So, you’ve decided to start a blog.

But you are struggling to find a niche for your blog. You don’t have an idea as to what to blog about.

You have several ideas running in your head and you are struggling to choose among them (due to fear of missing out) or you have none at all.

I can totally relate to it when I was choosing my first blogging niche in 2013.

In fact, most of the successful bloggers have all been there.

It’s very fortunate that you stumbled across this blog post before starting your blog.

The tips I’m gonna share with you in this post will be very helpful and you no more need to be in a dilemma what niche to choose for blogging.

This guide will be very huge, giving you answers to all the possible questions you may have in your mind when it comes to choosing your blogging niche.

So read until the end, don’t skip any section.

So what is a niche? In business, a niche is a small segment of the broader market on which a specific product, service or the business focus. In blogging, niche refers to a specific field in which you need to blog. The process of blogging in a specific niche is called niche blogging.

Why have a blogging niche? (Benefits)

In any business, whether it be offline or online having a niche is very important.

As this article is related to blogging, let’s focus on why you need to have a niche in blogging.

1. You showcase expertize: When you blog in a specific field, readers and also the Google treats you as an expert in a specific field.
2. You get a loyal audience: When you are blogging for a target audience with a specific niche, the readers will keep on coming back to your blog in hope of getting new content. Because you’ll always be publishing content that is highly relevant to them.
3. Blog monetization will be easy: As a result of getting a highly targeted audience to your blog, you can effectively market them the products and services they are highly interested in. And also, the product owners of the niche you are blogging will also be interested in placing direct advertisements on your blog.
4. Helps you rank: Niche blogging also helps your blog content rank high in Google, due to topical relevance of the articles. When you have lots of content revolving around a specific field, Google treats you as an expert in the field and ranks your content higher up in search results.
5. Building a tribe will be easy: When you have like-minded people visiting your blog, you can let them subscribe to your newsletter and build a highly-engaging community as those people will be interested in a specific niche. For example, as I’m blogging in the blogging niche – I’m running a private community BloggingX at Facebook.

What are some of the good niche ideas?

Almost 80% of the niches in blogging industry fall under any of the below umbrellas.

1. Wealth
2. Health
3. Relationships
4. Lifestyle
5. Education
6. Spirituality
7. Fashion

These niches are so popular because they are tied tightly to the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, that is hardwired in the human brain.

Here are some examples of niches under these categories

1. Wealth > Online > Blogging (This is where I’m, a blogger for bloggers)
2. Wealth > Personal Finance (This is where Michelle from Making Sense of Cents is positioned)
3. Health > Dieting > Paleo Diet (That’s where David Sinick found his market)
4. Health > Workouts > Crossfit
5. Lifestyle > Hobbies > Kayaking

If you go into any of the parent fields or one step into them, it’s called a niche. If you decide to go further deep into a niche, it’s called sub-niche.

If you look at any of the popular bloggers, they are experts and blogging in a specific topic and that enabled them to attract the right tribe and build a personal brand.

You need to always find a low competition niche where people have problems. You need to start blogging with a mindset of solving people’s problems. After finding a niche, while validating it you need to ask yourself – “Are there enough people in this niche who are having problems and are ready to spend money on getting their problems solved”.

Angling of the niches

Angling or niche overlapping is the process of overlapping several interests and passions into one niche. This gives you great clarity when it comes to developing your ideal audience persona or customer avatar which I’ll discuss in detail later in this blog post.

Michelle from Making Sense of Cents

For example, Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, first started her site to help people get out of student debt. As you can see, she is trying to solve a major problem – student debt.

She has also found a unique angle to personal finance – “student debt”.

With this, you’ll create your own blue ocean (ocean with less competition) inside a red ocean.

Finding niche overlaps like this, that solves a particular problem is very important. With this, you most likely have a low competition to face.

A thorough analysis of the market, having a clear vision of what problems you need to solve is very essential to find a very unique angle to the niche you are interested in.

Stefan James from ProjectLifeMastery

I’m a big fan of Stefan’s YouTube Videos, Podcasts, and other content. He’s an internet entrepreneur, life and business coach, philanthropist, and world traveler with an obsession for mastering every area of his life.

Majority of his audience are online entrepreneurs, who are also interested in personal development fields in the likes of Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, so on.

This is a classic example of niche overlap. There is a large community of people who are into digital marketing and also interested in self-development, NLP, life mastery, etc.

With this kind of laser-focused approach, Stefan finds it easy to build rapport with the audience and put massive value in people’s lives.

Elna Cain – Freelance writer and a coach

Elna is a high-paid freelance writer, she writes for digital marketing related blogs in specific.

On her blog, she blogs to help people get a headstart in their freelancing career. She also has freelance training courses that are popular.

If you see her blog design and how she brands herself as a “mom of two twins”, you can easily infer that she has a target audience of “moms who want to start/grow their career in freelancing”.

The quest for perfect niche

In order to find a perfect niche, we need to head over back to the ancient Japanese principle called “ikigai”.

You need to find a niche that satisfies the below conditions.

1. Choose a niche that you love
2. Choose a niche you are good and knowledgeable in
3. Choose a niche that’s profitable
4. Choose a niche which the world needs

Only when you blog in a certain niche that satisfies all the above conditions will you be able to answer the question – “Why are you doing, what are you doing?”. Or else, you’ll lose purpose in blogging and quit.

Your quest for passion

Many people just advice you to follow your passion when choosing a niche.

But you now know that passion alone is not enough to be a successful blogger.

You may tell me, “Okay Akshay, how to find my passion?”. If you are struggling to find your passion, ask these questions to yourself.

• What interest do I have since childhood?
• What things that I can’t stop talking about when around my friends and relatives? Is it Fitness? Politics? Finance?
• On what topic I would write a book?
• On what topics would friends approach me about?

These are all the questions you need to ask yourself, and think taking some time.

If you are not able to find your passion, even after trying to answer these self-discovery questions, then you don’t have developed a passion for any of the things you know.

Passion is the thing that needs to be developed over. No one is born with passion in a field.

For example, I’m insanely passionate about blogging.

You may ask me, “Akshay, how you developed this passion?”

My story: Back in 2012 and 2013, I used to blog about PC tutorials, software, and others. At that time blogging was new for me, so to grow my blogs I used to read plenty of SEO articles, and also blogging related articles.

Later I developed a passion for blogging – because of the fact that I read a lot about them and implemented them in my blog.

My tech blogs started to fail due to low-quality content and so on.

I thought – “Let me start blogging about blogging and SEO”. That gave rise to BloggingX, which is now being rebranded as BloggingX.

Like this, you need to start researching and reading the articles, books and watch video related to the field that interests you – this is how to develop your passion.

Passion is not developed by watching stars or by sitting lonely in the beach watching the tides. You need to put in the right work to discover your passion – i.e research and learning.

Your quest for profit

With passion alone, you can go nowhere. If you have the passion to write poems, children stories, etc… and it’s your passion, you can do it for a month, 2 months, 6 months, or a year?

You’ll eventually lose that initial mojo you had if you don’t see the cash flowing in.

Once you find a list of niches that you can develop your passion in, it’s time for you to validate those niches for profitability.

So, how to do it?

First, we need to know what are the major ways by which you can monetize your blog

Affiliate marketing: You promote the products of other people and get paid commissions for the sale.

Own products: You can sell your own physical/digital/informational products on your blog.

Training: You can offer training, consultation, and mentorship to your potential blog readers.

Sponsored content: You publish the reviews and advertisements related to other products in your niche and get paid for it.

If you ask me, I mainly do promote affiliate products, sponsored posts, and I also have my training courses on my blog here at BloggingX. I don’t do contextual ads.

After deciding your passionate niche, you need to determine whether there are enough affiliate products in your niche.

You can also search for the terms like,

[Niche] consultation

[Niche] courses

[Niche] training

These queries let you know whether there are people interesting in getting trained in your niche. This is especially helpful if you want to be a trainer or a consultant in your niche.

In the above example, I’m using a tool called KeywordsEverywhere, to display the number of Google searches per month for the term – “blogging courses London”.

Paleo diet consultant keywords have fairly good volume.

You can offer consultation in your niche, whatever your niche is. This is how you can make use of Google search to identify whether people are eager to spend money in your niche.

Other than this, you can also find whether there are products to promote in any given niche.

In the below example, I’ve searched affiliate programs for “Kayaking”. You can replace you niche keyword there and search for – [NICHE] affiliate products.

If there are good products related to your niche in Amazon.com marketplace, then, also you can consider monetizing your blog with Amazon Associates Program.

The affiliate programs  that I got above are called in-house affiliates.

Apart from these, there are also many affiliate networks like Clickbank (digital products), ShareASale, CJ, ImpactRadius, JVZoo (Digital Marketing products), and others.

These things will give you a clear idea whether people are buying products in your niche. You need to be clear about whether your target audience has money to spend before diving into a niche.

Blog niche competition analysis

Before choosing a niche, it’s very important to know about the people and the blogs who are already in the niche you’re about to select.

It tells a lot about the competition you’re gonna face and also the profitability of the niche.

Why competition is good? If there are many blogs blogging in the niche that you’ve chosen, it means that there’s a lot of money to be made in that niche – you’ll be sure about that. And also, as there are other bloggers in the niche same as you, you can network with them, build relations and grow together. Or else, blogging will be a lone journey.

I’m not saying large competition is good. All I’m saying is that small competition is essential – because competition itself validates the profitability of the niche.

Finding out potential niche competitors

You can determine the kind of competition you have in the niche by searching in Google for “best [niche] blogs”.

You can also use online tools like Ahrefs, that allows you to display the competitors of a specific site.

For example, in the above screenshot, you found that ThePaleoMom is one of the good blogs in paleo. I searched in Ahrefs for the competitor domains.

Now you got some great Paleo related blogs that are getting great SEO traffic.

You can also search in Facebook pages and groups section for your niche related blogs to make sure that you can build a tribe around your blog, and there are enough passionate people.

This is how you can validate the potential of building a community or a tribe around your blog.

Like this, you can also search for Facebook pages related to your niche and find out the kind of engagement they are receiving. This speaks a lot about the readership you can expect.

SEO keyword research

Google traffic is the most superior form of traffic for any blog. Because it is highly targeted and free.

A keyword is a phrase that people search in Google when they are in need of information. You need to determine the kind of keywords that people are searching for when it comes to your niche.

You can make use of a tool called AnswerThePublic.

This tool returns all the keywords people are searching for in Google that are questions, contain prepositions, comparisons, and also related keywords. This is great to use especially in conjunction with keyword volume tools like KeywordsEverywhere for finding out what people are searching in your niche along with keyword volume data.

You can also make use of competitor keyword research.

For this, you can make use of SEMrush. This tool has got the largest keyword database on the internet.

With this tool, you can enter the URL of any of the sites on the internet and get the report of keywords that the site is ranking for on Google along with all the metrics like keyword search volume, CPC data, position and much more.

Generally, if the CPC of the keyword is more, then it means the keyword is profitable and buyer intent. The advertisers bidding for those keywords in Google are paying that amount of money (CPC – cost per click) for every click they get.

If there are plenty of keywords that have high search volume, high CPC and also if the competition is low, it means you’ve hit the winner when it comes to earning money through contextual advertisements.

By doing this competitor keyword research, you need to make a huge list of keywords you can potentially target through blog content in a spreadsheet.

If you are planning to monetize your blog with contextual ads, you may want to make sure that there are enough high volume and low competition keywords in your niche for you to target.

Keyword competition analysis

Not all the keywords are equal.

If there are very high authority sites ranking for a keyword, you can’t rank for the keyword.

When you search for any keyword in Google, if the below things are present in the search result page of the keyword, then the keyword may be of low competition.

• More than 3 forum threads (Reddit, Quora, others)
• More than 2 article directories (EzineArticles, Web 2.0s, WordPress.com, Blogger)
• More than 5 low-quality YouTube videos with a less likes-dislikes ratio
• More than 2 Social media posts – FB, Twitter or Google Plus pages
• More than 4 niche sites with DA<15 ranking for a keyword (you can check DA of the website using MozBar)
• More than 3 irrelevant web pages ranking with no keyword presence in the title.

You need to always go for a niche which has atleast 20 – 30 keywords (depends upon the volume) which have decent search volume and easier to rank.

There is a type of keyword called “Long tail keywords”. These are keywords that are long and often contain more than 3 words in them. The intent behind these kinds of keywords is very specific and the Google search competition will be low.

As a beginner, you need to always target long tail keywords (with 3 or more words in it) and are of low competition.

You should never target single or double word keyword unless it is abnormally low competitive.

Know your target audience avatar

Before diving into any niche, it’s very essential to visualize the exact kind of person you want to serve in the form of blogging.

This is also called developing a customer avatar. Russ Henneberry has a great guide on this at DigitalMarketer.

You need to know the following things about your customer.

You can determine many of these things by using the Facebook audience insights tool, Google Keyword Planner, Facebook communities’ interactions, niche forum discussions, Reddit, and so on.

1. Demographics – Their location, age, gender, income, so on.
2. Psychographics – Their beliefs, values, attitudes, so on.
3. Technographics – Are they technology early adopters, what softwares they use, what smartphones they use, so on.
4. Pain Problems – What are the common problems they face?

First let me explain, you how you can use Facebook Audience Insights tool.

Suppose if you’re going into the Paleo diet, expect the majority of your audience to be women if you are targeting the US.

The above is the report of all the pages that people who’re interested in Paleo diet like. And you can view their location in city-level, and also activity!

But please do remember that this is just the report of the audience active on Facebook.

Making use of the tools I mentioned above, you can get data-points regarding your audience and develop the persona profiles, and incorporate it into your content.

For example, I concluded that women will be the majority of my audience if I ever start a blog in Paleo niche. Here are some things I may consider after starting a blog.

• Hiring a woman writer to add the feminine touch to the content would be great.
• When running FB ads or Google ads only targeting “Women” category to increase the ROI on ad spend.
• I would make my Paleo blog be more neutral than masculine (like usage of fonts, colors, and so on).

These are the action steps I made, just out of a single data point, i.e women audience for Paleo.

The digging deep into the nature of the audience you’d be attracting, you’ll get a clarity whether this niche is right for you or not. As always, clarity is very important before starting any business.

If the above tools are not enough for you, you can conduct polls, feedbacks and also surveys on various platforms, FB groups, or even can consider running targeted ad traffic to survey pages.

Make sure the survey questions are very strategic and will get you the answers about your audience that you get nowhere. For example, you can ask them about the challenges they are currently facing, what they are expecting out of your blog, so on.

Is your blogging niche future proof?

What do you do to predict the future of any company? You look at the charts right?

Same, you also need to do it for your niche before starting a blog on it.

You can make use of Google Trends for this.

As you can see, I compared Paleolithic Diet with Ketogenic Diet. The trend for Paleo Diet is falling, and Keto Diet is now all in rage.

Also, you can notice that for Paleo, the trend rose every year during January(notice the spikes). It may be due to new year health resolutions?

So, if you are in a dilemma to choose between these two niches, for example. It may be the time to consider researching about Ketogenic Diet first.

Google Trends is good at solving biggest dilemmas, whether it be choosing a niche or an online app.

What’s next?

It’s very essential to start your blog with the end in mind.

 You need to ask questions like ,why are you starting your blog? What are you expecting out of it? What is the end result?

Your “why” for starting a blog, should be very strong so that it wakes you up every morning without an alarm clock. Only when you have that burning passion and strong “why”, you will be able to succeed in blogging and become the top 4% of the bloggers – who lead a great life.

This is only possible when you have found the niche of your passion and also is highly profitable.

Visualize the end result you want to accomplish when it comes to blogging.

Do you want to be the best coach in your niche? Or a speaker? Or a consultant? Or should you have a stack of digital products in your niche? Or you want to dominate the search results in your niche?

Set micro-goals that are aligned with your final vision and achieve them.

Hope you found this comprehensive guide on selecting your blogging niche helpful.

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