About 73% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year tend to serve a particular audience. That means they focus more on the unique needs of their niche audience. And this clearly states how important it’s to find a profitable blog niche.
Plus, you’re here, which means you already know that a niche is essential for your blog’s success.
Therefore, in this article, we’re going to describe the step-by-step process of choosing a profitable blogging niche.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!
What is a blog niche?
A blog niche is simply the main topic of your blog around which you will blog about. In other terms, a niche means a specific segment of the market to which you’ll be targeting your blogging venture.
For example, the market could be health and wellness, but the niche you could choose is mental health. You can select a sub-niche (a very focused topic). So, for your niche mental health, blogging about ADHD will be your sub-niche.
In a different segment, you can say choosing a blog niche defines your target audience with whom you’re going to interact in the long run.
Why Should You Choose One Blog Niche, Instead of Multiple Topics?
Multi niche blogs are popular when people love to blog about their personal life. They were creating segments such as personal finance or money management, lifestyle, health, travel, etc., to showcase their knowledge on different topics from their own experience.
However, if you could observe a particular category, you’d understand there’s more and more knowledge to provide, and the sea of knowledge will never finish.
In that case, you are telling a large audience that might feel an advantage. However, there are more disadvantages.
A large audience has a great demand, and as a solopreneur or a small business, you can’t have unlimited time to research and provide information on everything.
According to the internet live stats, there are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.8 billion websites.
You can imagine how competitive it’s to stand out from the blogs on a particular topic from this number.
Further, if you observe, the blogs present on the top of Google are often based on a subcategory of a particular niche. And that’s called microniche, which is usually the wisest decision to take in this competitive world.
For example, if you choose health and wellness as your market, diseases and treatment could be your niche, and diabetes care will be a micro niche here.
Deciding on a niche highly focuses you on a specific subject, and you don’t even need to compete with every blog on the planet.
Another advantage of choosing a niche is that you’ll invest most of your time researching and providing value to your ideal customers rather than everyone.
So, choosing the flower (a niche) over the tree (multiple niches) is a plus if you want to start earning soon.
How to Brainstorm Blog Niche Ideas?
After grasping the idea of why a niche is essential, let’s know the “How to” part. The first step to choosing a profitable niche is brainstorming.
To understand which niche will give you more money, you need to create a few lists of topics from your existing knowledge. Create different lists that fall on these four categories:
Based on your Passion
Firstly, jot down blog topic ideas that interest you and align with your passion. For example, blogging about arts and crafts could be a good option if you’re an artist or want to become one.
If you’re passionate about creating change in this world, an idea could be motivational stories to interview famous persons and write what makes them unique.
If you’re tech-savvy and have a great interest in computers, you could start a blog on tutorials on how to perform a specific action on windows or mac.
List down ideas about topics or subjects you’re passionate about.
You Have Enough Knowledge
Now brainstorm topic ideas based on your expertise. These topics are those on which you have enough knowledge to start sharing among your readers.
For instance, if you have any specific qualification or degree, you can start sharing information about that subject.
Dermatologists could start a blog on skincare-related issues and their treatment.
If you worked as a sales rep in any company, you could share your knowledge on closing more deals.
If you are studying psychology, then your idea may include mental health.
Moms and parents could start blogging on parenting or newborn care. Homemakers can jot down food and recipes, interior decoration, baking, or knitting as their blog niche.
Blogs & Magazine Articles You Read
Your reading interest also shows your curiosity for a particular subject. And if you love to read about specific topics and know more about them, that could be an excellent idea for a blog.
For example, I love reading about gardening, personal well-being, cat care, photography, side hustles, and money-saving tips. So, I can brainstorm these topics in this section of my mind map.
If you don’t know what interests you most, then observe which blogs and magazines you read most of the time. Those are the topics on which you never feel bored to research and write.
Hobbies
Now create another list under which all of your hobbies remain. Hobbies are those activities you love doing in your free time.
Some people love playing with their dogs in their free time, while others love writing, gardening, cooking, baking, painting, dancing, reading, watching movies, photography or videography, etc.
So, choose what you love to do in your leisure; these are also some good blog ideas.
The topics that interest you most won’t bore you and sparkle your creativity in the long run.
After brainstorming blog niche ideas, now you have a more tedious task. That takes us to the next point.
8 Questions to Answer When Picking a Blog Niche
For a quick recap, now you have an extensive list of ideas you can consider choosing as a blog niche. But, how could you find which one is better for you to start your blogging journey?
That’s the reason we need to ask ourselves a few questions. These questions clarify your motive for blogging, along with validating the niche ideas you choose.
But before starting with this niche validation process, cross off topics you don’t want to blog about.
Now let’s find out the answer to the questions below, and finally, you will be ready with your blogging niche.
Question 1: What purpose will your blog have?
First thing first. If you’re going to purchase some groceries at the supermarket and don’t even know what you want to buy, what will happen? Well, you would forget the valuable things and purchase unnecessary items.
The same goes here. If you start working towards a project but don’t know your mission or the goal of creating, you’ll fail measurably.
“Starting a journey without knowing the destination is a huge waste of time and effort.“
So, define what you want to achieve with your blog. Whether it’s a marketing strategy to promote your brand or a way for passive income, you need to set your goals.
For instance, my purposes of creating a blog are;
- Promoting my brand
- improving knowledge in my field
- to develop and improve business relationships
- Improving SEO for ranking high on search results
- Making a massive email list
- Increasing traffic and sending leads to my main website
- Earning some passive income.
Ask yourself, “what are my major goals to start a blog?” This can remove a ton of burden from your head.
By defining a clear goal, you can find out which niche can help you to reach your goal straightforwardly. And refine your niche accordingly.
And now, after setting clear goals, I can remove a few more items from my list.
Question 2: Do you know enough about your niche to be able to write confidently?
Knowledge is another important factor while choosing your niche. If you don’t know anything about a topic, you can easily fall into a well-defined failure.
Yet, if you’re sincerely interested to learn more about it, then it’s a huge advantage.
That’s simply because most famous writers also did their initial research before writing. So, if you’re not knowledgeable enough on a topic you’re curious about, you could also create some good (if not great) content.
So, how could you know: which topics you need to strike straight away from your list?
Simple. Just brainstorm a list of 20-30 topic ideas that you’ll want to write about. On which niches you’ll get a clear idea straight from your brain are those you’ll feel confident about while blogging.
For instance, I could find topics about personal well-being, blogging, freelancing, recipes, copywriting, and book reading. So, now I’m filtering down my niche ideas to these and striking off others.
Question 3: Are you solving a problem that is faced worldwide?
Another question you want to solve for refining your list further is whether or not your blog is helpful to people.
Let’s be honest! Even if we want to make money and gain exposure through our blogs, our blog shouldn’t be about ourselves. Because the truth is people only care about themselves and NOT you.
According to one of the famous copywriters – Neville Medhora, “No one cares about you; they care about themselves.” And this is a psychological technique that can simplify sales strategy.
Can’t believe it? Let me explain through an example.
When you surf the web to purchase a product that entices your attention, what kind of thoughts do you bear?
You need to think, “how will this product help me to simplify my life.” And the same goes when we hover over google to find some answer to our questions. If the answer calms our curiosity and gives us the “Aha” moment, we stay or bookmark that page. If not, we jump to another web result.
So, if your blog content doesn’t help your readers and potential customers, that means it’s useless.
Because, if people don’t like what you want to say, then they won’t trust you. If they don’t trust you, they won’t recommend you. And if they won’t recommend you, you’ll struggle to gain both traffic and exposure.
Thus, after defining your purpose, your main goal should be to find out how you will help your audience.
So the niche ideas you love the most but can’t provide any value to the people, strike them out. Finding the answer to this question can also help you to find content ideas.
But, how could you know if a large number of people have the same struggles?
Well, check out the forums and social media groups where people mainly discuss their difficulties, and you’ll have some ideas whether or not you could help others in that niche.
Question 4: Can I make money from this niche?
Now the main question arises, “could you make money in this niche?“
To answer this question, you need to analyze the earning potential of each niche.
For example, if you’re choosing email marketing as your niche, and your goal is to earn a few extra bucks, you have to look after how to monetize that niche. You can either monetize it through affiliate marketing, advertisement or creating and promoting a tool. Also, you can give consultation services to other businesses for active learning.
So, now let’s understand the industries through step-by-step illustration.
- Know the Niche Market Size
The first step to understanding the earning potential of your niche is to know its market size. For this, type a keyword from your niche and see the results.
Let’s say your niche is email marketing. Now search the email marketing industry in the search bar. And you can see that this market is estimated at 2 Billion USD only in the US. From this, you can imagine what it will be like in the entire online world.
- Check Ads in Google Search Results
Another good way to know the market size or how many brands want to invest in this industry is by google ads.
Let’s assume your niche is skincare. So, analyzing the google ads for a product like anti-aging cream can show you how many sponsorship opportunities you will get. You can even promote these products as an affiliate.
- See How Other Blogs in Your Niche Make Money
Competitor analysis is probably the best way to know whether or not your niche is profitable.
You can search a key term from your niche and see the result websites.
These are your competitors. Note down a few of these URLs (for future referral).
Now, look out which methods they are using for monetization. Let’s say SEO is my blog niche, and Ahrefs is one of my competitors.
And after analyzing their site, I could see the SEO tool is their primary way of earning profit. Other free resources are there to educate their audience.
Similarly, some sites are running ads. So, ad revenue is their source of earning.
Analyze their content and products too. You can see some gaps that you can fill for your audience to win the game. It’s easy.
- Check for Affiliate Programs in Your Niche
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular sources of earnings for bloggers. And you can see the stats below:
No matter your niche, you can join any affiliate program and earn a natural passive earning from there. However, some niches have more products and services to promote than others.
So, how could you search for the affiliate programs in your niche?
Search “best affiliate programs in [your keyword] niche.” Soon, there will be search results listing how many affiliate programs are there.
Analyze how much earning you can generate from each niche, and soon, you’ll find the most profitable niches for your blog.
Question 5: How Many People Are Searching in Your Blog Niche?
You already know your ultimate niche options, and after answering these questions, your final niche would be ready.
Now another important factor that you want to consider is “what your audience size is.” If you want to know your target audience number or how much traffic you can get as a blogger of a specific niche, you must use a tool. Some options are ahrefs, semrush, similarweb pro, or Alexa. We’re going to use ahrefs.
But, you don’t have a blog yet; what are you going to analyze?
Well, your competitor’s traffic.
Let’s assume you have a fitness blog. And Nerd Fitness is one of your competitors. So, I’m going to search for this site on the site explorer tool.
Now you can get a clear idea of your traffic.
Question 6: How much competition is there in this niche?
Highly competitive niches are often saturated, and starting with those means you have to give blood and sweat for years for earning some revenue. Well, that’s true.
A blog in a too competitive niche is difficult to rank on a search engine rather than a less competitive one.
So, analyzing your competition size is crucial for a successful blog. You can get a good idea of your competition by its search volume, content scope, and competitors.
Let’s use ahrefs for this validation.
For instance, I’m taking social media marketing as my niche.
In this screenshot, you can see the global volume is 299K. So, this niche is not limited.
Now let’s know whether we can create enough content on this. Keep the keyword difficulty to 30 and see there are still 682 keywords just for social media marketing. And we can expand our research to youtube, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, or Instagram.
So, this is a pretty decent niche having enormous potential. But, how can you know whether this niche is too competitive or not?
Generally, broad niches have too many competitors. But if you’re focusing on something specific, that means you’ll have some decent competition. So, analyze your keywords, and you’ll get an idea of your competition size. If your niche isn’t too focused or too broad, it doesn’t matter that much.
Question 7: Can I write about this niche for the next two years?
Now you have to answer the question if you can write for that niche for a minimum of 2 years.
If your answer is yes, you’ll not be bored soon, then brainstorm ideas for at least one year. You can conduct keyword research or take inspiration from forum sites like Quora or Reddit or even check the topic ideas of your competitors.
This could clarify your mind about whether or not you’re going to get out of ideas after blogging for a while.
Question 8: Can you write evergreen content in your blogging niche?
And after all, you need to know whether your niche is evergreen or not.
If you’re choosing a topic that’s on-trend primarily on a particular season, then you can’t find ideas that could give you revenue all around the year.
For example, if your blogging niche is based on a festival, that means it’s going to be on top during that festival, and you can’t get any evergreen content on that niche too.
So, how to know the trend?
Simple, you can use Google trends. Let’s search interior design as our niche.
Now you can set the filter to worldwide and check its trend all over the year. This shows you’ll get enough evergreen topics to write on interior design. So, use google trends to finalize your niche.
Conclusion
Choosing a niche couldn’t be daunting if you’re using the proper steps and tools. Follow these steps, and finally, you’ll get your niche on your hand.
Get going and try something new!
