How To Identify Your Blogging Niche

Finding your niche and selecting a good niche topic is an integral part of your blogging strategy and something that you should identify early on. However, it is not always easy to know what your niche should be or if it’s a good niche to focus on.

In this guide, I look at the following topics to help you to evaluate your skills and your passions and help you identify your own blogging niche.

• Why you need to identify your niche
• Your passions and your skills
• Identifying your niche
• Finding out if your chosen niche is profitable

Why Do You Need To Define A Niche?

Identifying a niche is extremely important when zoning in on topics and choosing what you will blog about. If you simply say I am going to blog about travel, then you will be up against thousands of other people who blog about “travel”. But instead, if you chose a blog specifically about ‘travelling with a pet’ or ‘travelling in Italy’ you will probably have fewer competitors and a higher chance of getting your blog noticed and appearing in search results.

It is better to have 100 people who LOVE your blog, content and your brand than 1,000 people who feel indifferent about it. Having a clear and identifiable niche is one of the keys to building this highly engaged and passionate audience who are interested in the content you are creating and will come back time and time again to your blog and eventually become subscribers and customers.

Identifying Your Niche

How do you go about finding your niche? For some people, this will be very easy, for example, if you are a creating a cookery blog and you specifically like to create recipes from only homegrown organic products you pot in your garden and nothing bought from a store, you have quite a honed in niche already that not many people will also be writing about.

Many people don’t have such a defined topic, there are likely hundreds of cookery bloggers out there who don’t have defined recipe style making it harder to stand out against the others, reach passionate fans or get thousands of visitors to their website every day.

We will now look at the steps to help you define a more specific topic for your blog.

Step 1: Defining Your Passions

The first step in defining your niche is to identify what you are passionate about.

It is far easier to do something for an extended period if you actually feel passionate about it, enjoy doing it and you want to share with other people why you think this thing is so great.

Write down your passions:

• These are things you love reading about in your free time and time flies by when you are doing them. This could be politics, women’s rights, how to keep a tidy home, upcycling old furniture.
• List as many as you can, everything from your favorite interests, hobbies, activities, pass times, reading materials, music.

Choosing a topic you are passionate about will be very important because your passion is what will push you through obstacles as you work on your blog and your business. Everyone hits roadblocks from time to time, but if you really love the topic you are working on then it will make the journey much easier in the long run!

Step 2: Defining Your Skills

The next step is to define your skills, the things that you are good at.

Make a second list of things you are good at:

• List out what you think are your core skills. You might be a great cook, have an eye for design, you might be skilled at explaining complicated ideas in simple terms, you may be a finance geek or great at planning trips for your friends.
• Write down the skills you learned at different periods of your life. These could be from a university, your job/career, friendships, relationships, travel. All of these experiences help to build skills you may not even realise you have. For example, you might be an expert navigator or skilled at moderating a debate between friends.
• Ask your family and friends. Sometimes it’s hard for us to see what things we are good at, so getting some outside perspective is very useful.
• Think about what people frequently ask you for advice on. This is a good sign that you are better at this topic than most other people!

Again, nothing is off-limits so take some time to identify as many valuable skills as you can.

Step 3: Compare These Two Lists

Now take a moment to compare the “Passion” list and “Skill” lists that you wrote down.

Does anything jump out at you that could work well as a niche for you to blog about?

For example, if you wrote that you are passionate about fashion and are skilled at finding great bargains, you could do a blog on budget fashion styles! Or if you are interested in womens rights and skilled at a debate, your blog could be about how to get involved in women’s rights organisations, movement, events, rallies and you may even end up creating your own.

Write down all the intersections from your Passions and Skills that you see as possibilities for a more defined niche.

Step 4: Problem Solving

Now you have some topics that you could potentially blog about because:

1) you are interested in them

2) you have skills and knowledge in that area

But before you jump for joy that you have discovered your niche, you must consider if you are really solving a problem or a need with the topic you think you want to blog about?

If you have come up with a blog niche that combines your passions and skills, but you don’t really think anyone is searching for this information or you don’t think it’s solving a particular problem then you can still work with this niche – you just need to do a bit more digging into what could make this topic more helpful for readers.

• Think about common problems in the areas you are passionate about, and how can you help solve those problems with your skills?
• Imagine your ideal website visitor and the problems they might face, write down what these problems are
• If you pick a niche you are already familiar with, you can likely list off several problems that you’ve had personally. If you’ve had a problem, then I promise you many other people have to!

Then you are in a position to come up with solutions to those problems. This is how you make money! The core of every great business is solving problems.

Let’s go back to our cooking example, let’s say that you wrote down that you are passionate about cooking and skilled at making elaborate 10-course recipes, so you have decided to make this your blog’s niche. But then you critically look at this niche and think actually not that many people will have the time or inclination to prepare these recipes at home, and probably are not searching for them.

All this means is that you need to go back to your skills list and look at some other combinations that could work well with your passion for cookery. Perhaps your skills list has photography on it, could you come up with a niche where you write blog articles on the best way to present and photograph food.

This niche could appeal to several audiences – all the other food bloggers out there who don’t share your photography skills, restaurants who don’t have great photography on their websites, photographers who are good at other genres of photography but not food, the list could go on.

This niche example would give you lots of blog topics to dive into, staging food, specialist photography gear, photo editing, indoor photography, as well as allowing you to write about the main topic you are passionate about – cooking!

Step Four: Is This A Profitable Niche?

Now you should have reached a niche that is something you are passionate about, something you have skills in and something that you think people need advice on to help them solve a problem it is time to launch your niche blog!

But wait, there is one final and very important step you need to take and that is to determine is that niche profitable? Whether the potential financial aspect of blogging is important to you or not there is a cost to running a blog, so you do need to factor in the ability to earn an income to at least cover your costs in the niche you are choosing.

Therefore, you need to discover if the niche is profitable and if there is a big enough market for your topic.

To do this you can do some simple market research – starting with Google Trends to see if people are searching for the niche topic you plan to write about. This step is important because this graph will show you whether the interest in your topic is stable, rising or declining over time. Avoid topics that are declining in interest if you planning to build a blog that lasts for a long time.

Let’s take an example of Yoga Courses Online

You can see in the results from Google trends that search for ‘online yoga courses’ has moved around a bit and is now increasing – which is good if you are planning to launch online yoga courses.

Next, you should do some competitive research This can be done by simply googling the topic/niche you plan to blog about to see what comes up. When I Google ’Online Yoga Courses’ quite a few paid ads to appear at the top showing there is reasonable competition in this space meaning it could be hard to get onto the first page of Google for various keywords and keyword search strings related to the chosen niche.

The next step is to then look at the bottom of the Google search results to see what else people searching for in the related searches.

From here you can drill deeper and become even more niche with your topic based on the results of what you find people are actually looking for – i.e. what problems are they looking to solve, what information do they need. These could lead to more focused niches that match your passions, skills, solve problems and are also profitable.

Putting It All Together

Now you should have some ideas of 1) Your Passion, 2) Your Skills, 3) Your Audience’s Problems and 4) If the niche is profitable helping you to determine exactly what your blog niche will be.

The beauty in this method is you are unlikely to run out of topics to blog about. If you pick an area you are passionate and skilled at, you likely know a lot of different challenges facing your audience and can blog about those providing answers, solutions, and information that will be valuable to them.

If you have a lot of passions and/or skills, it’s perfectly fine to experiment with different targeted niche topics (within your overall niche) at the beginning of your blog journey! Eventually, you will find topics that you enjoy writing about more and that get more readers than other topics. But try not to be too scattered and ideally try and home in your niche early on.

Thank you for reading! I hope that you found this article helpful to narrow down the niche of your blog.

If you have questions about your niche you can ask these to me in the comments and  in our private Women’s Blogging Collective community

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