your core products and services.
If you niche down, you’ll be setting yourself up for better profitability with your blog.
How to Choose a Niche for Your Blog
Before you narrow down your niche, you need to ensure that you have selected the right niche for your blog.
Determine Your Interests and Passions
Determining your niche starts with identifying your interests and passions in life.
You should never start a blog about a topic that you know nothing about. A lot of new bloggers make this mistake, and they typically fail within the first year because of it. You should be chasing your passions, not some trend.
Write down a list of the biggest passions and interests in your life. Focus on the ones you could easily talk about every day.
After you compile your list, you can move on to the next step.
Identify Your Expertise in Your Passions
The next step is to identify your expertise in each of the passions you’ve written down.
If you’re not familiar with your niche, how can you be an expert on it? You need to show some expertise in the niche you want to work with. If it’s a passion, chances are, you have some expertise invested in it.
Expertise is a simple process. It means that you know enough about a subject that you can help other people with it if they are lost.
When you identify the passions that you’re an expert at, you can move on to the next step.
Research the Niche Market Demand
Next, you need to research the market demand of your niche.
It’s important to choose a niche that has market demand. If it doesn’t, you won’t be able to build an audience or profit. Don’t make this critical mistake that many new bloggers make.
Research the internet to see if there is a market for your chosen niche. Look at social media, other blogs, discussion forums, newsletters, and especially the products and services offered by other blogs.
In this case, you want competition, and when you find it, you can move to the next step.
Analyze the Niche Competition
The next step is to analyze your competition.
This can also help you narrow down your niche. By understanding what gaps exist in the competition, you can fill those gaps on your own blog, giving you even more opportunities to narrow down your niche. It will also help you focus on content that no one else is talking about but should be talking about.
Thoroughly research other blogs in your niche. Research their writing, newsletters, communities, and even their social media behaviors.
After you get a better understanding of your competitors, you can move on to the next step.
Evaluate Monetization Potential for Niche
You need to make sure that your niche can actually be profitable.
During your competitor analysis, you should look for what products and services they offer. Is there a trend among more than one blog? Try to understand how much money they are making and how high of a demand their products are.
If your chosen niche doesn’t make money, it will be difficult to profit from it. You may need to narrow down your niche even further to make a good profit.
If your niche is profitable, you can move on to the next step.
Determine Your Target Audience
The next step is to determine your target audience.
If you narrow down your niche, you’ll have a better understanding of who to target with your content. This is because you’re writing for a specific group rather than a larger and broader audience. It’s easier to make a blog popular and profitable when you have a target audience.
Once you understand a niche market’s needs and wants, you’ll have identified your target audience. Then, you can cater to their needs and wants with your blog, content, and products.
After you determine your target audience, you can move on to the final step of choosing the right niche for your blog.
Strategize a Personal Connection with Your Audience
You need to be able to connect directly with your niche audience.
By directly connecting with your target market, you’ll be able to build relationships, create loyal followers, and convert to paid customers easier. You’ll be able to better understand your audience and know what they are looking for. It’ll be easier to accomplish your blogging goals.
To find your personal connection, try to understand their stories. Then, take their stories and connect them with your story.
Connecting with your audience is all about relating with them and resonating with what you have to say.
How to Narrow Down Your Niche for Greater Success
Now that you’ve chosen your niche, it’s time to narrow it down for even better blogging success.
Start with Broad Research
Start with researching the broader side of your main niche.
If you want to start a food blog, for example, start researching food blogs in general. Try to get an understanding of what the majority of food blogs are posting about. Look at what unique but popular food blogs are in the market.
Researching the broader side of the niche is important for your strategy. It can help you see what is oversaturated and what areas to avoid when you narrow down your niche.
It’s best to understand everything about the niche, even if you’ll be covering a more specific topic.
Analyze Your Niche Audience
Learn everything about your target audience.
Find your target audience and study them. Learn who they are, what they want, what they need, and how they want to get it. Learn where their from, ages, genders, and everything you can about them.
The more you understand your audience, the easier it will be to narrow down your niche. A blogger who knows exactly who they are writing for knows exactly how to sell to those people.
Knowing your audience sets you up for success.
Evaluate Gaps in Your Competition
Competitors are a good thing when you’re getting into the world of blogging.
Research your competitors like you would your audience. Understand what kind of content they are putting out and what the market demand is for it. Look for gaps or missing information in their content.
You’ll use the gaps of missing information to make your blog unique. You’ll cover similar topics but also cover things they are failing to put out there.
Information gap analysis will be your best friend as a blogger.
Determine a Greater Monetization Potential
Before you narrow down your niche, you need to determine the best ways to profit from your blog.
There are many monetization methods. You should diversify them. Typically, especially at first, there is no one way to make a lot of money with your blog.
To achieve larger monetization goals, you might need to focus on a few different methods of making smaller amounts of money. Make an effort to try a few different methods to see which ones work best for your blog.
You still need to narrow down your niche if you want a better chance of being able to define the exact types of things you want to do to make money with your blog.
Use a Sub-Niche Strategy
Use the sub-niche strategy for narrowing down your niche.
This strategy is when you take a broad niche and define the sub-niches underneath it. Choose the sub-niche that you and your passion resonate with the most. This will help you narrow down your niche where it needs to be.
If a food blog is the main niche, a sub-niche will be a blog about cooking pre-packaged camping meals. Of course, you can do a sub-niche from that to make it even better such as how to spruce up the camping meals and make them like you’re eating out at a restaurant.
A sub-niche will help you niche down and find your most passionate calling in blogging.
Look for Longevity of the Narrowed Niche
Before you decide to narrow down your niche, you need to understand the future of the niche.
How long will the sub-niche last? How long will you be able to post new content for that niche? Is the niche threatened with being phased out?
Answer the questions above and make sure you are choosing something worth getting into. A sub-niche should never be something temporary.
Understand the longevity of a niche before investing yourself fully into it.
Define Your Unique Value Proposition
If you really want to improve your blog, you must have a unique value proposition (UVP).
You need to show your readers the benefits of your blog, how your content will solve their biggest needs and wants in the niche, and fully understand the people you are selling your content to.
You can achieve your UVP by identifying your readers’ needs and fully understanding your competition’s proposition. You also need to make sure that your readers see your UVP and know what you offer by reading your content.
You’re selling your content even if you’re not really making any money from it.
How to Create an Avatar of Your Perfect Customer
In blogging, an avatar is essentially a detailed profile of the ideal reader who would benefit most from the content you’re offering. It’s important to identify your avatar if you truly want to succeed with your blog.
Conduct Thorough Audience Research
The first thing you need to do is thoroughly understand who your audience is.
You need to know everything about your audience, from their wants and needs to where they’re from. Look at every survey, analytical service, and engagement you can to gain an understanding of who consumes your content.
This will help you decide who exactly you want to target with your content. Not all of your audience will make it to the list of being an avatar.
If you don’t know your audience, you’ll never be able to learn who your avatar is.
Segment Your Blog Audience
Segmenting your blog audience is a crucial strategy for creating your avatar.
You need to gather your analytical data. Then, based on that data, you need to create different category segments. After that, you can start grouping your audience into different segments so that you can better define your audience.
With segmentation, you can better understand what group of people are consuming your content the most. You can also shape your content better when you understand what each segment enjoys seeing.
Segmentation is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the books because it works well.
Identify Audience Demographics
You need to identify your audience demographics to find your avatar.
These are characteristics like age, gender, location, education, occupation, income levels, and similar information. You can usually determine this information through analytical platforms such as GA4 and social media dashboards. If possible, get this from every source.
This will also help you with segmentation. You can use the data to separate different readers based on their demographics.
This step is fairly simple because of all the analytical techniques, but it is very important to do to define your avatar and narrow down your niche.
Understand Audience Goals and Motivations
You need to understand the goals and motivations of your audience to determine your avatar.
You need to know their exact wants and needs, their goals for searching for the content you create, and what motivates them to take your content seriously and act on it.
To obtain this information, you need to research and listen to your audience. You also need to survey and engage with your audience to obtain this critical intelligence.
You’ll need to master this step to fully narrow down your niche for blogging.
Determine Audience Sources of Information
You need to know where your audience is getting their information to develop your avatar.
Are they getting their information from social media? Are they getting information from Google search results? How are they getting the information from these sources?
When you determine your audience’s sources of information, you can better adapt how you will serve your avatar. This will also show you the best way to transmit your content because it might not always be through blogging.
Audience listening is a very important step for narrowing down your blogging niche.
Craft an Avatar’s Story
You need to finish determining your blogging avatar by creating the story that tells you who your avatar actually is.
To create the story, you need to take all the data you’ve learned and put it together. You need to decide the best story and character that will want to consume the kind of information that you are willing to share with your blog content. Once you determine that, you can start focusing on that audience and not focusing on the ones that really don’t match your goals and objectives.
Every blogger should have an avatar. This is especially important for bloggers who want to make money with their blogs.
You need to fully understand who it is you want to serve.
Profiting from a Narrowed Down Niche
Once you narrow down your niche, you should start focusing on monetizing your blog.
Develop Specialized Products and Services
I’ve told you to diversify your monetization strategies, and I’ll repeat that below, but you also need to be an innovator.
By inventing your own specialized products or services, you have something unique to offer to your blog audience. You should definitely develop your own products and services and improve them over time. Eventually, they will be your main focus for earning revenue and profit with your blog.
You should develop products and services that are specific to your niche. These are going to be best for what you’re trying to accomplish with your blog.
Think about the products and services that can solve your avatar’s needs and wants, and then create them.
Develop Your Authority and Reputation
When you narrow down your niche for blogging, you should be focusing on your reputation and authority.
Create consistent content. Ensure it fulfills the needs and wants of your target audience. Ensure it is of the highest quality and packed with value.
Start answering questions in your niche on sites like Quora, Reddit, and social media. Make sure the community of your niche is seeing you actively helping people.
These practices will help you build your authority and reputation which will effectively help you earn more money with your blog.
Conduct Targeted Marketing Strategies
Every marketing strategy you conduct needs to be at a specific target that coincides with your blogging niche.
You need to research and understand your target audience. You need to create an avatar of your customer or reader. The more information you gather, the better you’ll be able to know your audience and accomplish your goals.
Utilize marketing strategies to promote your blog and its content. You should also actively engage with your audience and be seen within your niche communities as much as possible.
Blindly marketing to everyone will never get you what you want, and it will only cost you more than you actually get out of it.
Offer the Best in Customer Service and Response Times
The faster you are to help people, the easier it will be for you to earn maximum profit potential.
You need to be fast with responding to questions and customer support. You need to give accurate solutions that are easy to do for your audience seeking your assistance. You want to be known for being the best in supporting your audience.
This will build trust among your community and niche audience. They’ll know that you’ll respond to issues and help them when they need it.
When providing customers with support and assistance, be polite, respectful, and friendly. This will reflect on you wholly.
Implement Dynamic Pricing Strategies
Create a product or service that will have a dynamic pricing strategy.
An example of this would be a private community where membership is $150 a year starting out. Then you announce the next year prices will increase to $300 a year. This will create a psychological approach for potential members to get in before the prices go up.
It is important to have a dynamic pricing strategy for your blogging profit processes. Market demand and price changes will require you to increase over time so you can continue to profit.
When you narrow down your niche, it’ll be easier to do this because you know your audience and what they’re willing to spend for similar products and services.
Diversify Revenue Streams
Don’t just stick with one revenue stream.
Try multiple streams. Try selling ads, using affiliate marketing, selling membership, and offering your services. You can even try smaller methods such as Buy Me a Coffee and Google AdSense practices.
The only way you’re going to make money with your blog is to accept different revenue streams. It will take a long time before you’re able to just focus on one product or service to sell on your blog.
In the meantime, why not focus on making as much money as you can with your blog?
Network and Collaboration
When you narrow down your niche, you also need to try to network and collaborate as much as you can.
You can network with just about any sub-niche within the broader side of the main niche because your niche can relate to them. It’s better to collaborate with niche blogs that relate more with yours but broader niche blogs are fine, too. Do blogging, social media, podcasting, and newsletter collaborations with one another.
Collaborating and networking will unlock many benefits for both you and your networking partner. The biggest benefit is traffic share and authority growth.
This should be done every chance you get, even if it’s just one guest blog post exchange a month with a collaborator.
Utilize Email Marketing
Use email marketing after you narrow down your niche.
You should start a newsletter the moment you start your blog. Your newsletter is just as important as your blog. You need to launch one and start marketing it through lead magnets and lead generation.
Social media algorithms can’t get in the way of your newsletter. That’s because you have direct contact with your audience and their email addresses.
Newsletters are definitely not dead, and not utilizing them can result in missing out on many great opportunities.
Create an Online Community
You need to create an online community around your blog.
This doesn’t exactly mean you need to create a discussion forum or a Facebook group. It means you need to develop a loyal readership and fan following around you, your blog, and your content. This happens a lot easier when you narrow down your niche to something targeted and specific.
You can create a community by tending to your audience’s needs and wants. You should also be real and personal with them.
A community of followers is hard to defeat when it comes to search engine optimization, social media algorithms, and even artificial intelligence.
Final Thoughts About How to Narrow Down Your Niche
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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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