How to Find Your Perfect Blog Niche

As the Internet becomes more and more entrenched in our daily lives, there are more remote jobs available. For many, the dream of making a living through a blog is appealing and seems like the ideal path to financial self-sufficiency. 

From the outside, it looks easy. Start a blog, get writing, join Google AdSense and an affiliate program, watch the cash roll in. That’s all there is to it, right? 

It does require a little more thought than that. Before you even think about monetizing your blog or creating a content plan, you need to think about your blog niche. Whether your blog gains traction or ends up becoming profitable starts and ends with your blog niche. 

Is yours a blog niche anyone cares about? And on the flip side, if it is a potentially popular niche, is it something you care about? 

What is a Blog Niche, Anyway?

Simply put, a blog niche is what your blog is about. This isn’t usually a broad topic but rather a very defined, specialized subset of a wider topic that will appeal to a specific target audience. 

For instance, let’s say you’re interested in fishing. Your blog shouldn’t be about just fishing, but a specific aspect of fishing, such as fishing equipment, fishing prospects in a local area, or specific types of fishing, like ice fishing or fly fishing.

Defining your blog niche from the get-go is essential to your long-term success. It means the difference between attracting and building a dedicated audience that knows what you’re about, or trying to compete with the big fish. Furthermore, even at times when profitability is low, your passion for the topic at hand should be enough to keep you interested. 

Find your perfect blogging niche by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What Am I Interested In? 

This is probably the most important question on this list. You could find the most profitable niche in the world, but if the topic bores you to tears, you’ll probably give up.  But what if you have too many interests? How could you possibly choose one?

A little brainstorming will help with this. Make a list of:

• Your expertise: This could be something you studied at school or something related to your career. Do you have any specific insights and knowledge you could share with the world?
• Your hobbies: What do you do for fun? It may not be something you’re an expert in, but you could become an expert and share your journey with your audience.
• Aspects of your everyday life: You may not consider yourself an expert in this stuff, but you live it. You could have a specific financial, living, family, or relationship situation that may be of interest to others. 

If you’re still struggling, here’ a list of the most popular blogging niches from The Balance Small Business: 

• Weight loss and fitness
• Health
• Relationships and dating
• Pets
• Self-improvement
• Investment
• Making money online
• Beauty treatments
• Tech gadgets
• Personal finance

While this blog niche list is very broad, it may help spark some ideas. 

2. How Do I Narrow It Down?

So you found your niche. How can you go about making that more… nichey? It might be tempting to go with one of the topics from the list in the previous, such as health, and forge ahead with creating a general health blog, but this is a bad idea. 

The main reason this is a bad idea if the amount of competition you will have from bigger websites that already established a loyal following. Particularly in the field of health content, some of your biggest competition will probably be government-sponsored websites. So, the likelihood that someone is going to consult your small health blog for their health concerns over one of those big websites is slim.

You need to focus on a specific area within the niche. A health sub-niche could be something like assessing dietary supplements, following a certain diet or lifestyle, or reviewing gym equipment. 

The more specific your niche, the less competition you’ll have. Because of this, you’ll have an easier time becoming an expert in your niche, and are therefore more likely to become a trusted figure that readers turn to for reliable information. This is also great for SEO. Trust and authority are two key criteria Google looks at when ranking a web page.

3. Is this Blog Niche Profitable?

While it’s important to get specific with your niche, you don’t want to choose something so out there that nobody would even think of searching for it. So, how do you find out if there’s interest and potential profitability in your niche?

You can:

• Search for your blog niche ideas in Google Trends. Google Trends is a simple way to see if people are searching for your blog niche at all, and if so, how much interest there is. Brainstorm relevant keywords people are likely to search for, or find keyword suggestions using a tool such as Moz. Enter them into Google Trends, and away you go.

• Explore search engines and see if there are PPC ads targeting your niche. Using those keywords you just came up with, do a general search across the top search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If businesses are paying to display ads for products related to your niche, then it’s fair to assume that there is money to be made in that area.

• Check Amazon for affiliate link opportunities. Use those keywords again, this time on Amazon. What products come up? Do they have many reviews? If so, these could be products you review or talk about on your site, and potentially earn commission through Amazon’s affiliate program. (To find out more about affiliate marketing, check out  Namecheap’s in-depth articles on the subject.)

• Search for other affiliate link programs related to your specific niche. Amazon Associates isn’t the only affiliate program out there. Check out how your niche is doing on other popular affiliate programs like Rakuten and ClickBank. You can also conduct Google searches for affiliate programs related to your specific niche.

4. Is It Sustainable?

Coming up with a good niche isn’t the hard part—ensuring your blog is updated consistently is. Blogging may look like an easy side-hustle from the outside, but it requires time and effort. If you have no interest in writing, creating content, or marketing, you’re going to have a tough time sticking to it.  

Even if you love writing and creating content, do you have enough interest in the subject to keep going? You need to come up with a blogging schedule and endeavor to deliver. You’ll also need to continually come up with unique and interesting content to fill up your editorial calendar. 

Before committing, brainstorm ideas to see how much content you could create related to the subject. Research your niche, and see what other bloggers are writing about. Think about how you can take this content and make it better. Do you have a unique angle or perspective you can inject? If the answer is no, your great blog idea will run out of steam sooner rather than later. 

Conclusion

Before you start a blog with the intent of monetizing it, it’s important that you take the time to properly research blog niches. By following these easy steps, you’ll quickly gauge whether or not a blog idea is right, so you can move on and focus on finding the best niche for you.