How To Choose Your Blog Niche

How To Choose Your Blog Niche

What is your blog going to be about? Discover why it’s important to choose your blog niche BEFORE you launch your new blog.

*Updated 11th June 2020*

Hey lovely mama, I’m so happy you’re here. If you’ve found this blog post it means you’ve decided to start a blog – yay! – and you want to learn how to do it the right way.

I’m glad to say you’re in the right place!

If you haven’t started your blog yet, read this post for detailed advice on how to get started.

I’m going to show you how to decide what your blog is going to be about.

This is called your niche.

Your niche is essentially the topic – or collection of related topics – that you’re going to write about on your blog.

And I’m going to show you why it’s important to choose your blog niche and have this all planned out BEFORE you launch your blog. (Or as soon as you can afterwards!)

Don’t have time to read this now? Pin it for later.

Why Do I Need a Blog Niche?

Okay, so technically you don’t need a blog niche. You could write about anything and everything that takes your fancy.

And that’s fine. It’s your blog after all.

But doing that will most likely mean that you aren’t able to grow your audience very quickly. Or at all.

And your blog won’t be very profitable.

You need an engaged audience to make money from blogging.

If you’ve read my free ebook, then you’ll know that writing for yourself is more like keeping an online journal, or a hobby blog. It can be a whole heap of fun, but it won’t make any money.

If you haven’t read my FREE ebook sign up here to get it!

A profitable blog – the kind of blog you want! – is written to help your audience with something.

It could be to entertain them, teach them a new skill, or tell people about your local area.

To be effective in providing solutions your audience’s problems, you’re going to need to focus your efforts. You need to choose your blog niche, and be able to clearly define it.

And for that you need to have planned out your niche before launching your blog.

Say I was looking for advice on how to prevent my baby getting colic, I wouldn’t take advice from someone who writes a gaming blog.

They may know everything there is to know about colicky babies, but I still wouldn’t click on their gaming blog for the answers.

More likely I would click on a mummy blogger link, or a blog written by a health visitor, or children’s nurse.

Their expertise and experience is tied up neatly with their blog niche.

And that’s what you need to do too lovely mama.

You need to choose your blog niche sooner rather than later. And you need to keep your writing focused within your chosen niche.

Which Blogging Niches Make Money?

Since we’re talking about money-making blogs, it makes sense that you’d want to know which blog niches are most profitable.

As in the offline world, topics that require a lot of expertise or technical knowledge tend to be the big money-makers.

If less people are able to write credibly about a particular topic, those few blogs are going to be in bigger demand. And therefore make more money.

Here’s a quick list of the 10 most profitable blogging niches:

• Legal
• Tech
• Finance
• Digital Marketing
• Health / Medicine
• Fashion & Beauty
• Pets & Pet Care
• Celebrity
• Travel
• Crafts

Of course you don’t have to be an investment banker to write a finance blog. You could write a home-budgeting blog for stay at home mums. That still falls into the finance niche.

And you don’t have to be Dame Anna Wintour to start a fashion blog. Perhaps you could write about creating a capsule wardrobe for working mums. You never know, you might become insta-famous just like Dominique from @allthatisshe.

Even though you may not feel like it, you have incredible talents and a whole heap of knowledge that you can build your blog around.

And don’t worry if you can’t see an easy fit with any of the niches listed above. Just because they tend to be the more profitable blogging niches, doesn’t mean others won’t make good money too.

How To Choose Your Blog Niche

So how exactly do you decide on a niche for your blog?

You may have decided on a broad area already. For example you might already know that you want to start a food-related blog.

But “food blog” is still far too vague to be truly useful for your audience.

Remember it’s your audience you’re writing for. Not you.

And so you’re going to have to narrow things down a little further. This is called niching down.

There are two ways you can do this, and both will require you to do some thinking.

Know Your Audience

The first method is to know your audience. And I mean really know them. Understand who they are and what pain points they have in life that you can help with.

Questions to think about are:

• how old are they?
• male, female or non-binary?
• are they married or single?
• what job / profession do they have?
• where do they live?
• do they have kids? What age?
• where do they shop?
• what’s their favourite brand?
• where do they hang out?
• Fine dining or take away?
• Facebook or YouTube?

This short list of questions indicates the sort of detailed picture you should be aiming for when deciding on your target audience.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. You can always add more questions if it helps.

You’re essentially creating an avatar of your ideal reader.

Know Yourself

This is also going to take a little bit of work and self-reflection.

You need to get to grips with knowing what your strengths and weaknesses are. The things you’re really interested in. And the stuff that you could research endlessly, or want to get better at yourself.

When you’ve done reading this, grab a piece of paper and write out these headings:

• likes
• interests
• strengths
• things I’d love to learn

Take some time to fill out each of the headings. When you’re done you could colour code them into similar groups.

For example, if you have nature listed under likes, photography under interests and photographing water birds for things you’d love to learn, these called all be grouped together in one colour.

Based on this selection your blogging niche could be learning how to photograph water birds, where you teach your audience as you learn yourself.

Journey blogs are very popular!

Another example might be that you’ve written green living under likes, home grown veggies under interests and time management as one of your strengths. Again these could all be grouped together in a different colour.

Your blog could be about growing your own organic veg at home for full-time working mums.

You could have a LOT of FUN with this exercise, and it’s a really important step to do while you’re in the planning stages of your blog..

It will help you to see just how many different blogs you could easily start writing now that you’ve focused your mind.

Research Your Blog Niche: Is There A Market?

You’ll find lots of advice that says you should blog about your passion. And of course you can be passionate about your blog niche. BUT don’t let this be the deciding factor when you’re trying to choose your blog niche and set up a money-making blog.

Of course you need to be interested in your niche, otherwise it’ll just feel like hard work. And it won’t be long until you lose interest and the whole thing flops.

I’m not going to lie. Blogging is a lot of work. And you might not see immediate results. So make sure you choose a blog niche that you enjoy and would happily read about anyway.

But if the aim of your blog is to make money, then you need to know whether or not there is a market for your chosen niche that you can monetise.

Take a look at the image below.

Ideally you’re aiming to have your blog niche sitting nicely in the middle of where the circles intersect.

Remember how I said before that “food blog” is just too vague?

Perhaps reading this has made you realise that you know how to get fussy toddlers to eat anything you put in front of them, and so that’s what you’re going to blog about.

If that’s you, by the way, then you have a true superpower worthy of Marvel!

Your “food blog” has niched down to be specifically about creating fun and healthy recipe ideas for mums with fussy toddlers.

With just a little thought and planning you’ve identified your target audience = busy mums. You know their pain point = fussy eating toddlers. And you’re going to write about something you’re already interested in, which is also one of your strengths too.

From this you have the perfect springboard to start writing content for your blog.

AND you know you’ll have an audience all ready and waiting to read your every word!

High five mama!

Now it’s your turn. Have a go at the activities I’ve suggested above. And let me know how it goes.

It’d be awesome if you told me the niche you’ve decided on for your blog in the comments below!

What Next?

I share lots of high-value, useful and personalised hints, tips and advice in my Facebook community most of which I don’t share anywhere else. So don’t miss out! Come and join my community of busy mummies just like you who want to start a blog but don’t know how or where to start.

Or if Instagram is where you prefer to hang out, you can find me there too!

Finally, if you’ve found this post useful, please take a moment to share it using the buttons below 🙂

How To Choose Your Blog Niche

Did this post help you? If you have any questions about how to choose your blog niche, just drop them in the comments below and I’ll happily get back to you!