Find A Niche For Your Blog: Step-by-Step Guide

Blogging has become extremely popular today, but not all blogs are successful. When trying to find a niche for your blog, you want to choose one that will get traffic but also has the potential to make money.

Many people are unsuccessful because they don’t choose the right niche for their blog. They may not be passionate enough about the topic, not know enough about it or not really know how to make money from it. If you want to be a successful blogger, choosing the right niche is crucial.

Key considerations when picking a niche are your interests, the level of competition, monthly searches, money-making potential and long-term potential.

1. List Your Interests And Experience

The first step when trying to find a niche for your blog a list of all your interests. To make this list, think about your hobbies, how you enjoy spending your free time, the books you read and the TV programs you enjoy watching. An interesting exercise is to look at some of the recent Google searches you have made.

If you have little interest in a topic, you will not be able to sustain the effort required day after day to make it successful, especially when you seem to be putting in a lot of effort and you don’t see the results straight away.

Gina Michaels, who blogs for a top-rated assignment writing service company has this advice, “Don’t worry if you think you don’t know enough about a topic – you can learn as you go along and your audience will enjoy the journey with you.”

When you’re passionate about your topic, it is easier to connect with an audience. You’re less likely to run out of ideas or abandon your blog. You will be able to continue writing day after day without losing interest and keep learning and developing your skill sets within your niche.

You may be able to utilize your experience and skills to teach others. Do you embroider? Are you a carpenter? Are you skilled at DIY? Perhaps you have learned some valuable life lessons as a parent. If there are people who can benefit from your experience and skills, you have a potential audience.

2. Examine The Competition

If you’re a passionate gardener, and gardening tops your list of interests, should you go ahead and start a gardening blog? Google gardening, and you’ll be completely scared off by the number of other gardening blogs, some of which are majorly successful.

If you really want to have a gardening blog, you will have to drill right down into the topic to find a niche within that broader niche. For example, container gardening would be better than gardening but even that niche may be saturated, and you have explored all the nooks and crannies of that niche to come up with the idea that could be profitable.

3. Strike The Right Balance

Perhaps you have an interest on your list that is not so common, like making wallets from leather offcuts. You google that and find that there’s hardly any competition. You get excited, only to realize that you need to consider the demand. How many people want to find out how to make wallets from leather scraps every month?

If your blog’s niche is just too small, growth will be limited, and you may struggle to increase your traffic and even to continue to find blog topics to write about. Looking at a keyword research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner (free), can give you a good idea of how many people are searching for specific keywords.

Looking at books that have been published within a niche is also helpful. If a book has been published by one of the big publishers, such as Penguin, you will know that there’s a decent audience for the topic.

What you need to do is find a topic that strikes a balance between your interests, the level of competition and current trends. The topic can’t be too broad or too small. Too broad and you have too much competition, too small and you don’t have a big enough audience. It can be quite difficult to strike this balance.

4. Think About The Profit Potential

You may come up with a niche for your blog that you’re really passionate about, but if you can’t think of any products or services you can sell, you will not make any money. It may help to go to Amazon and have a look through the products available in a niche you’re considering to become an Amazon affiliate blogger. This may just give you the inspiration, especially if you see a particular product you can visualize selling on your website.

You can use Google Trends to find out whether an interest in a particular product is increasing or decreasing. For instance, selfie sticks were popular at one point, but interest has declined. You may have been on to a good thing selling a certain popular product for a while, but as interest declines, so your niche falls flat.

5. Think About Long-Term Possibilities

You need to consider whether the topic you have chosen can last the distance. If you choose to start a blog about a current trend, there’s no guarantee that it will last. It may be successful in the short term, but you won’t be able to count on ongoing monetary success. An evergreen topic will always be relevant and continue to bring in money year after year.

6. Think About Your Ideal Audience

Ask yourself who would benefit most from your service or product. Who are the people you most closely empathize with and understand? You have to be able to identify strongly with your audience and have insight into the challenges they face and their desires.

It helps to understand how they dress, what they eat, what they do for entertainment and much more. Unless you understand them, you’re unlikely to be able to provide them with the solutions they want. A good tip is to give your customer a name and describe him or her in great detail.

7. Create A Mind Map

Once you have narrowed down your options, it helps to create a mind map. This can even trigger ideas you may not have considered. You can write down each topic and then add applicable words such as passion, expertise, and profit.

If you can mark off all three of these factors, you will probably narrow your list right down to one or two ideas. Free Mind is open source mind mapping software you can use.

8. What Can You Bring To A Niche?

This may be the deciding factor in choosing your niche. If you believe you have something new and fresh to offer, this is an advantage. That said, don’t worry because you can be successful anyway – as long as you do what you do better than your competitors.

Finding the right niche may not be as easy as you imagined but if you go through a logical, thoughtful process, you’re more likely to find one that strikes the right balance. Many people do not get it right the first time but go on to become successful by applying what they learned in their first attempts.

Don’t be held back by your fears and spend so much time trying to find a niche that you never begin. Go through the process suggested above, take the bull by the horns and choose a name for your blog.

Remember that niche marketing does not limit you. It means that don’t have to spread yourself too thin, you have a small pool of potential clients, and it’s easier to become well known in your niche. Stay flexible, listen to feedback from your followers and you will discover more about what they want and what you can offer them. This will help you to fine-tune your niche as you go along.

Author Bio

Mary Whitman is a freelance writer and blogger based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is a Master of Arts. In her spare time, she enjoys talking about Sustainable Development and writing essays.

The post Find A Niche For Your Blog: Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on BlogPress.

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Find A Niche For Your Blog: Step-by-Step Guide was first posted on July 18, 2018 at 10:54 am.


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