Maybe you’ve heard of a few of these rich and famous bloggers:
- Joanna Goddard, a lifestyle blogger – CupofJo.com
- Lindsey Livingston, a healthy food blogger – TheLeanGreenBean.com
- Perez Hilton, a celebrity gossip blogger – PerezHilton.com
- Michelle Gardner, a finance blogger – MakingSenseofCents.com
- Alborz Fallah, a car review blogger – CarExpert.com.au
What do these bloggers have in common besides making tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars every month? The answer to that is they’ve found their blogging niche, and they’ve gone all in on it.
Have you thought about becoming a blogger, but wondered what you’d blog about?
If you want to be a successful blogger, choosing your niche is the very first step. But what is a blogging niche? Why is it so important? And how can you find the perfect blogging niche? Read on, and we’ll fill you in on all the details.
What is a blog niche?
A blog niche is a specific, narrow topic or subject area on which the blogger’s content is focused. Think of it as a topic specialty. Just as you may be sent to a medical specialist who only treats specific diseases rather than a general family physician, a niche blog only centers around specific subjects.
You’ve seen the niches of the bloggers listed above – lifestyle, healthy food, celebrity gossip, finance, and car reviews. Each of these bloggers might have the knowledge to write on many other topics, but they limit their blog content to the specific niche topics they’ve chosen.
Why do you need a blog niche?
While it’s not always a requirement, focusing your blog’s content on a specific niche makes it easier to grow your blog. Here are a few reasons why.
Demonstrate expertise
When’s the last time you asked a lawn care expert how to build a spaceship? Sure, it’s possible your lawn guy is also an expert in rocket science, but if you’re looking for an expert on spaceships, you’ll probably ask someone who builds rockets for a living.
By blogging about one subject, as opposed to both lawn care and rockets, you’ll more easily demonstrate your expertise in the subject. As you cover more and more topics within the niche, your credibility as an expert will grow. Credibility inspires trust. Trust inspires people to take action, share your content, and return for more.
Narrow the competition
Let’s stick with lawn care as a niche. If you are a lawn care expert but you blog about anything and everything related to outdoors or nature, your competition will be much higher than if you only blogged about lawn care.
Let’s look at some Google searches to illustrate this concept.
- If you search Google for “nature”, the number of results returned are “about 12,680,000,000”. That’s a lot of zeros, so let’s break that down into words. Google returns twelve billion six hundred eighty million results for “nature”.
- If you search Google for “lawn care”, the number of results returned are “about 528,000,000”, or five hundred twenty-eight million.
- That’s a massive difference. While 500+ million is still huge, you’ll soon see how to refine your niche to make that even smaller.
Connect with people who care
Success depends upon building an audience that keeps coming back for more. The best way to attract and keep an audience is to give them what they are looking for. If they want to learn all about lawn care, but you blog about types of grass one day, portable heaters the next, and your trip to Thailand the following week, your audience will never know what to expect. If they came for the lawn post, they’ll stop coming back after reading about portable heaters and your vacation plans.
Discovering the “You” in your niche
When we think of a successful blogger, we usually imagine one person (perhaps two if they are a couple). That blogger is an individual with a personality that connects with readers. There’s not one personality type that makes a blogger successful. Some are funny, some are sarcastic. Others are serious and professional. Some bloggers are quirky; others come across as the “girl next door”.
When you become a blogger, you put YOUR personality out into the world. While noticing which personality types are the most popular in your niche may be useful, you shouldn’t try to take on another blogger’s persona. Instead, you should go all in with putting your own personality into every post you write.
Readers want to connect with you. Not everyone will, of course. That’s true for any blogger. And that’s okay. Just as you aren’t looking to write on every topic imaginable, you also shouldn’t strive to appeal to every personality. By being who you are, you’ll find your crowd. You’ll build your community.
But how does this help you find your niche? Who you are is what will lead you to the perfect niche for you. Let’s break that down.
What are your passions?
The things you love are the things you’ll enjoy sharing with others. Are you the queen of Minecraft and love to talk about the game with your friends? Are you a number-cruncher and can’t stop yourself from helping someone manage their finances? Are you that lawn care expert whose favorite thing to do is swap tips on keeping a lawn from being overtaken with weeds?
Your passions can guide you in finding a niche that is just right for you. And if you love what you’re sharing, that love will naturally attract others who are interested in it as well.
What skills do you have?
Although we are often skilled in the topics we are passionate about, many people also have skills in other areas. That Minecraft queen might also be an expert magician. She might not be as passionate about magic as she is about Minecraft, but her talent could easily contribute to creating a successful magic-inspired blog. Passion is helpful, but expertise can be all that’s needed to build a huge audience.
Will you still love it years from now?
Successful bloggers keep going and going and going. Building up a successful blog can take time, but success tends to breed more success. Once momentum is established, the popularity of your blog will often push upward seemingly on its own. But don’t be fooled. The traffic will eventually disappear if you stop blogging.
The blog will suffer if you get bored with the topic or run out of things to say. So when considering your passions and skills, consider what that will look like 5 years from now. Will you still be excited to talk about this niche at least weekly?
Does your authentic voice match the subject matter?
We know now that visitors want to connect with you and your personality. But when deciding upon a niche, you should consider if your personality matches the topic. For example, suppose your style is irreverent, sarcastic, and insensitive. In that case, you might not appeal to visitors who are looking for advice on how to hold a beautiful funeral ceremony or memorial for their loved ones. Even if your expertise is in the memorial ceremony space, your voice might make it difficult for people to connect with you.
On the other hand, that same personality might be perfect if you are a comedian blogging about life’s weird moments.
As you consider possible niches, using the tips below, keep YOU in mind. How will your passions, skills, long-term interest, and voice factor into each potential niche?
1. Brainstorm niches
Enough preamble, already. Let’s start the process!
This first step seems the hardest when you first begin because it’s like looking at a blank sheet of paper. Seems overwhelming, right? But starting will quickly unleash a torrent of ideas. Write down every possible topic you might have an interest in, are skilled at, or even think you might enjoy. Use sticky notes, notebook paper, Google docs, or any method you prefer.
Don’t overthink this process, and don’t try to judge or eliminate as you go. Throw every idea that comes to mind on the list. And then add some more.
If you need to walk away for a moment, or even for a day or a week, that’s fine. As you go about your normal life, ideas will often come to you. As you shop for groceries, you might realize that you love negotiating and making deals. Write that idea down! As you balance your checkbook, it may hit you that you know a lot about budgeting. Write it down!
There’s no perfect number of ideas. Maybe you’ll list 10; maybe you’ll list 100. Just focus on writing down every idea that crosses your mind.
2. Validate the list
Once you’ve created your list of possible niches, now’s the time to evaluate the possibilities and narrow the list down. Consider each idea on the list and ask the following questions. If there are 2 or more “No” answers for an idea, scratch it off the list. 4 or 5 “Yes” answers make the idea viable.
Can the niche be monetized?
Some topics naturally lend themselves to easy ways to profit from them. Others, not so much. If your specialty is the lifecycle of centipedes, you might have difficulty figuring out ways to make money from that knowledge. On the other hand, your experience controlling garden pests could lend itself to many profitable revenue avenues. When considering this question, you’ll need to know how most bloggers earn money from blogging, so let’s take a quick look at that.
Here are 8 popular ways to monetize a blog:
- Affiliate marketing – Recommend products and earn commission on every sale made
- Selling physical or digital products
- Running a membership site – Charging subscription fees to access content
- Running ads
- Selling services based on your expertise
- Coaching / Consulting – Help others achieve specific goals
- Selling online courses – In-depth classes on the topic
- Sponsored posts or paid reviews – Charge others for writing content to promote their business or product
Is there a large enough market for the niche?
Here’s where you’ll need to spend some time doing a bit of research. Are enough people actively searching for the content you’ll be sharing? A quick way to check this is to use a free tool from Google called Google Trends. This tool allows you to look at the search trends for one or more search terms, over time. Google explains what the chart result means:
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
Let’s look at an example to understand this better. We’ll compare three search terms in the US:
- lawn care
- garden pests
- centipede lifecycle
The trends chart looks like this:
We can immediately see that the blue line, representing the search term “lawn care,” is searched much more often – even in the winter months – than either “garden pests” (red line) or “centipede lifecycle” (yellow line). So even though we’ve determined that we could more easily monetize a blog all about garden pests than we could monetize one about centipede lifecycles, user interest is clearly much higher for lawn care. If you have a passion for lawn care, you could still include articles related to garden pests, of course, but you would probably have more success focusing on the broader topic of lawn care.
Now let’s compare some well-known, highly profitable niches:
- financial planning
- real estate investing
- budgeting
Which do you think would have the highest search interest over time? My guess was real estate investing. Hint: I was wrong. Here’s the chart.
Budgeting wins! Clearly, that has a broader appeal to more people; however, all three would be viable niches. If you aren’t an expert on budgeting, but you can run circles around the experts on real estate investing, then, by all means, make that your niche.
Are there multiple sub-niches?
Can the topic be broken down into smaller niches? For example, it would be difficult to break “centipede lifecycle” into smaller subtopics. However, “lawn care” could include subtopics such as:
- Fertilizing
- Types of grass
- Lawn disease prevention and treatment
- Soil maintenance, including aeration and seeding
- Lawn pests
- Non-grass options
- Lawn maintenance tools
- Weather and climate considerations
The more subtopics a niche has, the better chance you have of providing valuable content over a longer period of time.
Can you write enough content to last for years?
As we just mentioned, sub-niches can help provide opportunities for writing content for years. But even niches with multiple subtopics may still be too limited in scope. If there isn’t enough to say about the niche to keep the blog active for a number of years, it may not be worth considering.
Is there a lot of competition?
Nearly all viable niches will have a fair amount of competition. You can’t completely avoid that. But competition doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. Focusing on a niche is the best way to find your place in the competitive landscape.
For instance, if the competition seems too stiff to focus on “lawn care”, what if you narrowed it down to “lawn care in the deep south”? Or “lawn care tips for people on a budget”? How’s that for combining two niches? We know budgeting is popular, so perhaps that niche might be as well. You’ll need to do more research to find the sweet spot between competition, interest, and monetization potential. The goal is to find profitable blog niches with low competition.
Run some Google searches to see what the top sites are for popular search terms in your niche. Is the first page of search results filled with giant companies, or are there smaller sites that you could probably compete with? What about the second page of search results? Remember, you aren’t going to rank well immediately. But if the first 20 or 30 search results include websites that aren’t behemoths, then you have a shot at working your way up the chain.
If you’d prefer to use a free tool to help with this research, a good choice is the ahrefs browser extension. (Note that although the extension is free, you’ll need to have a paid account with ahrefs to use it). The data it gives you assumes you have some knowledge of SEO and its acronyms, but the learning curve is not extremely steep at this level. The two easiest-to-understand metrics are ST (Search Traffic – the estimated number of monthly visitors that the page gets from organic search) and KW ( Keywords – The total number of keywords that the target ranks for in the top 100 search results). So if you were to look at the Google search results for “lawn care tips for people on a budget” with the ahrefs extension activated, you would see something like this:
You can see that these search results include major sites such as Yahoo Finance and US News, as well as some much smaller sites. The US News result at #4 has an estimated search traffic of 6.3 million and an estimated 1.8 million keywords ranking. Just under that, at #5, is a much smaller site, growingavings.com, with an estimated search traffic of 21.8 thousand, and 13.8 thousand keywords ranking. Then #6 result, charlotteinsurance.com, has a search traffic of 2.5 thousand and 4.1 thousand keywords ranking. This tells you that there is plenty of opportunity for you to break into this pack. It is not completely dominated by impossible-to-beat giants. The top 10 includes quite a few sites that should be much easier to compete with. While you might have been able to determine this by simply looking at the results, the SEO tool gives metrics to validate your guesses.
Another browser extension, Mozbar, only requires a free account with Moz.com. With a free account, the toolbar will show DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) metrics. These are Moz’s estimations of the strength of a whole site (DA) or the strength of a particular page (PA). You can compare those metrics in your research in the same way you would compare ST and KW in the ahrefs examples above. Here’s what the Mozbar would show for the same search. Again, we can see that pages with much lower PA and DA scores are competing alongside pages with much higher scores.
If you’d like to dig even deeper, you can also use some of the more popular competitive research tools such as ahrefs or SEMRush to narrow this down. These tools can be a little complex and expensive, but they provide a lot of information.
Once you’ve considered each of these questions, you’ll probably have a much smaller list of niche ideas that have the potential to be profitable. What’s left are niches that you’ve validated and are worth seriously considering. The rest is up to you. Which feels right? Which excites you? The one that tugs the strongest is probably the niche to choose.
Of course, we wouldn’t want to tell you how to choose a great niche without giving you some ideas, so here are 50 to start with. Most could easily be further refined to decrease competition. For example, #9, fitness, is probably far too broad. Is there a particular segment of fitness that really hits the spot for you? Maybe you are a crossfit guru. There’s a niche in the broader fitness category that might be perfect for you. Use these ideas just as a starting point to help you begin the brainstorming process.
50 blogging niche ideas to get you inspired
- lawn care
- personal finance
- budgeting
- real estate investing
- blogging
- make money online
- healthy eating
- sports
- fitness
- lifestyle
- travel
- photography
- DIY
- crafts
- skin care
- freelancing
- living abroad
- fashion
- celebrity news
- cooking
- homeschooling
- parenting tips
- retirement
- cryptocurrency
- product reviews
- homebrewing
- working from home
- smart homes
- video games
- web design
- self-improvement
- writing
- dating tips
- public speaking
- getting into good universities
- career advice
- yoga
- music
- pet care
- wedding planning
- weight loss
- mental health
- paying off debt
- influencer tips
- investing in stocks
- time management
- organization tips
- woodworking tips
- videography
- off grid living
3. Next steps
We’ve discussed what a blog niche is, why choosing one is so critical, and how to choose the right niche for you. So what now? How do you start?
Once you’ve found your niche, you’ll need to purchase a domain name and build your site. Of course, your blog name should reflect your niche, so be sure to spend time considering blog name ideas.
And since WordPress powers over 40% of the world’s websites, there’s plenty of reason to choose WordPress as your blog publishing platform. It’s quick and easy to sign up for a WordPress.com account. Get started today. Who knows? This time next year, you might be on someone’s top 5 list of rich and famous bloggers. We hope to see you there.
You might also be interested in: Finding Your Niche: The Cornerstone of Your Future Website
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