HOW TO CHOOSE A NICHE FOR YOUR BLOG
When you first start blogging, you’ll hear a lot about choosing a niche. Your niche encompasses both the subject of your blog and the target audience who will be reading it.
Choosing the right niche will help make writing your blog both enjoyable and profitable, but the question remains: how do you choose the right niche?
There’s no one formula for finding the perfect niche, but the following guidelines will help you to pick a strong niche for successful blogging.
Pick a Subject You Care About
Choosing a subject that you’re passionate about is certainly an important consideration when choosing a niche. If you want to have a successful blog, you’re going to be writing regularly (at least once a week) for a long time. Your content will become dry and boring very quickly if you’re not personally interested in your topic. Your readers will absolutely notice if you are not excited about your topic.
Of course, there will be days when writing a blog post isn’t your favorite activity, but overall, your blog needs to give off a sense of expertise and enthusiasm. The more you know and care about a subject, the better you can write about it, and the more readers will want to read your content. Choosing a niche you’re passionate about will also help to motivate you and keep you writing in the long term.
Choose a Profitable Niche
If you want to make money from your blog, you also need to choose a niche that has some potential for profit. This means deciding on a niche that a substantial number of people are also interested in. One way you can figure this out is by using a keyword analysis tool, such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner or Copyblogger’s Keyword Research. Try entering in keywords related to your subject and see how many searches people are doing for those terms. You want to choose something that’s getting at least a few hundred monthly searches to ensure that some traffic comes to your site.
To choose a profitable niche, you’ll also want to consider the potential for advertising. In order to effectively monetize your blog, you’ll need to find advertisers who want to reach your target audience. Off of the top of your head, can you think of at least 3 companies who might be interested in advertising on posts about your niche topic? If not, you might not have much potential for advertising revenue, and you might need to come up with a different niche.
Choose a Niche of the Right Size
One of the trickiest things about choosing a niche for your blog is picking something that’s the right size. If you choose something too general, you risk being lost in a sea of search results. If you choose something too specific, your target audience may be too small.
When you’re coming up with an idea, try creating a list of variants of the same niches, ranging from the most general to the most specific. Then you’ll want to pick something around the middle. Niches such as “Travel” and “Business Marketing” are likely too broad. You’ll be competing with thousands of other websites with the same keywords, and you’ll miss out on readers who are looking for something more specific. “Budget Backpacking” and “Marketing for Landscaping Businesses” are more specific but still have significant target audiences.
With a more specific niche, you’ll have less competition and are more likely to draw in readers who are looking for more targeted information. Just be careful not to go too narrow, as you’ll potentially be writing hundreds of posts on this topic.
Remember that you can tweak your niche a bit as you build your blog. If you start with too wide of a focus, you can decide to make it more specific and write posts within a smaller area of interest. Conversely, if you realize your niche is too small, you can add a variety of posts to broaden your subject. This is easiest to do if you choose a niche to start with that has a bit of flexibility for expansion or contraction.
If you do your research and choose something that you’re passionate about, your niche is likely to help make your blog successful.
Chapter:
- WHY START A BLOG?
- HOW TO CHOOSE A NICHE FOR YOUR BLOG
- CHOOSING A BLOGGING PLATFORM
- SETTING UP A WORDPRESS BLOG
- HOW TO COME UP WITH IDEAS FOR BLOG CONTENT
- HOW TO WRITE ENGAGING BLOG POSTS
- MONETIZING YOUR BLOG
- FIVE BLOGGING MISTAKES TO AVOID
- GENERATING TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG
