Kalkan, Turkey
(Updated 6/28/2022)
Deciding how to pick a blogging niche is one of your most important decisions.
Picking the right niche for you and your readers often marks the difference between success and failure.
Selecting the proper blogging niche energizes you for a long, sometimes challenging blogging journey. Niching down targets your readers. Making the right niche choice helps to grow a thriving blogging business.
Ultimately, mixing your passion with a pressing demand forms the foundation for a professional blogging career.
Most bloggers have no idea where to start when it comes to selecting a niche. Chasing popular niches won’t work if you have no passion for covering these topics. Following your passion never works if no strong demand exists for covering this topic.
Struggling new bloggers make the common mistake of blogging about multiple niches interesting to them. Unfortunately, the world trusts specialists and deeply distrusts generalists. “Jack of all trades” types master none.
Follow these tips to pick a blogging niche that works for you and your readers.
1: Follow Your Fun
Passionate bloggers persist through inevitable blogging obstacles.
Choose a blogging niche that feels fun to discuss if you want to go pro.
Making money through blogging requires:
- learning
- studying
- practicing
- creating
- connecting
- monetizing
over years.
As these years elapse, passionate bloggers persist and everyone else quits.
Blogging has to work for you if you want to stick with it during lean years. Picking a niche that feels fun to explore stokes the fire of an inner driver that never seems to be extinguished.
Write a list of 5-10 topics you feel passionate about. Consider what you would blog about even if no one paid you a penny because no one will be paying you a penny for a long time as you build your:
- skills
- exposure
- credibility
Take this list of 5-10 topics to the next step.
2: Pinpoint A Pressing Problem
Vet each of these 5-10 ideas by searching for a reader demand.
Feeling passionate about a topic does not guarantee that readers want you to blog about the topic.
Demand dictates whether or not your passion can evolve into a professional blogging career.
Validate your blogging niche idea with:
- Google semantic search
- Answer the Public
- Quora
For example, if you feel passionate about blogging query popular blogging-related keywords like:
- “blogging”
- “blogging tips”
on the above mentioned sites.
Do people search a wide range of keywords and key phrases related to these terms on Answer the Public and Google? Do Quora and Reddit users ask a high volume of questions related to each search term via these Q and A sites?
Determining keyword search volume on Google can indicate reader demand but simply seeing 100’s of keywords being queried related to these terms plus observing 100’s to 1000’s of questions asked on Quora and Reddit concerning these niches clearly indicates a strong demand exists.
Whittle down your list to 5 passions that clearly solve a pressing problem.
Matching your personal passion with a public demand makes for a viable blogging niche.
3: Pare Down to a Single Niche
Choose a single blogging niche from your list to become a specialist.
Admittedly, this may be the most uncomfortable step in the niche selection process because:
- people feel passionate about multiple topics
- the ego desires to express itself through multiple topics despite your reader’s demands for specialization
- letting go niches triggers a “what if I covered that niche instead?” fear scenario that paralyzes bloggers into delaying, hesitating and subsequent analysis paralysis
Spend time in quiet. Think about the niche that feels most fun to discuss. What would you blog about before any other topic?
Pick that niche.
Being highly passionate about an in-demand niche positions you to go pro because inner drivers beat outer demand when both appear to be in abundance. A blogger who genuinely loves their niche persists until they become a niche leader because no:
- stat
- metric
- worldly outcome
stops passionate people.
However, less passionate bloggers driven by outer demand (traffic, money, trends) quit blogging often because numbers on a screen scare them into quitting.
Mildly passionate bloggers give up when they do not see traffic or profits metrics reach a specific threshold after a period of time since numbers drive them more than passion.
Passionate bloggers keep blogging because love, fun and service, not numbers, motivate them to blog. Eventually, if they keep blogging intelligently, the big numbers arrive.
Should You Run a Multi-Niche Blog?
New bloggers often want to begin blogging on multiple niches.
This is almost always a bad idea because changing niches with each post:
- confuses readers
- dissolves credibility
- erodes trust
- eradicates any sense of expertise
Targeted blog readers help build thriving blogging businesses. Changing niches on a single blog un-targets your readers. Un-targeting readers leads to blogging business failure.
How can you gain reader trust when you lose reader trust with each post? Instead of following your “blogging and SEO” blog readers will just follow Darren Rowse for blogging and Search Engine Land for SEO. Humans seem conditioned to trust specialists and to not trust generalists. People believe someone who masters one niche inside-out and lose interest in someone who tries to master 2, 3 or 4 niches.
Would you trust a blogging tips blogger who offers you hundreds of detailed, in-depth posts, online courses and eBooks covering only blogging tips? Or would you trust a multi-niche blogger who offers 30 thin, weak posts about blogging tips?
Pick only one blogging niche to succeed.
4: Consider Niching Down if Appropriate
Niche down to cover a specific sub-niche if appropriate.
For example, Blogging From Paradise is a “blogging tips” niche blog. I did not niche down because the niche is not highly crowded or broad.
However, bloggers who choose the personal development niche may consider niching down to:
- stand out in a crowded niche
- explore fewer blog post topics in greater detail
- establish authority more quickly with a specialized approach
Standing out from 20,000 personal development bloggers seems difficult. But niching down to a mindset training blog makes it easier to stand out. Selecting a tighter niche also allows you to become a niche authority more quickly by publishing fewer but more highly-detailed, specialized blog posts that rank on Google. Driving laser-targeted, organic traffic through these posts builds your credibility and blogging business.
As a practical example, Kelli Cooper of Life Made to Order niched down within the law of attraction niche to teach an internal approach centered on changing your mindset to enjoy worldly success. Most law of attraction bloggers cover the broad topic of how to get stuff through generic but less transformative strategies. Kelli mindfully decided to blog about the specific niche of:
- going within
- managing your energy
- facing, triggering, feeling and clearing your fears
- feeling better
- manifesting your ideal life from a better-feeling, peaceful mindset (allowing in money, the ideal partner, etc)
Her blog and podcast appear on many top LOA resources lists because she niched down to stand out versus going broad to compete with a bigger pool of bloggers.
Note; for full transparency, Kelli is my wife but offers you a genuine example of how niching down in a competitive field can help you become a professional blogger. Her clients and customers find her almost exclusively through Google. Covering a tight niche in great detail drove Google traffic to her blog and she has never optimized a single post for SEO.
Decide if niching down makes sense for you.
Bloggers thrive in competitive niches but niching down makes it easier to specialize, stand out and thrive.
Selecting a tight niche drives highly-targeted, quality blog traffic which grows your blogging business.
However, blogging about broader but less competitive niches can also accelerate your success.
Consider niching down if it makes more sense to specialize.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do You Choose the Perfect Niche?
Following the prior four steps helps you choose the right blogging niche for you and your readers.
However, beware how you define and feel about the word “perfect”.
Bloggers often delay picking a niche for weeks or sometimes months for their fear of missing out on the perfect blogging niche.
For example, new bloggers often mistakenly believe that the most profitable blogging niche is the best or perfect niche. This crowd flip flops between the most profitable blogging niches daily for weeks because perfection-obsession induces analysis paralysis. Today, the most profitable niche seems like the perfect choice. But the second most profitable niche appears to be the perfect choice tomorrow due to greater growth potential in the future.
Meanwhile, the passionate blogger who picked an in-demand niche 3 weeks ago already drives 200 plus targeted visitors to their blog daily.
The perfect niche does not exist.
Simply follow the prior four steps to find the right niche.
What Is the Most Important Part of Picking a Blogging Niche?
The most important part of picking a blogging niche involves 2 steps:
- select a niche you feel passionate about covering
- match that passion with a pressing blogging problem based on research
Do not base niche selection on popularity alone because frontrunners struggle, fail and quit before succeeding. Bloggers who select a niche based solely on Google traffic never put in the 1000’s of intelligent blogging work hours required to go pro because they lack the:
- passion
- desire
- trust
- detachment
to work for free for a long time.
However, do not blindly follow your blogging passion without doing market research. Passionate bloggers who do not vet their niche based on a pressing demand simply blog for themselves.
Join your passion with solving a pressing problem to find your blogging niche.
Conclusion
Pick your blogging niche then get busy creating detailed content and building relationships.
Selecting your niche is just the beginning of your blogging career.
Think about your passions. Do research to ensure that demand exists for your passions. Select one niche. Drill down if necessary.
Figuring out how to pick a blogging niche is not difficult if you simply match your chief passion with a pressing problem.
