How to Choose Your Blog Niche as a Beginner Blogger
How to choose a blog niche? That’s what is the topic of today’s discussion. This article is especially useful for you if you are a person who wants to start a blog and make money from it, but don’t know what blog niche or blog topic to choose.
You can totally skip this article if you are not intending to make money from your blog and just want to be happy with a hobby blog.
Before continuing further let me tell you what a ‘blog niche’ or a ‘niche’ is. In simple terms, ‘niche’ means a small section of a big market. Let me give you an example.
If you want to start a blog related to health, in general, you are targeting a market or an industry. ‘Health’ is a market. This market is very huge and highly competitive. There are a lot of big players out there. Websites like WebMD, HealthLine, etc. are almost impossible to outrank.
And that’s where you need to niche down the market. You can choose a specific topic in the health market and create a blog dedicated to it.
For example, if you want to start a blog in the health market, try to target only a small section of that market, like weight loss. By doing this you are entering the niche of weight loss. Nowadays, even weight loss is turning into a big industry. So we will try to niche down even further.
We can choose to target ‘weight loss for women’. Now that’s a niche. If you want to go even further, choose ‘weight loss for women under 40’.
I believe you have understood the concept here. Choosing the perfect blog niche is a very import step of your online business-building process. If you fail to choose the right niche, you are bound to fail. As Benjamin Franklin supposedly said ‘if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail’.
Before I show you how to choose a blog niche, let’ see why it is important to choose a niche for your blog.
Why Choose a Blog Niche?
Why choose a blog niche? Why can’t one choose to blog about a big market or a general topic? Here are the reasons.
Big Markets Are Too Competitive
Big markets are all very competitive. The main three industries online are health, wealth and relationship. If you just try to target health, wealth or relationship, in general, it may take you many years before you start making real money from your blog.
Can Build a Targeted Audience In a Niche
You can easily build a targeted audience in a niche. People who search for niche topics online are usually very focussed. They want solutions to specific problems. They are not there to simply browse through the pages and kill time. An engaged audience means a better conversion for your blog and more money in your pocket.
Easier To Rank On Search Engines
When you target niche topics and long-tail keywords the chances of your blog ranking higher on search engines increase significantly. This isn’t the case when you target general topics and single phrase keywords.
Ranking higher for the keyword ‘weight loss for women under 40’ is much easier than ranking higher for the keyword ‘health’ or ‘health tips’.
Creating a Product is Easy
If you want to make money selling your own informational or physical products on your blog, it is much easier to sell these products when you have a small targeted audience in a niche rather than a very large audience with varying interests in a huge market.
How To Choose A Blog Niche Step By Step?
Without further ado, let’s get started with choosing your blog niche.
Make a List
To begin the process of niche selection start by writing down 10 topics that interest you. List down things that you would love to write about. This list may contain things you love to do, things you are knowledgeable about or any other topic that interests you.
If you are running out of ideas or if you are experiencing a brain fade use one of the many niche idea generators available on the net. Some of them offer free services like this one.
When you click the link above, you will be greeted by a page that looks similar to the one below. When you write your chosen term in the search box, niche ideas are automatically generated below, as shown in the image.
I entered the term ‘health’ in the search box and got the related niche idea suggestions. Similarly, you can use this tool to generate ‘N’ number of niche ideas for your blog.
You can also take the help of Amazon.com to find new niche ideas. Just visit Amazon.com and click on the ‘All’ tab as shown below.
You can then do in-depth research in each category and generate more niche ideas for your upcoming blog or website.
Knowledge, Talent, and Skills
Now among these 10 topics which you have listed down, choose only those topics in which you have a special talent, skill or extensive knowledge. Don’t choose the topic about which you yourself don’t know much.
You can also choose the topics in which you are able to solve certain problems. Choose something you are good at. Don’t get confused. I am just telling you to choose something you are good at. That doesn’t mean you choose something you aspire to be good at.
You may like to learn swimming. That doesn’t mean you start a blog about swimming. As you aren’t an experienced swimmer or don’t have any expertise in swimming you may be hardly of any use to people who want to learn swimming.
Similarly, if you already know dancing and want to learn swimming, choose dancing as a topic for your blog and not swimming.
Teach something you are good at, not what you want to be good at.
Did you get my point?
Also, you need to have enough knowledge about the topic to write at least 50 to 100 articles. And that’s just the beginning. If you don’t have enough content for those many articles, please choose another topic.
I usually write down around 50 article ideas in my chosen niche before starting a blog.
Passion
Now among the topics you chose, select only those which you are passionate about. If you don’t choose a topic you love, creating content for your blog is going to be really tough. You may lose interest after a few days or weeks and quit blogging.
So it is always recommended to choose a niche/topic that’s very close to your heart. By doing this, work won’t feel like work anymore. Imagine doing something you love, every day for the rest of your life. Sounds amazing, isn’t it? That’s why choose a topic you are passionate about.
Niche Profitability
I always try to choose a topic for my blog which has the potential to make big money. And I suggest you do the same. The best way to decide whether your idea is profitable or not is by researching.
One of the ways I approach this is by visiting Amazon.com and searching for products related to my niche. If there are a lot of items being sold in my niche with a ton of customer reviews, it’s a good sign.
Similarly, I visit other popular eCommerce websites and look for products in the niche.
I also research for CPC or Cost Per Clicks for keywords in my niche. In broader terms, CPC or Cost Per Click translates to the amount of money that advertisers are ready to pay for a single click if you decide to put advertisements on your blog in that particular niche.
Higher the CPC, the more money you make. CPC for a keyword can be found out using a keyword research tool.
Here’s an example.
In the above example, I used the Ahref tool to find out the CPC for the keyword ‘weight loss recipes’. The tool is showing me that the CPC for this term is $3.50 which is really great. The Ahref tool is also showing me the keyword difficulty score and the search volume for the keyword in the above example.
Similarly, I also look for the number of affiliate programs available in my chosen niche. If there are a lot of affiliate products and services being promoted in the niche, it’s a good sign.
Searching for affiliate programs in any niche is very simple. Just enter your niche keyword and add the phrase ‘affiliate programs’ to it and search in Google. For example, if my niche is weight loss recipes I will just do a quick Google search for weight loss recipes affiliate programs or weight loss affiliate programs.
You can also visit ClickBank which has one of the largest digital marketing affiliate programs on the net and search for affiliate programs in your blog niche.
Just visit ClickBank.com, go to the market place, enter your keyword into the search box and click on search. You will be presented with the list of affiliate products relating to your niche as shown in the image above.
If there is not even a single affiliate program related to my blog niche, I usually take a step backward and rethink my chosen topic.
I am not suggesting you do the same here. But as I am a great fan of affiliate marketing, it will be a big let down for me if there are no affiliate products to promote in the chosen niche.
This, however, doesn’t usually happen because one of the biggest affiliate programs on the planet, Amazon.com, has in its inventory almost any product you can imagine, which you can promote as an affiliate. Because of this, nowadays you can make money from affiliate marketing in any niche.
BTW you can also make money from your blog without depending on affiliate marketing. You can create your own product and sell on your blog. You can also start offering services on your blog in return for money.
So the mere absence or presence of affiliate programs in your niche shouldn’t be the benchmark for deciding whether a niche is profitable or not. But that’s the way I like to do it.
Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis
This is the step which finally decides the niche you are going to be blogging about. To accomplish this step you are going to need certain tools called ‘keyword research tools’. With the help of these keyword research tools, you will be able to find many hidden niches within your chosen topic. You can also find out your competitor’s keywords or topics using some of these keyword tools.
Although we are not going to discuss how to do keyword research in detail here, I am going to just demonstrate the whole procedure in a nutshell with an example.
For the sake of this example, I am going to take the keyword ‘herbal tea’. As usual, I will be using my favorite keyword tool Ahref for this purpose.
When I ran an initial search for the keyword ‘herbal tea’ on Ahref I got the following result.
The keyword difficulty score of 26 indicates a medium competition keyword. This isn’t difficult to rank for but isn’t easy either. Similarly, it has a CPC score of $1.90 which is decent and also has a search volume of 41K per month.
Now I want to dig a little bit further and look for any other keywords that may possibly be hidden in the same niche. For this, I am going to take one of the top-ranking websites for the keyword ‘herbal tea’ and analyze the website using Ahref tool.
When I ran a search and analyzed one of the top-ranking web sites, I found many golden nugget keywords which I can use for my future blog content or can also use as standalone niche websites.
Here is a screenshot. I haven’t included the entire keyword list here.
And that’s how you do niche research and competitor analysis.
Blog Niche Ideas for Beginners
Before concluding this post I am going to give you a list of niche ideas to get you going. These are for reference purposes only. Feel free to be creative when choosing your blog niche.
Blog Topics List
- Astronomy
- Virtual Reality
- Parenting Blog
- Weight Lifting
- Travel Hacks
- Woodwork
- Sewing / Knitting
- Restaurant Reviews
- Photography
- Running Shoes
- Weight Loss Recipes
- Investing
- Entrepreneurship
- Frugal Living
- Make Money from YouTube
- Calligraphy
- Herbal Remedies
- Herbal Teas
- Painting
- DIY Crafts
- Homeschooling
- Best TVs
- Virtual Reality Gears
- Meditation Techniques
- Health Care Devices
- Hair Fall Prevention
- Blog About Religious Beliefs
- Videography
- Food Photography / Food Videography
- Watercolor
- Design Tutorials
- LED lights
- Law of Attraction
- Public Speaking
- Relationship Advice for Single Women
- Relationship Advice for Single men
- Make Money Online as a Student
