After reading and understanding what blog, blogger, and blogging are about, today, I would like to share more one of the most critical things when it comes to successful blogging: Niche blog.
What is a niche blog? How to find the right niche for your new blog?
What is a niche blog? All you need to know about niche blogging
(from a veteran niche blogger since 2017)
Back in 2017, I wrote a blogpost on my European Travel Blog to share what I had learn after one year of travel blogging. One of the things was to find the niche for your blog as soon as possible. Why?
Well, to thoroughly answer that question, we should first start be defining what a niche blog is.
1. What is a niche blog?
Niche or niche market is a term widely used within the field of Marketing. It can be easily understood as to create a new market for a specific product.
Let’s take the example of travel blogging. First of all, you know that your market will be travel. However, within travel, you’ll have different segments, like Asian travel, European travel, cruise travel, adventure travel, and so on. You as a travel blogger should find the right segment to kickstart your blogging career.
Your segment should be the one you are most familiar with since it’ll be way easier for you to blog about it. Let’s say my segment is European travel since I’m living here, so there will be no difficulty for me travelling around Europe and blog about it. It would be more difficult (and make no sense) for me to blog about Asian travel, for example, because it’s neither what I’m familiar with nor something I can relate to myself.
After recognising what segment you’re in/should be in, it’s time to dig a little bit deeper to find what niche you should blog about.
Take my European travel blog, misagjone.com, as an example: In the very beginning, I wanted it to be a travel blog (market) where I could blog about all the places I’ve been to. After one year, I realised I should narrow down the market and should only blog about European travel (segment). Eventually, I caught myself blog more about travel in Europe with kids, seniors, and weekend breaks with detailed day-to-day itineraries. That’s when I knew I have found my niche.
More examples:
- A beauty blog (market) about skincare (segment) for people with uneven skin (niche)
- A food blog (market) with a focus on vegetarian food (segment) for people with problem tolerating meat products (niche)
- A photography blog (market) for beginners (segment) who want to learn about food photography and travel photography (niche)
So now you basically have some ideas about niche blog and niche blogging. However, the ugly truth is that it’s not always THAT easy to find your niche. It may take you time until you can figure it out.
In that case, take my advice to start with a good segment first. Later, depend on the development of your blog and the market in general and the data about your readers (via Google Analytics), you can decide that niche your blog should be.
For example, you’re a food blogger (market) with a focus on baking (segment). After a while hanging out there, you gain more experience within your field, build up your community of loyal readers who truly enjoy reading your blog, and most important, understand who your readers are and what they want, you may eventually figure out you should blog more about baking without using an oven ← voilà, THIS is your niche!
But, my friend, that’s not all about niche blog!
Finding your niche is just the first step you should take to become a professional blogger. Next, I’d love to talk more about what you need to know before choosing a niche.
2. What you need to know BEFORE starting
2.1 Do you really love that niche?
I know many (MANY) travel bloggers who chose a niche for two reasons: Either it’s a hot topic (meaning they can gain a lot of traffic) or it’s a lucrative topic (meaning they can earn big money). Or both.
However, no matter what they chose, the problem is that it’s not a niche they LOVE.
Choosing a niche that you’re not really into it may cause more harm than good. Blogging is not an easy job (sorry). If you don’t love what you’re doing, you may lose interest in the topic and later, drop off after a short time.
My advice: When considering a niche, choose the one that you do love. Love from the bottom of your heart. It will make your live easier!
2.2 Is your niche popular?
Say you’ve found a niche you love. But in the reality, nobody cares about it except for you and maybe your parents and close friends, but that’s it. Sounds bad?
So the question here is how to know if your niche is popular! The answer is to be active on SoMe and do your research.
You can follow relevant groups (on Facebook, forums, Quora, Reddit, etc.) and try to engage in the conversations, answer questions and see how useful your answers can be to solve people’s problems.
Or you can check keywords using Google. Just type the keywords related to your niche and see what you can get from Google. If you have more than 10 million results, it means your niche has great potential. More than hundreds of millions may mean the market is already saturated.
Less than a thousand? It means you should better find another niche!
2.3 Can you monetise from your niche?
Another factor to consider is if your niche profitable, meaning you can make money from what you blog.
Niches like religion or politics are considered to be non-profitable (and that’s why they often have a .org URL, meaning they don’t make money from their content). But even if you don’t blog about one of these two, there are still niches that are not as profitable other ones.
What should you do in this situation, when you finally can narrow down a niche just to figure out it’s not lucrative?
Think about another niche in the same segment!
Don’t choose another market or another segment but rather a niche in the same segment, because it will…
- keep you motivated and interested, and
- save your time learning about a new market.
For example, you’re into sewing cotton reusable diapers (yes, there’s a thing like that) for newborn babies. However, except for you, no one seems to take it seriously. So, do you think you should shake it up a little bit and turn your niche into something like sewing onesies/clothes for newborn, especially for busy new mums?
If you, in the worst case, cannot generate any passive income form your niche (which will NEVER be the case ever), you can still sell your products online and possibly turn it into a profitable side hustle in the future.
2.4 Find ideas for your niche
Finally, to make sure you really know what you’re going to blog about, try to write down 50 blogpost ideas for your blog.
If you cannot make it to 10, it can be either this niche is way too niche or you haven’t understood your niche thoroughly yet. Try to learn, search, and read more about the topic again and see if you can generate more ideas.
From 30 and above, though, can be considered as “safe” for your niche. Maybe more ideas will come up later when you’ll be actually blogging.
You see, finding a niche is crucial for the development of your blog and make it a business, i.e. you can make real money from it. If you want to thrive in the world of making money blogging, find your niche. Now!
I hope this blog post will be useful for you on the way of figuring it out! I’m glad to hear your niche finding story, or if anything unclear, feel free to leave a comment below and let me help you!
Happy blogging!
