by Table of Contents
What’s Your Niche?
Do you come across this question very often?
Guess No!!
But as you start your blogging journey, this query will start knocking at your door unless you select the right niche.
What Is A Niche In Blogging?
Niche is the topic around which you will create content for your blog.
Identifying a niche is the first stepping stone towards your successful blogging journey.
Niche is a small segment derived from a larger market that usually won’t exist or is ignored in a larger market.
Sometimes, you have to instead identify and create a niche depending on the demand and requirement of the market.
The niche can be created or borrowed from any broader topic related to travel, food, sports, photography, Fashion, Music, or Digital Marketing.
e.g., you want to create your fashion line, which you can always derive from a more significant niche of fashion like casual wear, streetwear, sporty or ethnic wear.
Similarly, if you can specialize in any food type and create your niche depending on the interest and requirement in the market.
Niche has its own unique identity and preference.
It allows us to cater to a specific group of audiences with particular needs, be it a product or a solution, thus becoming the mentor or guide.
How To Identify Your Niche?
You can select your niche based on your learning, earlier experience, and existing skill set.
However, to maintain the profitability and sustainability of the place, in the long run, you have to explore, the top three critical areas in identifying your niche as mentioned below
Explore 3 Key Areas to Identify Your Niche
Passion
What are the things you are passionate about?
What brings a smile to your face and excites you?
We all are passionate about some or other things like reading books, watching movies, or traveling.
The Key to the success of a Niche is many, with Passion being the leading driving force.
If you are passionate about the topic, you will never fall short of writing and can always visualize it and execute it irrespective of hurdles.
Your Passion for your niche is crucial to keep the blog alive and get going.
Interest and Knowledge are also two vital areas linked with Passion, which will be helpful to identify niches.
Interest
Once you start brainstorming about the niche, you will be surprised to find that many buried interests keep coming to the thoughts always there with you in your subconscious mind.
Hidden passions are keen interests that grow with us as we move ahead in life.
I am interested in cooking but not my regular Passion, but it can always sharpen up to create some niches in cooking.
We at blogging ladders are committing to help and guide our audiences with topics related to blogging and digital marketing. Still, somewhere we are also interested in Travel, photography, and Farming, and I am sure we will start a blog with any of the topics mentioned above later.
You should note though Passion and interest are glued together but are two different sides of the coin and will be explored in the market accordingly.
Knowledge
Knowledge is something that we gather over time as we read many informative blog posts, read books, and watch relevant videos.
I am not an active investor; a year back, when I was exploring some options to invest in IPOs and trading in stocks, I was stranded, going nowhere as everything was going over my head.
Then I have started watching some financial advisory videos reading the various aspects of market investment, and collected some info that was helping me acquire some excellent knowledge.
Now I am convinced to reach a stage where I can write a blog post in the finance niche.
Hey, I must say I am still a learner.
Knowledge can be gained in any niche unless it demands specific expertise.
For example, to start in a Niche related to the best diet and foods, being a dietician or nutritionist would always be an added advantage.
e.g., Suppose you are a fitness freak who follows all health regimes and is aware of specific diets, you are an expert and qualify to start a Health or Fitness blog.
You learn something new every day.
Thus Passion remains the key driving force in exploring one’s interest and drilling deep your Knowledge in finding the niche.
You should always analyze your Niche ideas taking into consideration of the above-mentioned areas, and shortlist a minimum of 3 to 5 different niches.
Finally, select at least two topics, one to kick start with your blog another as a standby.
Key Points To Consider Your Passion As Your Niche
When you are converting your Passion into blogging, it is like half the battle is won.
What about the other half?
e.g. You have started a blog about soccer.
You are a diehard fan of Manchester United Football Club, and you don’t miss any of their single
matches. In contrast, your audiences are more passionate about watching the Ashes Test Cricket series between England and Australia.
You and your audiences are miles apart, and you are struggling to find an audience and monetize your blog.
No doubt, Passion is one of the strongholds of your blogging journey, but translating Passion into productivity requires a substantial size and demand in the market.
The 3 Ps
Ideally, choose a niche with the right blend of balance between your Passion and the market potential and profitability to be a winner.
Thus the 3 Ps of niche for formulating a success story are
Passion
Potential
Profitability
Emerging Your Niche As A Winner
How steep is your niche competition?
Are we able to stand out in a crowded market where 2 million Blog Posts are published daily?
Name a niche you will find competitive.
But that should not stop us from taking the first move.
Higher is the competition; higher is the opportunity.
People remember the top 3 spots in any category, rarely any 4 (if you are lucky), and tend to forget others.
Imagine you are a foodie and passionate about starting a food blog, but if your niche is already
jam-packed, then narrow down your niche like catering region-based cooking like Indian, Thai
or Italian food or focus on a single niche like Vegan foods, Baking food, or even you can start
smart in a place like a bachelor’s kitchen.
If the top slot in your niche is already occupied, pick a subcategory where you can put in all your efforts to become a leader.
While entering into a sub-niche, try your best to have all 3 Ps of the niche in your control span.
How To Identify The Potential Of Your Niche
What’s the size of the audience for your niche?
How is your niche trending in the market?
Your niche has monetization abilities or not?
I am sure these questions would knock in your head before going ahead with the niche.
Thus Google trend is the right place to dive in to have a general idea about your niche.
It helps find the current trend in terms of competition, interest level, and Money-making ability of your niche, whether it’s moving upward or declining.
e.g., You are all set to start a niche in diet and curious to analyze current trends and competition related to the vegan diet.
Once you enter the term vegan diet in Google trends, you will find a graph image representing interest with a specified no overtime.
As we can see, the trend in the vegan diet is not stable over the last five years.
It seems to be in a declining stage.
So what’s the new diet interest for the audience?
Let’s compare it with another form of diet called the Low-fat diet.
As we can see, the search for a Low-fat diet is quite popular than a vegan diet with a lot of
interest over time and has the potential for an audience and monetizing the niche.
You Can practice the same approach for finding the performance of any niche to go ahead before finalizing.
Unique points to be noted in Google Trend
- Interest over time is to find the popularity of the search in a required region with a specific time frame ranges between (0-100).
- The nearer the graph to 100 indicates it’s trendy among the audience, with the value hitting 50 means half popular and 0 signifies comparatively no interest.
- Data can be Searched for a specific country and worldwide depending on your business operation in a defined region.
- Data can be fetched from the last five years to way back in 2004, helping evaluate the niche’s stability and trend in a longer duration.
- Multiple comparisons can be made in the niche to identify the most popular topic to go ahead With the blog like in the above diet comparison, we can further include two diet forms like paleo and vegetarian diets.
- Google Trend is also helpful in finding content ideas. If you scroll down a bit, you will find related queries in your niche defined as Top and Rising.
- An overall search value of 100 in the Top related queries mean the most frequently Searched term.
- Rising related queries are current searches in Google related to your topic ranked between 1-25th, helping to find content and keyword research for your blog post.
- In rising Break out means the search volume increases by 5000%.
Keyword Surfer
Keyword surfer is also another Google chrome free extension that helps you to fetch instant keyword monthly search volume both regionally, globally, or any preferred location of yours, along with the cost per click (CPC).
e.g. The below image illustrates the estimated monthly Google search and Cost Per Click of the Keto diet in the United States.
Keyword Surfer also helps you to keep a tab on the estimated monthly traffic of your competitor’s domain in a particular region along with the content keyword count in the blog post and the no of times the keyword has been used in the blog post, hence generating a basic idea for you in creating and ranking your blog post in Google.
You will also find similar keywords with search volume for creating relevant content helping in Google search ranking opportunities.
The content editor feature of Keyword Surfer will also guide you in using multiple sets of words in your content derived from Google Search results and your competitor’s usage would help rank and optimize your blog post for search volume in organic traffic and would be helpful to identify the factors in ranking for your niche.
It’s a unique, helpful plug-in to identify relevant searched data related to your niche that helps prepare your blog’s content. You can also save keywords to the clipboard and download your selected keywords for your future reference.
keyword Search Tools
Undoubtedly, tools like Google Trends and keyword surfer help us capture the nearly searched data in our niche and encourage us to start with our blog.
However, once we dive in with keyword research, we will have a fixed idea of the traffic in our niche along with the exact Term of the keyword used in the content and helpful for improved ranking in search engines.
You will find plenty of free keyword search tools out there, explore a bit into researching keywords, though you will never have an exact search volume but will end up with a basic idea of the size of the audience searching your niche along with the key trends in your place.
Note down many keywords related to your niche, preferably informational keywords with buying intent, and use the below-mentioned tools to get ideas and sprinkle accordingly in your niche content.
Some Free Keyword Research Tools.
There is no thumb rule for search volume, but more and more people showing interest in your niche would always be encouraged to keep the blog up and running.
A search count of 1000 -10000 per month for your niche is a winner, and even you can start with 500 searches per month and always find a way to move ahead to top the chart in all three(PPP) aspects.
How To Measure The Competition Of Your Niche
How to find a low competition niche?
A curious search on Google.
Can I have some quick and easy niches to earn some fast money?
I wish I can wave a magic wand and got the answers.
But it’s a harsh reality.
You have to sail through the competition.
If there is no competition, there is neither market opportunity nor profitability.
Once your niche is finalized, take out some quality time to check the size of the competition in your niche.
Start simple with Google to search your niche and the primary keywords of your niche and check the number of blogs already existing in your niche.
There is nothing to panic about if your niche is already overcrowded with the competition.
Consider your competition as a guiding force in finding how they engage audiences, manage content, or emerge as winners in their niche.
Moreover, It’s a good signal; there is already an updated audience interested in your niche category.
The responsibility lies with you to attract this set of audiences by creating a magnet in the form of helpful content or helping them in resolving their queries.
If you still feel there are already experts existing in your niche, dissect the niche for a subcategory to be a leader.
Still, if you are not confident about a go with the niche because it’s crowded, take the smart way of narrowing it down into a sub-topic in your niche category.
For example. If the food blog is already filled, you will find plenty of subtopics in the food niche to start your blog.
Look out for profitable keywords in your sub-niche which is being searched frequently.
If your sub-niche is of low volume and hovering around 500 – 1000 searches a month, you are good to go.
Have an eye for the related keyword in your niche with a lower to medium difficulty level with no or lesser PPC ads
( pay per click) for the keyword.
Dedicate some more time.
Look out for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter & Instagram to find current trends and buzz around your niche. Join a few groups and forums related to your place to find out your niche’s engagement level and audience size.
As you walk further in your blogging journey, You will find plenty of innovative tools like
Buzzsumo, Ahref, and MOZ to check what’s happening in your niche, the size of your
Competition, and the keywords in your niche that drive the audience’s interest.
It’s going to be a long drive; you have to start somewhere instead of waiting for all the perfections in the world.
Things will fall into place as you move ahead.
How To Monetize Your Niche
I have covered a quarter of my journey, choosing my niche.
Both the 2 Ps passion and potentiality of my niche are in place.
So let’s combine both the Ps and convert them into profitability.
In a real sense, let’s find out how much money-making potential is there in our niche?
Which niche makes the most money?
Can we continue with the niche in the long run?
Before we move further, let me have an honest thought if you are passionate about your niche and a bit innovative, you will always find a way to monetize your blog.
It might not be overnight but indeed will have a slow start to a sure shot.
And you don’t have to be highly skilled in implementing rocket science to earn for your blog.
Here We Go. Let’s dive in.
Gathering Ideas
The first step is to generate ideas by visiting popular blogs in your niche and finding the sources utilized to monetize your blog.
Few takeaways should be
1) Are they writing content around a product in your niche and sharing a link to purchase it.
2) Have they created their product in the form of eBooks or online courses?
2) Are they popular enough in displaying ads and banners of others businesses in your niche?
All of the steps mentioned above signify a healthier signal that bloggers in your niche are making Money.
Affiliate Marketing
Which niche is best for affiliate marketing?
Check for affiliate products in your Niche with High revenue.
Affiliate program is also one of the biggest platforms for revenue generation through blogging by promoting other’s products.
The product might belong to an individual or an organization.
Keep an eye for affiliate products in your niche and have a tab on what competition offers for affiliate products.
You can directly Google your affiliate product in your niche to find further info regarding the product’s Size and Potential of the product.
Simultaneously, you can also check affiliate programs sites like ShareASale and ClickBank to find your niche’s product offerings.
Checkout for high commission products in your niche built valuable content around it to help your audience and place the affiliate product as a solution.
Check for Amazon
Amazon is also a great place to drive ideas for your niche.
Look for the popular products related to your niche on Amazon, and which niche is best for Amazon affiliate marketing.
The higher the product category and demand with the audience, it’s a good sign for monetizing the niche.
You can create awareness regarding the product with detailed input and refer your audience for sale to earn a commission.
Self Solution
Over time as you go deep and build trust with your audience; you can create and sell your products in EBooks or digital courses and monetize your niche.
Final Thoughts
Your niche selection is a critically important factor as it’s going to make it or break it.
However, it’s never the end of the road.
There is no rule of thumb to stick to a single niche, and instead, one should always be ready to experiment with the ever-demanding requirement of the audience in a fast-paced market.
It will be a best practice to avoid juggling between multiple niches in one go.
Once you start learning and implementing your first blog, can always switch to the next topic or start parallelly.
Take a pause Brainstorm a bit, jot down 4-5 niches that come to your mind.
Zeroed in on a niche you enjoy and are passionate about, considering all 3Ps are in place.
Give a thoughtful plan, Strategize and penetrate the profitable markets in your niche.
Devote a lot of time and drive your niche to be the next big thing in your category.
Stick on with your audience by delivering valuable information that they keep coming back to you until they become your fans.
Guide your audience to be a part of your journey in making your niche a success.
Conclusion
I hope the topic discussed above helps you in discovering your niche.
While selecting a topic, think of it in the long run.
Stay updated with the trends of your niche and keeps updating your post regularly.
The success of a niche is not an instant noodle and can’t be measured immediately.
The niche grows gradually as you consistently focus and sincere efforts to scale it to greater heights.
Choose a niche which you love, give your best leave the rest.
So here we are we have just climbed the second step of the ladder.
Stay connected.
We will be back with yet another exciting topic as we dissect What is a Domain?
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Godspeed
