How To Choose A Niche For A Blog 2021
This post may never get ranked high on the search engines as it is a subject that every business website has and we don’t tend to write 25,000 words to compete. But we wanted to cover this subject for our audience anyway. We promise we will do our best to offer advice and guidance. So with out further ado How To Choose A Niche For A Blog.
What is a niche?
It is a topic, subtopic, or a segment.
According to Dictionary.com
“a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.”
“denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.”
You will need to pick a topic (niche) for your blog to be centered around. For some people this is instantly obvious, for others (like us), it is extremely hard.
Some people want to write about everything under the sun. This is alright as long as you realize that you are the subject of the blog and you have to get the audience interested you.
How To Choose A Niche
Start by writing down things you love, hobbies, passions, interests, etc. Are you already an authority on a topic? Is there something you like to talk about the most? Is there something you are interested in learning? Can you narrow it down? Is it a specialty field?
Examples of Specialties Within Niches
Travel
Travel Blog
Travel Diary
Business Travel
Solo Travel
Family Travel
Budget Travel
Traveling By Ship
Traveling By Car
Traveling By Plane etc.
Traveling Europe
Traveling America
Traveling Europe by Train
Traveling America By Car
Traveling America By Car With The Family
You can see we started narrowing it down just by creating this list and that is what you want to do with your topic.
Let’s do another one together. How about fitness?
Yoga
Pilates
Zoomba
Dance
Home Workouts
Exercise(s)
Diet(s)
Weight Lifting
Supplements
Exercises For Diabetics
Diet For Diabetics
Diet For Women With Diabetes
Home Workouts For Diabetics
Personal Training
Weight Loss
Keto
Weight Loss Diet Keto For Diabetics.
We don’t know a whole lot about fitness as that is not one of our interests but you can see the process is much the same. We do know a little about diabetes so that is why that is on the list.
Once you have your list ready it is time to do the research.
Researching Your Niche
So you have your list of ideas ready but you need to narrow down your options.
You want to know
- 1. If other people are interested in this niche
- 2. If the niche is profitable
To find out the popularity of a niche you can do free research on trend statistics at Google Trends. It will show you a graph of interest over time. You can choose the period of time from a drop-down box to see the trend up from 2004 and up. This gives you a good overall view of the trend. Did it rise over time? Did it fall? Maybe it is up and down.
You can also use the tool to compare terms.
As you can see the word “diet” is in decline but it is still pretty popular. Looking at “weight loss” the trend has only gone up over time and stayed popular. Either one of these words would make a great niche however the competition is fierce.
And Just For kicks and giggles let’s check out the individual diets and compare them.
So it looks like keto diet is the winner. All the other diets have surges in popularity that dropped off towards 2021. Keto while it rose and then fell is still the clear winner. The one diet to rule them all. (That could be an article all on its own!)
Theoretically, you want to be in a niche that is either steady or going up. In the charts of the example above it still shows popularity of the diet even though it is not as high as it once was and when you show a more recent timeline it shows as very steady. However because it is on a downward you may be gambling with how many more years it will remain popular.
The only reason we would pick something on the downward trend is that we wanted to be on board for the upswing but this is just like trading the market one day it will work or one day it will fail. Basically, you are taking a gamble and we would rather have stability especially if it is our first website.
Next you want to come up with some keywords for your niche. Read How To Do Free Keyword Research.
Plug those keywords in to google and check out the results. Does this niche have products that you can sell? Services that can be sold? What is the competition like? Are the results mostly forums? Or are they big competitors, authority site (ie Walmart, Healthline, webmd, whoever you considered to be the big guns of the industry)?
If it is all forums then you know it is popular enough and that a small blog will most likely out rank those forums. You have just found an easy to rank for keyword. If they are all authority sites then you know the niche is popular BUT it will take a long time to compete. So in this circumstance you may be on to the right idea but you will need to narrow down your niche a little more.
Why Choosing A Niche Is Important?
Well first off you need a topic to write about on your website. This much is obvious, but there are a few other reasons as well.
You need to be able to write about said topic now and for the foreseeable future. Your website is technically never done so you need to choose something that interests you and you want to write about for the next couple of years. If you pick something you don’t like it will be difficult to pump out content for your site plus it also begins to feel a lot like work.
We chose “gifts” as our first niche and there were so many problems along the way.
One it was really hard to write for. We never wrote over 800 words and you need 1000-2000 to get anywhere near the competition and page 1 of the search engines. There were some days it was hard to get over 250 words. Maybe you could do better but this was our experience.
Two, the competition is high. There are so many authority sites for just the “gift” niche it is not even funny. We were a small blog trying to compete with the big boys and it just wasn’t working
Three “gifts” turned out to be way to broad of a niche. It just wasn’t specific enough. We did eventually niche down a little and it is working out better now that we have a specific audience to target.
All this is part of the learning process, but if we can save anyone from these problems it is worth it!
So to repeat, choosing your niche is a very important part of the process of starting an online business. Take your time. Do your research. Tentatively plan your site. Then start your site. It is much better to know what you want to do ahead of time and it will make it easier in the long run.
Choosing Your Audience
You need to know who your audience is or will be.
Find out where they hang out. Find forums and groups in your niche. Get to know their problems and pain points.
This not only helps you to write but helps you solve problems and questions that the people in your niche really want to read about.
With our gift site we choose “everybody” as our audience. That was a BAD idea.
First of all that is just too broad and second you can’t write for everyone.
It also does not help Google see you as an authority, at least not right off the bat. You would probably need over 500 posts to be seen as an authority in this niche. That is a lot of posts for a blog just starting out. (It’s about 2 years’ worth of articles)
Make sure to narrow it down so you don’t fall in to that trap. You can always expand later when you have an established site.
Ways to narrow down your audience
By Demographics
Male or Female?
Age groups: Child, teen, adult, senior, specific age range
Other Ways
Hobbies: Interests, Passions
Income
Pain Points: Problems
Education
Final Words
After you’ve chosen your niche and planned your site, it is time to start writing. Write, write, write. Post consistently at least once a week. You really want to shoot for 2-3 posts a week but with emphasis on quality over quantity. It is better to have one quality post than 3-5 low quality mediocre posts.
As it is with most things practice makes perfect. If not perfect then we will go with “better”.
It took us over a year to write over 800 words. For some of you this may come easier, but for the rest of you it will get better and easier as long as you have chosen the right niche for you.
