As extracted from my own article on my personal blog.
Before you start a blog, the first question you may have is perhaps how to decide on a blogging niche.
For newbies, you may not know what a niche is but this word keeps coming up in many tutorials on blogging.
What is a niche?
Briefly, a niche is a topic or a category that is of interest to a certain audience. For instance, your blogging niche can be food recipes, lifestyle, reviews, internet marketing, sports and so on.
A niche can be really narrow or even really broad. For example, you can have a blog that specializes only on coconut oil or Dyson fans. That’s how narrow it can be. These niches are normally referred to as micro-niches.
It can also be really broad, like a blog on finance as a whole. Finance is super wide, it can cover anything that relates to money.
Whether it’s super narrow or broad, there are both pros and cons.
A narrow niche is easier to grow as you establish yourself as an expert in the field. You may not have to put as much effort as you do in blogs with wide niches. The downside is, you may hit a limit as to your traffic, because not everyone may be interested in the small niche. Furthermore, you may run out of ideas as to what to write.
A broad niche on the other hand is harder to grow as you have to cover so many areas. It’s difficult to establish authority since you’re probably competing with bigger blogs that can employ lots of writers. For instance, you probably won’t be able to compete with TrustedReviews if you run a general review blog. The good thing is, you won’t run out of ideas on what to write and you have the potential to gain a huge amount of traffic, judging on how many visitors your competitors are getting.
Hence, think hard before starting a blog.
How do you decide on a niche?
Back to the main topic at hand. How do you choose your niche?
There are certain considerations or questions you may want to think about before making your decision.
Am I really passionate about this niche?
Passion keeps you blogging. Without passion, you’ll probably quit after a few months or even weeks when you see no visitors on your blog or no earnings at all. Hence, you should go for a niche that you really have passion in. Don’t choose a niche merely because it’s very profitable.
Can i write on this niche for many years to come?
Blogging is a long-term journey. The longer you’re on this journey, the higher your chance of success. Provided of course you’re doing it right. Successful blogs have at least one thing in common, i.e. consistency. Can you consistently publish a few articles a week, every week, for the years to come? That’s the question you have to ask yourself. If you can’t, probably it’s not the niche for you.
Are you an expert in the niche?
If you’re an expert in your potential blogging niche, it should be easier for you to excel in it. Then again, you should have the passion as well. For instance, I may have a lot of knowledge in legal matters, but it doesn’t mean that I want to start a blog on the same niche. In fact, there’s nothing on law if you read my blog.
Is this blogging niche evergreen?
A niche is evergreen if it’s always in demand. For instance, money, relationships and health/medical issues will always be in demand. Hence, those are really profitable niches and advertisers are willing to pay well for those niches. However, evergreen niches are probably the hardest niches to enter into due to the massive competition. You have to put a lot of thought into it before you decide on choosing an evergreen niche.
How much competition is there in this niche?
This should be a huge consideration as well. As mentioned above, evergreen niches may not be suitable for all bloggers considering the high competition. Even more so if you’re a lone blogger. It’s better to go into a medium or low competition niche if you want to rank well on Google. Use a keyword research tool to determine the level of competition in a niche.
Will there be readers at all for this niche?
If you plan to choose a specific niche that nobody searches for, what’s the point? You won’t get traffic anyway. Hence, you can use a free keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner to see how much traffic a particular niche gets. You can try some research tools like KWFinder and Serp that allows you to search a few times a day for free. For more searches, you need to use their paid plan. You don’t have to go for niches with the most searches as those come with high competition. You can always go for the medium and low competition niches.
What if you still can’t decide on a blogging niche?
I’m one of those who couldn’t decide on a blogging niche. Thinking back, maybe I should have “niched down” but I’m sticking to the few niches I have.
I understand the struggle of not knowing which niche to choose or refusing to stick to one niche. If that’s the case, join me!
You can always stick to a few niches, but try to keep them at least related in a way. For instance, my niches on blogging, social media and making money are in a way related. They’re all ways you can work from home.
There are several multi-niche blogs that are popular, like Hongkiat and Making Sense Of Cents. Perhaps they started off with one niche but now they have writers for all of their niches. That’s the dream, isn’t it? To build a successful blog and get applications from guest writers all the time.
Regardless of the path you choose, I’m sure you can still be successful, whether as a single niche or a multi-niche blog. Always stay true to yourself, be persistent, consistent and churn out quality content.
In a nutshell
It may be easier to grow a blog with a single niche since you’re establishing yourself as an authority in the particular niche. Furthermore, your readers and subscribers will be more targeted. If you run a multi-niche blog, it’s more difficult to get a targeted following. For instance, if you write on money, fishing, food and so on, those who followed you for articles on money may not be interested in fishing articles.
As I’ve mentioned above, there are pros and cons in all choices. Hence, take your time and decide on a niche, or a couple of niches. Once you have done so, decide on a proper domain name to reflect that niche. I sometimes regret the choice of my domain name. Don’t make the same mistake. Once you’re ready, start a blog! Do it today or else it will never be done.