When you’re starting a new blog, the most important decision you can make is to choose a blog niche. This is the only guide you’ll ever need on how to choose the right blog niche to start a profitable blog.
Choosing a niche is the single most important factor in whether your new blog succeeds or fails.
That’s right. It’s that important.
What is a blog niche?
Quite simply, your blog’s niche is what you write about. It’s the focus of the whole site.
You may notice that Feels Like Home has several niches – food & recipes, Christian faith, and family fun. This is not ideal, and I wouldn’t do it again if I was starting over. It’s too hard to become an expert at anything if you’re trying to do too much.
The most successful blogs have one focus, one niche. So plan on sticking to just one thing.
Why every profitable blog needs to have a niche
When your blog has one defined topic, it is easier to assert yourself as an expert on the topic. It’s also easier to write the blog because you don’t have to worry about creating content in a bunch of different veins. (Take my word for it!)
When you have multiple topics, you have to figure out how to send readers the content they want without bothering them with content they don’t want. You have to write multiple newsletters every week, and you will burn out more easily.
You can avoid all this by choosing a niche early and writing only on that topic for the lifetime of your blog.
You need to choose a niche that is broad enough that you can write about it for the next 5-10 years. For example: gardening is a great niche, but growing pumpkins isn’t. You can write a lot of content on gardening, but the amount you can write on growing pumpkins is pretty limited.
Step one: Choose a subject.
While there are an infinite number of niches, there aren’t really very many broad subjects:
- Beauty
- Business (how to make money)
- DIY
- Entertainment (could be gaming or Hollywood)
- Fashion
- Food (often a certain cuisine or diet)
- Healthy living/physical fitness
- History
- Hobbies (not hobbies in general but choose one)
- Home (decorating or DIY projects)
- Law
- News
- Parenting (this is tricky)
- Personal finance (how to save money)
- Pets (not pets in general but choose a category like reptiles or even turtles)
- Philosophy
- Politics
- Relationships
- Religion
- Science
- Self improvement
- Sports
- Tech
- Travel
- Vehicles
- Writing
How do you choose?
There are a few things to consider:
- What are you passionate about?
- What do you enjoy talking about?
- What. areyou skilled at?
- What kind of advice do people ask you for?
- What are the subjects of blogs you follow?
- What product/service are you selling, and what niche does it fit into?
I think the most important one is how much you know about the topic. Are you an expert? What makes you an expert? Why would anyone want to read what you have to say on this topic?
Your readers are going to want to know what qualifies you to talk about your niche, so be prepared to put that on your About page.
You’ll still want to narrow your focus within your larger subject, but how do you know what’s too narrow?
Step two: Research, research, research
Niche research
There are a few tools you can use to determine how narrow to make your niche:
- Facebook Ad Manager – Go to the Ad Manager on Facebook. Select United States as your location, and enter your potential niche. If the potential reach. is in the millions or tens of millions, you’ve probably found something promising.
- Google/Amazon – Find out whether there are print magazines, major websites, and cable channels devoted to your potential niche. These are all good signs.
- Google Keyword Planner – Search for your potential niche. If the volume is in the millions, it’s probably broad enough.
- Google products – Most bloggers make considerable income on affiliate sales. This means that you are selling someone else’s product to your audience, for a percentage of the sale. So you’ll want to make sure there are digital and/or physical products in your niche that you’ll be able to sell to your audience.
Ad rate research
You want to find a niche that has revenue potential, so use Google Ad Manager to find out the ad rates for your potential niche. You’ll want to try to find something with a CPC (cost per click) rate of 50¢ or more for US users. (Ad rates are lower in other countries.)
Step three: Choose a domain name.
This is going to take a lot of digging and brainstorming. Come up with a list of ideas related to your niche and start Googling them.
Use a domain name search like GoDaddy to find out if the domain is available, and then search the US Trademark & Patent Office to make sure there isn’t a current trademark on the URL you choose (or a close variation of it).
Be careful of using punctuation and variations on domain names. I once had to force someone to rebrand a site called feels-like-home-blog.com. Lawyers were involved, and it was ugly. Save yourself the hassle and do your research to begin with.
Step four: Start publishing content.
Choose 5-10 topics within your niche and start writing. (Content creation is something covered heavily in my mastermind, and I would love to help you with this.)
Aim to write 3-5 posts on each of the 5-10 topics you’ve chosen. Cover them thoroughly and be sure to link in between them for better SEO.
Step five: Track your success
As you’re publishing this content, keep an eye on your analytics. Google will favor some of the topics more than others. Once you know what is bringing in traffic, you can focus on those and stop writing about the stuff that’s not performing well.
Step six: Pick up new topics
Even though you’re writing relentlessly on the topics that are bringing in traffic, you’re going to want to keep branching out with new topics.
For each new topic, publish 3-5 posts interlinked posts and then watch the analytics to see whether you should cover that topic more thoroughly.
Please note that it can take Google 3-6 months or longer to start sending you meaningful traffic, so don’t get discouraged that it’s not happening overnight. You have to be patient and keep publishing well-written, thoughtful content until you see some trends starting to form.
Step seven: Build authority in your niche
The more traffic you get, the more traffic Google will send you.
The more traffic you get, the more people will link to your content.
The more links you get, the more Google will see you as an authority in your niche, and more of your posts will start to get even more traffic.
Keep publishing the topics that are performing well, and keep adding new topics systematically.
