What’s your Blog Niche?

 

What’s your Blog Niche and will it work for you?

By Charles L Harmon

Writing a blog might be easy, but finding a blog niche that you enjoy writing about might not be so easy. There are hundreds of millions of people on the Internet, so there are probably millions of blogs. If your Niche is being written about all over the web, then it will be hard for you to be recognized. You will have to do a lot of promoting your blog in order for people to find it. If you are trying to find the right niche for yourself then you need to ask yourself some questions.

What are you interested in?

If you aren’t interested in your niche, then the process of writing consecutive blogs about it will be very boring and probably not last too long.  You will get tired of writing about something that you have no or very little interest in. I ought to know since I have a number of blogs myself. Take it from me you really should have a good interest in whatever you decide to blog about.

Although you will almost always need to do some research in order to write interesting and authoritative articles, and sometimes even short blog posts, there’s a big difference between research you really hate doing and learning from scratch, verses research that you enjoy and that usually comes easier if you like the topic of your research.

Research can, and often will take up a lot of hours for you, so you need to be able to enjoy what you’re researching about. If you don’t enjoy it you could become burned out after a relatively short period of time. Although the market might be better for Acne Remedies, if you’re interested in home gardens and hate health issues, then anything having to do with acne should not be your niche.

A big problem is people go for what other people are saying is a good niche or are into. That’s well and good, but you could have your work cut out for you just trying to “keep up with the Joneses” so to speak. With any niche you choose to go into it will help greatly if you make your niche well known and interesting. By doing that you can get other people interested and wanting to visit your site. At the same time, you are writing about something you know and enjoy.

If you have any doubts about writing what you are interested in take a quick look at a site about astronomy and space I have. I recently removed over 2600 pages from this site to make it slimmer and more focused since it covers a very broad niche. Imagine trying to write hundreds of articles or blog posts on a site like this if one hated astronomy, space, and other topics related to it. This is not a good example of a narrow niche, but my intent was just to have a site about astronomy and space for the layman and not make money from the site.

Who is your audience?

Before you start writing you need to know who your audience is. If your audience will be young adults, then you know most of them will have Internet access. If it’s seniors you can be fairly certain most of them may not have much experience with the internet and are also more conservative with their money.

Knowing your audience can also help you when it comes to advertising. You know with young adults you can advertise on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to get business people, and other social networks knowing a lot of your audience visit those places and are active.

You can even advertise on forums and around school sites if your audience is real young, still in school, or taking classes. Now if your audience was mainly senior citizens, you know most of them don’t use a computer or Internet, although that is changing somewhat. Nonetheless, what appeals to seniors may not appeal to younger people so there could be a difference in what you advertise and where you place your ads according to whom your audience and what their likes are.

Your blog niche, is it too broad?

When choosing your blog niche or niche for some other type of website, remember that it shouldn’t be too broad a topic. The other end of the spectrum holds true also, it shouldn’t be too narrow of a niche or topic. For example you want to write about music. That sounds like a great idea, because everyone loves music. However, music is a VERY BROAD subject. It is not one you could cover in a blog or even a large authority website. It is just too large and broad.

You would need to narrow that down to either a genre of music, specific artists of a genre, Jazz saxophone players, the best new bands, etc. If you wrote about every genre, you would lose customers that just want to know about one specific genre. Same with artists, or bands, you need to be more specific and cover just a narrow slither of the huge music market.

You could easily lose customers because you wouldn’t be talking about the genre they like enough. The other thing to remember with a topic like this, like with all topics, is make sure your targeted audience is into what you pick.

What about a doll niche? It would be great to have a domain name with the major keyword doll in it. I haven’t analyzed it, but it’s likely too broad a niche in itself. Maybe you’d need to narrow it down to porcelain dolls, antique dolls, children’s dolls, cloth dolls, Barbie dolls, etc. to be able compete in such a niche.

Or an alternative is to start in one of the narrow niches like porcelain dolls and as you get more traffic add another niche within the doll niche. Doing it this way could lead you to eventually have an authority site in the broad doll niche, yet you started off the smart way in one of the sub niches of the major niche.

Don’t do what I did. I was interested in an “off the wall” topic. I did a lot of research and couldn’t find much information. However I still wanted to have a website about it and let others know what I found. I bought a lot of books and read them and wrote a few hundred articles along with paying a writer to write about the same amount for the site.

Although I did eventually put up the site and ultimately got quite a bit of traffic to it, it never made much money. I knew from the start it might not make much money. Even though my site grew to over 2000 pages it could not reasonably expect to make much money because the topic was too broad. People in the niche were not passionate; the audience was not a coherent group with common interests. Plus there were a lot of other negative factors that entered into the picture that never would be an issue had I just stuck to a narrow niche where people were passionate and I could solve a problem for them. If you wonder what the niche was, take a look at my “Wish Good Luck” site where I was targeting the “good luck niche.”

Will you make any money?

Consider the above large good luck site. It didn’t make enough money to cover the cost of all the articles and software it used. It’s still up and getting some traffic, although Google’s series of animal algorithms updates over the past year have wiped out about 90% of the traffic it was getting.

Although making money is not necessarily the most important factor, it is a very real factor. You don’t want to spend a lot, or even all of your time, working on a blog or website and not have some monetary returns to show for it. That’s usually true even if the original intent was not just to put up a site to make money with it.

While looking at your list of possible niche ideas, look for one that you love, but can also make a profit from. Let’s say you’re into computers and making toys for your pet aardvark. If you choose to write your niche about pet aardvarks, you will probably get no traffic and make no profit. However writing about something associated with, or involving computers, like hardware, software, laptops, using computer graphics programs to draw and sell cartoons, etc. could lead you to profits. I’m sure you could make a nice profit if you did the research to find a narrow niche within the large computer niche.

Other Considerations

Some other things to ask yourself are; who are your competitors, and will advertising be easy or will it be difficult to reach your target audience. Those are important things you will need to figure out before picking you niche.

Just remember, have fun with it and choose a narrow niche you like, especially if you are going to blog about it. If you feel forced to do countless hours of research, your niche will not necessarily be a success just because of all that work.

Remember you will need to do some research, however, including keyword research and you’ll also need to pick a niche where you can sell something, solve a problem, plus your niche has to be ready and able to spend money if you are selling something to them. You can check to see if there are ads in the search engines for the keywords you want to target to easily determine whether people in your niche will spend money. Once you’re done taking all this into consideration, your blog niche is doable, then you should be ready to go.