Finding Your Niche

You probably have some friends with personal blogs that are smorgasbords of all their interests—pictures of their kids and movie reviews and talk about their favorite sports team, and everything in between. While this is fine for a personal blog, if you want to blog professionally you should narrow your focus. 

A blog that has a clear identity is more likely to be successful than one with a broad focus. A personal blog is about you while a professional blog is about the topic. You can and should be personable and share your story, but only as it relates to the topic at hand.

Before you start doing anything else to start your blog, you should figure out your topic. Your niche will impact the domain name you choose, the design of your page, and your ideal posting schedule to appeal to the most readers in your area. 

Research the market

Picking the right market for a new blog can be tricky. You want to find a topic that is popular enough to attract interest and earn money, but one that hasn’t already been oversaturated with bloggers giving their opinions. 

Finding a new perspective on a topic, something that people aren’t already blogging about, gives you the best chance of making it in the business long-term—if it’s a field where interest exists, and the reason there are no bloggers on the topic isn’t because no one wants to read about it. The only way to know is by researching the field.

The larger the interest in a given topic, the smaller percentage of the total market share you need to capture to be successful, and the more specialized your niche will be to provide a new voice. Let’s use a food blog as an example. Food is a topic that interests a broad range of people—the overall potential readership is massive, but there are an accordingly high number of blogs already talking about food. Even if you narrow it down—say, to a blog about cooking—you’ll already find thousands of other blogs already doing that. 

The interest in the area is so high you’ll need to narrow it down again. Maybe you’re a vegan and want to share recipes for making traditional comfort food that’s vegan-friendly. You’ll probably find there are quite a few vegan bloggers out there, but the comfort food angle will make you just different enough to be a new voice in the conversation, and there are enough people interested in the topic that all of you can share the readership and be successful.

Now let’s say you have a less popular topic—we’ll use musical instrument repair as an example. Instrument repair is a practical subject that lots of people will be interested in, from professional musicians to band directors to people who play instruments for fun, but it won’t encompass quite so broad a group as cooking. 

You might do the research and find there are a lot of musical instrument review blogs, but not as many that focus on repair. Not only do you not need to break your topic down further into “wind instrument repair” or “on the fly repairs for rock musicians” but focusing on more will probably narrow your topic too much. 

There isn’t as much competition for instrument repair blogs as there is for food blogs, but the group of interested readers is also smaller, meaning you need to attract a larger percentage of interested readers to be successful.

Another way to think about this is to have a target audience size in mind numerically. Let’s say you want to reach 1,000 unique subscribers. On the surface, the larger audience seems to give you the best statistical chance of being able to find more readers. If there are 100,000 people interested in X and only 10,000 interested in Y, that might seem to give you 10 times as many opportunities to make an impression on a unique reader. 

But if 1,000 people are already blogging about X and only ten are blogging about Y that means the smaller group will nonetheless have more available readers per blogger. With X, you’d have to fight other bloggers to take away some share of their readership if you want to reach your goal; with Y, you could theoretically reach your target readership without having to share readers with any other blogger. The market may be smaller, but it’s also less saturated.

Of course, things rarely work out that cleanly in the real world, but the ultimate point remains. The best niche for a new blog in 2016 isn’t necessarily the one with the biggest following or the one that’s the most unique; the best niche is the one that allows you to be a new voice for a community that will be able to support you.

You shouldn’t assume what kind of activity exists on a given blog topic before you start doing your research. Some topics might seem like they’d be immensely popular but turn out to be relatively rare once you’ve done your research, making them perfect potential niches for you. 

Conversely, you might think you’re the only one interested in a given idea, only to find the blogosphere already overrun with people scribbling on your esoteric niche. Take notes as you do your research to kill two birds with one stone. 

Bookmark blogs you like, either because of their look or the writing style of the author, then study those for ideas once your site is set up. If the blogs are in your niche, sign up for their mailing list, pay attention to their posts, and consider commenting and become part of their community once you’ve got your blog set up. It’s never too early to start building goodwill (and good habits) in your blogging career.

Why you?

The blog itself is not the product you’re selling to the consumer. The blog page is more like the storefront. The products that are up for sale are your ideas and expertise, as conveyed through your posts. To attract readers to your blog, you need to give them a reason to listen to what you, specifically, have to say about a given topic. Why would someone want to read your blog instead of the ones already established?

For an example, let’s use the topic of professional baseball. There’s a huge target audience, but what value do you have to offer to readers? Do you have an inside connection to the players? A new method of analysis for the games? Talking about how much you like something might be fun for you, but it’s not very interesting to read.

The best bloggers have either a high level of expertise about their topic or bring a unique perspective to the table. Even if a given niche has a large potential audience and not many competing voices, you won’t attract any readers if you don’t have anything interesting to say about the topic. Before you make your final decision on which niche to delve into, ask yourself that simple question: why me? You should be able to provide a one-sentence answer that would make someone interested in reading what you have to say.

Logistics

If your blog fits naturally into your daily schedule and lifestyle, it’ll be easier for you to put in the effort of maintaining it, and you’ll be less likely to feel overwhelmed or give up due to burn-out. Make sure that the research, writing, and marketing you’ll need to do in your chosen niche is realistic for your life before you settle on a topic. If you want to write about the local music scene, you’ll have to make a point of going to a lot of shows—maybe not the best idea if you have to wake up early every day for work. 

If you want to write a financial blog, you need to be able to keep up with market trends and deliver timely advice to your readers who are counting on you to guide them through a quickly changing landscape.

The niche you choose will also have an impact on how you earn profit from your blog. If you’re writing in a larger niche, your ratio of fly-by traffic to repeat readers might be higher. You’ll get a lot of page views that would appeal to advertisers, but may have a harder time selling products.

Conversely, a blog in a small niche that has a loyal core of followers might not get as much traffic, but the per-visitor profit could be higher because those visitors buy products and services, whether they’re original to you or sold by an affiliate.

Blogging success story: Joe Gilder

Joe Gilder is the owner of HomeStudioCorner.com, a blog aimed at helping people set up home recording studios. Within six months of starting his blog, he had 500 subscribers on his e-mail list. By the time he sat down with Yaro Starak for his EJ Insider Interviews Club series, Gilder was on track to make $300,000 a year, with 13 different income streams all working for him through his blog. 

Gilder is an example of someone who’s found success by focusing in on a relatively small niche. He doesn’t have as many readers as the best-known “celebrity” blogs, but the readers he does have are more loyal. More of his income is from his product range than it is from the traditional blog revenue sources, like advertising and affiliate programs. 

He can continue to make a living through his blog even though he has less traffic than larger sites because he makes more per visitor, offering high-quality products that his readers benefit from buying.