One of the most important decisions to make when starting a profitable blog is which niche to choose. With millions of blogs already on the internet, people are spoiled for choice. This makes it a challenge for an independent blogger, business owner or online marketing agency to choose a niche for their next blog.
The steps outlined in this blog post will help you take the guesswork out of selecting a niche which has excellent potential and also how to avoid falling into the category of 90% of niches which fail:
Follow Your Passion
If you start a blog about a topic, where you can barely add your own personal insights, then you are creating just another blog on the internet, and you will struggle with producing quality content. If you write something that you are passionate about, the quality of your content will be naturally high.
So the first step to choose your blog niche is to list the topics that you’re super passionate about by asking yourself the following questions:
- What do I find myself talking about non-stop?
- What are some topics that I read about a lot?
- What are my main hobbies and interests?
- What do I feel like I could write about every single week and never get tired of it?
Once you have a long list of topics that answer these questions, then you can move on to step two.
Prioritise Your List
The next step is to list topics where you have plenty of skill and or knowledge.
To help uncover this list, ask yourself questions like:
- What do I enjoy teaching others about?
- What am I better at than the average person?
- What do I have a lot of experience doing?
- What is something unique that I’ve accomplished?
Answering these questions will help you pin down your main areas of expertise. When you do this exercise, keep in mind that you don’t have to be a world record holding expert in your selected topic.
You only need to be skilled and accomplished enough to be able to teach what you know in a way that is valuable and helpful to your intended audience. So don’t hold yourself back from picking a certain niche just because you don’t feel like you’re an expert yet.
Look For a Profitable Niche
Once you have your two lists, the next step is to look for an overlap and consider profitability, by examining which of the topics where you’re both knowledgeable and passionate. Online marketing experts agree that you should not base your decision on how much money you can make overnight because it will take you probably a while to start making some serious money from your blog. So if you are a new mother, you probably have a lot of parenting knowledge gained recently, so creating a website MommyHood101.com would be a good idea for you.
Thinking in terms of profit is important because without it you have a hobby and not a business. You also really want to make sure you’re considering your knowledge and your passions too because if you just base your blog solely on how much money you can make, you’re going to burn out quickly. Blogging is very demanding and requires a lot of work, so if money is your only motivation, you will quickly give up.
To get started, let’s say you want to start a blog around physical fitness and would like to determine whether the topic has a large enough audience and how competitive the niche is, begin your process by using Google Trends. Type “physical fitness” to check if there’s any interest in the topic and the number of people searching for it. This is an important step because it will help you determine if the interest in the topic is rising, declining or stable over time. It’s best to avoid a topic where the interest is flagging if you want to build a blog that your audience will be interested in over a period of several years.
As you can see, “Physical Fitness” is a good topic for a blog. The interest in the topic over the past 5 years has been stable and is continuing to rise. This means you will have a sufficiently large audience interested in the topic for many years to follow.
However, the topic is very broad and there are several websites are competing for attention, so you will need to get a bit more specific. Using the AdWords Keyword Planner tool, find out which other keywords have a high search volume and low competition.
You will find that keywords such as weight training, weight lifting, weight trainer, weight workouts and weightlifting exercises are some keywords you can target. Explore other keywords and keyword phrases, which you can include in your blog topics. This way you will have several keywords which you can target when creating content for your blogs. If you aren’t sure exactly how to choose the best keywords, enlist the help of an online marketing agency.
Finally, to find out if your niche is profitable, do a Google search to see whether any products are being advertised through Adwords, which target keywords that are related to your niche. If you find there are several ads, then you have found the right niche.
As you can see, there are several ads which appear when a Google search using the keywords, “weight training equipment”.
Once you’ve found the niche for your next blog, begin creating compelling content to help position yourself as an expert. It will take a little time to start generating traffic to your blog, so you will need to be patient, and while biding your time, continue creating content which your target audience will appreciate.
Content by Nik Tordil
Results oriented Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Online Marketing Strategist with over 10 years of professional experience. Had worked alongside a team of SEO Experts in Sydney and helped numerous businesses across Australia in terms of leveraging their SEO / Internet Marketing campaigns and guiding them to success using effective and white hat methodologies.
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