A blog niche is another way of referring to the topic you choose to focus your content on. It can be as broad or as specific as you want it to be. You might choose to blog about fiction in general and categorize your content into multiple genres. Or you might choose to specialize on the topic of romance fiction. There’s no one-size-fits-all, best answer here. Finding the right niche for you will be part of the journey.
To answer that question, let’s go back to your goals again. Why are you doing this and what do you want from it?
A lot of people start their journey by writing for an audience of one: themselves. It’s a great way to begin as it gets you into the habit of writing and you will have plenty of material.
But let’s think about an audience beyond you. Perhaps that audience is friends and family members? In which case you’ll be crafting personal stories and updates that you think will interest the people closest to you.
Maybe you aim for a bigger audience? In which case who is your audience? If you want to monetize your blog, you’ll want to get super clear on who they are and what niche you are going to serve.
It all comes down to your goals again. It can be a lot of fun crafting content that is based on things that inspire you, or things you have seen, or your travels or hobbies. And it can also be just as much fun creating content for a specific group of people who will be really keen to hear what you share, perhaps because it helps them in their lives.
But here’s the problem: Figuring out what the perfect niche is for you, personally, can be a real conundrum.
If you’re in the early stages of creating a blog, and you didn’t set out on this journey with a preconceived idea of what your blog would be about, then you might want to do some exploratory exercises first to see what really revs you up. (These are also terrific exercises to do if your blog has grown stagnant, or you just don’t have the same passion for it that you once did.)
We recommend drafting up some posts on different topics as it can help show you which ones you get the most enjoyment out of researching and writing.
To get started, some people use prompts. These are single words that spark their creativity. For example, if you think about the word “Awkward” or “Guilty”, what does that make you think of?
Which words create a spark? These are topics where your creativity flows freely. Everyone’s results will be different, but what you end up writing will almost certainly reflect what your real passions are.
Another possible consideration when choosing a blog niche is whether or not you have plans to monetize the blog. While there are ways to monetize any niche, certain blog niches are more readily aligned for monetization than others.
If creating a profitable blog is something that is of importance to you, then you’ll want to do some research into the trends of the niches that are of most interest to you. Articles found through Google, such as 4 tips for finding your profitable blogging niche, offer good resources on how to do this research.
We’ll also cover more details on various monetization tools in the Monetization module of this course.
But what if you have a more specific goal in mind already? What if you want to blog about a particular topic? That’s terrific! It means that you’re ready to move on to diving deeper into who your audience is.
Whether you’ve already picked your niche or not, use this time to do a bit of soul searching and reflection around the niche you’ve chosen, or the ones you’re considering. Do some exploratory writing to verify what types of topics interest you the most, using the suggestions provided in this lesson.
As we learned in the lessons on Understanding your why and Understanding what you want, your desires and motivations are the things that are going to keep you moving forward toward your goals. The amount of passion you have for the topics you choose is the third ingredient that will make or break the longevity of your blogging journey.
Click to expandResources
- 4 tips for finding your profitable blogging niche (Article)
- WordPress.com Prompts and Challenges
- WordPress.com Prompts Feature
- Inspiration, Resources and Ideas
- 365 Blog Ideas e-book
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