Contents
An Introduction to Niche Blogs
Your favorite niche bloggers all began like this…
They found themselves scrolling through the internet checking out niche blogs, subscribing to their best-loved channels.
Slowly gathering inspiration…
Researching the ‘how-to’s’ of blogging…
and then suddenly, they were hit with an immense stroke of ‘I’m doing this! The rest is history and you most likely see them still surfacing at the top today.
However, the success of these niche blogs isn’t just a stroke of luck…
Your favorite bloggers didn’t centralize their niche blogs around just anything that seemed to be popular at the time.
No, they knew better than that because in order to build a blogging empire, you have to share your personal love and passion of what you do with your audience.
This allows you to identify your niche – sustaining your interest in your blogging experience while keeping your viewers engaged in your content!
Have you found your niche yet?
If you’re having a little bit of trouble identifying your niche…
Don’t worry!
We have made a list of the most influential things to do in order to help you choose and develop your niche through doing what you love most!
Identify Your Blog's Purpose
Finding Your Niche Focus: Your niche’s interaction with your blog is imperative to gain page viewers and shares. When you start working on finding a niche that is right for you, try this:
How to Zero in on Your Purpose
In order to find the best niche to gear your content towards, you first have to understand your blog’s purpose.Finding the purpose behind your niche blog ideas means understanding the fundamental reason you have chosen to share your ideas with your viewers.
Ask yourself: Is this niche going to allow me the landscape to convey all of my valuable ideas? Choosing a niche that offers mobility in idea sharing will always keep your content winsome with your audience.
When contemplating niche selection, take a moment to consider: What interests intuitively peak your curiosity? If there is a thought or idea that has never seemed to quite go away, run with it!
This will allow you to always be excited when introducing new niche blog posts as you have a genuine interest in what you are sharing.
Friendly tip: Think about the passions we discussed earlier and which ones would give you the most joy to convey. Whether you bring you blog to life through photos, videos, or written posts – you're viewers need to be able feel you're genuine love for that topic!
• The Added Bonus
The more you are excited to share, the more you end up sharing! This is the best way to gain a large audience as your viewers want fresh content, as often as possible.
Use Maps to Target Your Strengths and Passions
Dig deep – I mean really deep, when unraveling your inner-strengths and passions. Your abilities should allow you the support your need to succeed in the journey that is blogging.
Creating a mind map is a great tool to identify your inner-strengths and passions. This tool can also be used when developing new sub-blog topics relative to your blog’s main idea.
Find Your Niche With a Mind Map
It’s time to declutter your mind, replacing what is scattered with pure clarity!
Before you begin, let’s gain a little insight on how a mind map can serve your thought process when identifying your niche.
How to Use a Mind Map
Think of your mind map as a key database for your brain. It contains the multitude of your thoughts; however, it’s actually organized.
A mind map is mostly seen beginning with a central point and then grows while sub-topics associated to your main themes are added. Your key subject should be at the center of your page, reminding you of the purpose of your blogging pursuit.
Mind maps can be used for many aspects of your blog!
Mapping could be used for anything, from coming up with a niche to content creation. The team from Uhurunetwork.com wrote an extremely helpful article on how to use mind maps to generate blog post. We suggest checking it out! It has some great examples and could be useful in creating your niche map.
For those that are looking to keep it simple, you can start by writing (or typing) ’The ideal niche’ and branching out with your main themes. The branches then should form a connected structure; allowing an organized approach to develop when identifying your niche.
Examples of main themes can range from health, fashion, beauty, or entertainment.
Sub-topics will be relative to your main themes. If you chose health, a sub-topic may be personal development or holistic nutrition.
Really, you can pursue anything you put your mind to – so think limitlessly!
It's Time to Start Brainstorming
A few questions should arise while putting the pen (or fingers to the keyboard) to paper:
• What would I like to spend more time doing, if I had more time?
• What niche, overall, would make me most happy?
• Can I envision myself pursuing this within 2-4 years?
In our opinion, the answer to the last question can be a determining factor for whether you want to pursue that niche or not.
The reality is: you want your blog to grow! This means you want the flexibility of writing as many posts, as often as possible.
By identifying your answers, you’ll receive a better insight on what you should be including on your mind map, leading you to your blog’s best fit niche.
Complete Your Mind Map
If you’ve gotten to the final point where nearly all of your ideas have been added to your mind-map – then a congrats is well in order!
With a highlighter in hand (or coloring tool if you are using your laptop). Decide what the main goal of your blog is and then highlight the ideas that will best allow you to reach these goals. So, If making money is your main goal highlight the most profitable options for your blog.
This may take a little bit of research but it’s definitely worth it. You will find yourself quickly sorting right through the yes’s and no’s of your niche identification.
Now, take a moment to objectively view your map.
What stands out most to you?
Don’t fight yourself on the answer – really go with it. No matter what niche you choose, if it’s broadened with a lot of wiggle room to build, you can always take your blog on a new journey!
Bonus: Free Mind Mapping Tools!
If you’re looking to conserve a little bit of paper and conveniently create a mind-map via desktop or smartphone, here are a few free mind-mapping tools that are booming within the market today:
The answers always lie within: Through identifying what you enjoy most, what values resonate with your core, and how you can achieve inner-fulfillment, you can undoubtedly discover your ideal niche.
Take your time with it!
The answers may not come overnight, but don’t lose hope yet! The answers are within you, keep mapping and it will happen!
As they say, patience is key!
Try Choosing a Niche With Options
The sky’s the limit, so the bigger you think – the higher you soar!
You don’t want your niche being too small, because in a small niche market, you have little room to grow in the future. Also, developing your sub-niches will become more difficult since there is a narrow window of flexibility to begin with.
Keep in Mind: Yes, you want a niche with lots of options. However, you will need to find a different angle within that niche in order to stand out.
For Example:
If you decided to go with cooking. Doing a blog on “Travel” in general is too vague and will get buried by the million other blogs already doing this. Instead focus on an area that isn’t already completely saturated, such as “Traveling on a Budget”.
Broaden Your Horizon With Research
The best way to ensure your niche has a lot of room to grow is with that old-school research. Research can show you what is flourishing in the blogging market and comparatively, what you will find most success in pursuing.
Use your favorite niche blogs as inspiration within your niche, find out what their readers want, right now. Once you’ve done that it’s time to get serious, start using research tools to analyze what your favorite bloggers are doing and what is working or not working for them.
We suggest becoming very familiar with this free tool:
Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool
Okay, at this point you’ve narrowed your focus a bit. Wish to narrow it a bit more? Use Google Adwords Keyword Research tool in order to find the out search volume data and competitiveness of your niche keywords.
Familiarizing yourself with this tool has a lot of benefits. You can also get forecasts on keyword ideas for current trends within your niche for supreme blogging success.
Analyze Your Niche
There are other tools you can also use to analyze what is flourishing within your niche in real-time.
Majestic: A free intelligence tool for SEO, Internet PR, and Marketing. Discover what is leading in the online niche market and who's influencing whom. You will have the ability to check other niche blogs backlinks, keywords, and website stats.
SemRush: An intelligence tool to identify different trends that occur within your niche. You have the ability to research other niche blogs and find out the keywords they are ranking for. SEO page audits, rankings and backlinks are also available. SemRush offers a free program for newbies. It is limited to 10 searches a day, however we think this will be enough for a beginner blogger.
Develop Your Sub-Niches
With a large niche to work with, you can easily develop your sub-niches. Your sub-niches are smaller segments that can be discussed within a larger segment of the market.
Designing a mental visionary: Think of your niche as an entire city and your sub-niches as different avenues within the city itself.
Essentially, you can pursue a sub-niche to take your niche blog in a new direction that still offers value and a little more specification.
If you are creating a budget travel blog, consider a sub-niche that is geared toward travel tips for college students with little to no money.
This niche is specified and takes your blog on a new path!
Pick a Niche for Passion and Profit!
For passion or for profit? This question makes it seem as if you have to pick between the two. When in reality, you don’t have to pick one – you can choose both!
This is because you can still make money while pursuing your passion!
The hard truth: If your blog is a platform for critiques or a venting arena, then you won’t need to worry about your niche market. Unfortunately, these kind of blogs do not have a likelihood of being monetized.
However, if your blog is something you’d like to make money off of, you should consider the niche market place. Some niches monetize better than others. Some just don’t offer many options to make money at all.
There are many different ways to monetize your site. Many niche blogs cash in using affiliate marketing, ads, eBooks and e courses, product sales, etc….. Our guide on the“ 7 Things to Consider Before Starting a Blog” has a great section on this, if you would like some more details on ways to make money with your blog.
Discover Your Niche's Market Place
With your passions and these monetizing methods in mind, research your niche market place with these following ideas:
• Target Audience Brainstorming
There is a high likelihood that your audience will be similar to you. This may come in the form of age or career. If your blog resonates best with you, it will then be easier for you to target your viewers needs. This strategy works because you already are aware of the services and products that interest you. From there you can build an income strategy.
• Niche Problems First
Is your niche looking for a solution to the problems you're audience has? It should be, as you introduce content geared towards these problems, you can create a way to solve them and make money doing it. You could design eBooks or an e course that you sell for fee that helps them gain insight on their revolving issues, inner-dreams, and life potential.
Use Profitable Problems!
If you want to put the buck to the problem, you have to use the profitable ones. The profitable niche blogs are likely to be seen ranking highest on search engines.
• Can You Set Yourself Apart from The Rest?
Let’s get real, when it comes to resourceful information, anyone can just Google it! By incorporating exclusive knowledge and your unique experiences to your niche, your readers will believe in you. Do you have something different to offer your niche?
To separate yourself from Google’s search engine, really dig deep with accredited information to help support the solutions presented to your niche problems.
Also, adding your personalized touch by sharing your unique experiences with your audience is something that Google can never provide when configuring the search results!
Now, your niche will trust your message because you have lived it out. This adds to your authenticity and your readers will have faith in any type of Ad, Service, or Product you create or recommend!
Conclusion
….And now you too are ready to begin!
When beginning as a blogger, choose a niche that you can put strengths and passions into! You excel best at what you can do best and what you love most.
We are at a time when conventions are releasing and everyone within the blogging market isn’t just chasing profitability. In fact, many niche blogs today are chasing their dreams first while putting the cash follow second.
By using in-depth brainstorming, creative mapping sessions, and reliable research – choosing your niche can be made that much simpler, allowing you to tread ahead and eventually surface to the top!
Don’t forget: Your niche already has an interest in what you have an interest in, don’t be afraid to be individualistic and embrace your inner voice!
Choosing a niche is one the most important steps required to start a blog!
Do you have any questions or comments about niche blogs? We would love to hear from you leave us a comment below. We will be sure to get back to you and help in anyway possible!
What's Next?
Check out our awesome new definitive guide on the ” 7 Things to Consider Before Starting a Blog”. You'll find tons of information on choosing a niche and more. It's sure to help you in achieving your blogging goals!
Wow this is some jam pack information, Thanks for making everything so clear. Really enjoyed all of it
Hey Anthony, Thanks for your feedback we really appreciate it.
I want to blog about a book I’m writing. An author friend of mine has a blog about herself, with a tab or two about her book, and a tab about encouragement and a positive life-style. I’d like to do something similar.
Hey Kathy, that sound really interesting. Have you started your blog yet? I see that you say you “want to”, the first step to blogging is saying ” I am starting a blog on…” and then just going for it. Let us know if we can be of any help!