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A lot of people that I know have been considering launching a blog of their own, be it for fun, necessity or money, what most of them ask me, however, is in what area or niche to start in. Inspired by their questions I’ve decided to do a write up on the matter, to thoroughly guide anyone that considers opening a new blog, thorough the delicate process of choosing a blog niche. First thing first, let’s do a quick definition of the word niche.

A niche is a certain area of expertise in which you’ll exercise your skills, basically a niche is sorta’ a topic or theme, but no quite. The main difference between a niche and a topic is specialization and focus, which leads to a smaller audience, then the broader topic, but that exact specialization and focus ensures a more loyal readership. As a example you can take the Internet as a topic and Blogging as a niche.

Choose Wisely!

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If you want to open a new blog and you’re a bit confused on what topic to start on, the first thing I’d tell you is do whatever you’re passionate and good at. No hesitations. There’s no sense in starting a blog in a niche where you’re both not interested and unexperienced, the end result is a short lived blog, in which the only thing you’d manage to accomplish is wasting time. Eventually most people that reach this point try to change their niche, but that often leads to even more complications.

So what you have to keep in mind is to choose wisely. However your wisdom will often be clouded by money, especially if you’re looking for a get rich quick niche. First thing first, there isn’t such a thing. Every niche requires a great deal of dedication and time investment, but some are more or less accessible then others. Here’s a few questions you need to ask yourself before choosing your niche:

1. What are my interests, hobbies or passions? This is the most important question you need to ponder, when thinking to start a new blog. Because you’ll be blogging about something you’ll actually enjoy and care about, you’ll fail to lose interest; great help on the long run. Plus because you’ll be passionate about your work, you’re also be enthusiastic about it, I can always tell when somebody really means the things he writes about and so can most of your readers.
2. What am I skilled at? If you already are trained and prepared in a particular field you can always convert that knowledge into blog posts, thus saving all that time needed to document yourself. Also someone who knows what he’s talking about will always be looked at as an authority, an highly important factor for guaranteed success.
3. Will I have enough time? Time is something must of us don’t have and a blog can be pretty consuming, especially if you’re authoring multiple blogs. Be sure when looking at a niche for a potential blog, to make some assumptions on how much time you’ll have to spend on it. Some niches are less time consuming then others, depending on their difficulty rank. A certain niche may require more research or more in depth articles, so be careful what you pick or else you risk having a inactive blog on your hands.
4. Will I be able to come up with posts? A key ingredient to a blog’s success is a constant flow of fresh and remarkable content. If you can’t supply that, at a regular basis, you won’t be able to keep your readership and consequently your blog will die. So be careful you either make sure you know enough about the respective niche or have access to enough information to keep you going for a very long time.
5. Is the niche too saturated? The last few years have seen a explosion, in number, of blogs, that lead to a lot of market points being over flooded. A very popular topic means there’s a very large readership hovering around it, but it also means there are already bloggers that hold monopolies over it. The idea is not to jump into a niche where everybody’s had a piece of the cake, but rather find a area on the web where there’s a small audience with little to no competition; you’ll be far better of being a fish in the pond, then one in the ocean. This all becomes clearer if you have a basic understanding of the law of supply and demand.
6. What’s the competition like? There’s no use in venturing in a niche where you’ve got no chance of competing what so ever or the cost of competing is higher then the benefits. Just open a search engine in your browser and type the keywords you’re going after, the search engine will then return your top competitors. When looking at the competition you have to look at what he’s done to get on “top of the food chain,” from humble beginnings to present day; study it well and find it’s weak spots and mistakes. Then you need to ask yourself if you’re able to copy your competition’s success, avoid making their mistakes and as a plus offer something more then them. This is how you can over through someone off a niche, if not move along. I’m more of a winner, so if I don’t at least have the chance to be the best at what I do, then why should I bother continuing?

Narrow Down Your List

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Let’s say you’ve made a list of topics and niches, that positively answer the questions listed above; now we’ve got to trim the list a bit and narrow it down to just a few. Head over to the list once again, have a closer look and strike down any item, from the beginning, that you feel like less comfortable writing about it, opposed to the others. Now consider these points:

• Longevity. Do you see yourself writing on the respective niche one year from now? If not, forget about pal. Blogging is a long term deal, one that requires a lot of perseverance and patience. If you’ve got enough content going on around you and passionate enough, that you feel like writing on it for years to come, then this is a good sign.
• Niche relevancy. What’s hot now, might not be a few years later or even months for that matter. You can usually spot what topics are gonna still be relevant in the future and which will dim, but some bloggers get involved in so called “seasonal blogs,” that only work at a given time, some only once. A Valentine’s day blog will only be hot around February, or a soccer Word Cup blog only once every four years. You can really make it big if you can predict if a niche is gonna go hot, usually if you get a 6-8 months head start, you’ll be on top of the game and you’ll make a killing. I used to (still am to a extent) reserve a few hours a week doing niche hunting, looking for topics that I thought were gonna do well. Never managed to get something going, but I’m sure I will and I know plenty of people, that now run highly successful blogs by making assumptions on how trends will progress.
• Niche activity. If you’ve been active on the internet for some time, chances are you’ve participated on multiple forums, websites or blogs in discussions and thus made a name out of yourself, more or less. Consider this as a foundation, that will immensely help you when launching your new niche blog.
• Income potential. If your serious about making some money with your blog, then it’s a good idea to find a niche that is highly profitable and easy to milk. I’ve written before on how you can earn money from your blog, but what I omitted to mention was how to find a profitable niche. Most of you will be using CPC (Adsense) and various affiliate programs to provide a income, so we’ll be using this when researching profitable niches. One very useful tool is the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool. Just type in your desired keyword and the Google tool will return tons of further related keywords, displaying next to them, their estimated traffic, competition and search volume.Since we cant see what the click prices will be, we’ll gonna have to click on where it says ’show/hide columns’ and select ‘Show Estimated Average CPC’. Input 100 (maximum), next to where it says U.S. dollars and then hit ‘recalculate’. You’ll then have a estimated earnings per click on every keyword, but most of the time the real value is half of what’s displayed; so if a keyword says it’s gonna average 2$/click it’s actually worth only 1$. For a more advanced look, on how much money a keyword can produce, you can consult the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator.But you can always choose not to use any CPC or CPM network at all and still have a profitable niche on your hands, by leveraging affiliate networks and programs. There are some extreme cases in which you can be faced with extremely low earnings, but at the same time with huge affiliate revenues, all in the same niche. To find a suitable affiliate program just head over to any search engine (read Google) and hit “desired niche keyword + affiliate program.” You’ll more then likely find more then you need, but in case you don’t, head over to Clickbank, Comission Junction or Share a Sale.
• Enough interest. This would translate into traffic. You see, you might be heavily passionate and interested in a particular area, but are there enough people out there that share it? The Internet is huge, such a dilemma is usually unfounded, but there are some obscure domains of interest, that little people inhabit, so it never hurts to check. The easiest way to check how popular a domain is, is to check the volume of search engine traffic it gets. There’s tons of such tools on the net, eventually you can use the ones listed in the point above, but for a more detailed approach I prefer to use Google Trends and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Final Thoughts

 
Choosing the right niche for your blog is of crucial importance. It will determine how your blog will evolve during time, but how you, as blogger, will develop as well. It’s the first step on your “blogging journey” and it’s you who’ll have to decide if it will take the good or wrong path. Your time and mental health are more precious then you think, so spare yourself months of hard work for nothing, by spending a few hours of research, that might just make the difference.

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The How To Choose The Right Niche For Your Blog by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.