Note: This used to be a page, but I decided to make it a post instead. Sorry for any confusion.
Wait a minute! Shouldn’t that headline read How to Choose a Niche for your Blog in 5 Easy Steps? Well, I suppose we could all agree that it should say that, but unfortunately, this is not easy! It is difficult.
Overview of the Process
- Determine Your Motivations
- Narrow Your Niche
- Research Traffic and Keywords
- Research Domains
- Decide!
Step 1: Determine Your Motivations
You want to blog, but what should your blog be about? Good question! To help answer it, you need to answer a deeper, preceding question: why do you want to blog? What are your motivations? There are several motivations that you might have:
- You want to make money online
- You feel very strongly about a subject and want to tell the world about it
- You enjoy a subject very much and want to share it with the world
- You want to chronicle something important that’s happening to you for your own sake, and/or because it might help others
You don’t have to have only one motivation: most people blog for several of the reasons listed above. In my opinion, the better blogs out there were started from a combination of at least two out of the four motivations listed above.
The last three items in the list are an easy decision for a blog’s subject: whatever it is you feel strongly about, passionately about, or whatever’s happening to you becomes what your blog should be about. But what about that first item? What about making money blogging? If you want to make money from your blog, it is better if one of the other motivations also exists. Otherwise, you have a much harder choice to make, because your blog could be about anything that might make money for you. But even in this case, you should ask yourself, “What do I know about?” Are you an expert in something? Do you have a hobby or special interest? Consider these as possible topics for a blog.
Step 2: Narrow Your Niche
If you have read any other articles or blogs about making money online through blogging, you have probably encountered the word niche, as in finding a niche market. A niche is just a very specific subject matter. A niche is the opposite of a generalized content strategy. Think about real stores: Store is general, but Art deco-era glassware store is a niche. On the internet, there are enough people to drive money towards any niche imaginable. This concept is often referred to as the long tail, or long tail effect. If you plan on making money blogging, it is better that your blog is about a specific thing, rather than a general topic, because people buy things! Things get advertised. Things are reviewed and recommended. General topics do none of these things. For example, photography lighting is better than just photography. Lomo cameras is a better niche than just cameras.
Step 3: Research Keywords and Potential Traffic
I don’t want to say that you shouldn’t create a blog simply because it isn’t about a popular topic, because on the internet, nearly any topic is popular enough to somebody! There are enough people online to provide a large audience for any specific topic imaginable. However, if you’re creating a blog to try your hand at making money online, you need to do some serious research. If making money online isn’t your thing, you will at least be entering an existing community of bloggers on the same or similar topics. You will need to get the lay of the land, see who the “big fish” are, and see what is common knowledge among the bloggers in your anticipated niche.
There are several ways to gauge a topic’s existing popularity and strength. The simplest is to just do a search for the most obvious keyword of the topic in a blog search engine (regular search engine too) and see what comes up. Here are some blog search engines you can use. You may want to bookmark them for later if you want to keep reading (drag the link up to the bookmarks or favorites area of your web browser toolbar):
Another way to judge a blog’s potential if you plan on making money from the blog is to see what kind of competition and pricing there is for search keywords. We’ll learn more about how to make money later, but one main method used by many bloggers is to have ads on their blog (that is one income stream for my blog). Ads related to expensive keywords (the advertisers themselves are bidding/paying for the clicks for these keywords) could be quite profitable if a blog were popular. There is quite a lot to know about keyword research, so keep in mind that we are just barely scratching the surface, here. Don’t get too impatient. Take the time to learn things in the right order and build a strong foundation—you will avoid typical beginner’s mistakes that could cost you a lot of frustration and time (and maybe money). Below are some resources for looking at keyword popularity and advertising bid prices. Articles on how to use these kinds of tools are coming in the near future.
Step 4: Research Domain Names
Many of these topics are all interrelated, which makes it difficult for a beginner to know where to start in order to make the right decisions. One important thing every beginner should know is that it is ideal if you can get a domain (websitename.com) that contains the very keywords used as search terms by your audience. When researching a new blog, you want to do a little domain research after determining a niche and looking at certain promising keywords. Often the most obvious keyword-domain correlations have already been taken—but not always! So take that keyword research you just did and feed those keywords into a domain search engine.
By the way, if you’re wondering: what about free hosted blogs like Blogger’s blogspot.com and WordPress’s wordpress.com? I have a simple answer for you: if you are serious about blogging, avoid them. Get your own hosting and your own domains, so that it is you.com, not you.blogspot.com or you.wordpress.com. You want to control your own blogs, and not be subject to the whims of another company. Plus, it’s better for search engine results. Most people who begin a blog on a free service regret it sooner or later. Moving over to a self-hosted blog is painful and you will lose some of your audience. It’s just best to avoid this altogether if you can. Begin the right way. I have a few Blogger-hosted blogs as experiments, and one that I probably should have followed this advice on, but I didn’t know this back when I started it. Now, I wouldn’t dare risk moving it. Looking back, I consider this to be a mistake, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake.
Step 5: Decide!
Finally, you have to make your decision! It’s tempting to get caught up in endless fantasies about how successful you will be, how much money you will make, or how cool your blog will look. These fantasies often take the form of “research.” There comes a point where it’s time to take this seriously and begin. Choose your most likely topic, purchase a domain name and hosting, and… then what? You need to choose a blogging application and set it up! We’ll cover that in a future article. In the meantime, you’ll need to do some research on other blogs in your area of interest. You’ll want to note what’s current news, who’s who, and what’s common historical knowledge in the online community regarding your subject.
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