How to Start a Blog: Choosing Your Blogging Niche

The first step to setting up a profitable blog is choosing the right niche.

What is a “niche”? It’s simply the general topic or theme of a blog.

Long gone are the days of “general” blogs about anything and everything you might fancy writing about. Instead the best blogs are based around a topic – such as pet care, or yoga, or technology.

Why is this? When you start a blog you want to attract a very specific readership of people who will be interested in subscribing and receiving further articles from you. Basing your blog around a particular niche helps you to achieve this very thing.

After all, if I suddenly started writing about football on my personal finance blog its unlikely that many of my subscribers would be overly engaged, wouldn’t you agree?

Over the years I’ve set up dozens of different blogs, and found that one of the single biggest factors that affects the success or failure of a site is the niche that it is in.

Luckily, based on my experiences to date, choosing a niche for your blog needn’t be difficult.

In fact, I have five simple questions that can help you choose the exact niche of your blog.

Simply use these questions to brainstorm and assess ideas, before deciding on the niche that seems to have the most potential for you.

Ready?

1) What Are You Passionate/Knowledgeable About?

While I’m living proof that its possible to earn a healthy income from your own blog, the reality is that it can take some time and effort before things really take off. Don’t expect to earn a thing for the first few months as you get established.

This “introductory” phase is arguably the hardest to push through. Once you’re earning money things become a lot easier.

The factor that pushes you through that launch phase is *passion*.

Writing a blog about something you know and love is not just easier – it’s also a whole lot more fun. You get to write about things you’re interested in, and to meet like-minded people.

So grab a pen and paper, and think about all the things you could base a blog around.

Consider things like the places you’ve been (or where you live), hobbies and interests of yours, topics from your career and so on. Most people should be able to generate 10-15 ideas at least.

A great source of ideas, if you need some help, is Alltop.com – it’s a huge database of fantastic blogs, which you can use for inspiration when producing your list.

2) How Much Could You Write?

The point of a blog is that you’ll constantly be producing new blog posts and publishing them. This means that over time you’ll be producing plenty of articles. My personal finance blog has almost 150 posts at the time of writing, and I expect this to keep growing over time.

A second consideration when choosing your niche is therefore whether or not you can write enough around a subject.

Take goldfish care as an example. Sure, you can talk about different types, about their water, food and cleaning. But could you write 100+ posts just on goldfish? Frankly it seems unlikely.

Then compare this to gardening. There are almost endless articles you could write about such a subject. This makes gardening a rather more exciting prospect from the perspective of blogging.

Once you’ve generated your list of interests, therefore, cross off any which you’d struggle (over time) to write 100+ different articles about.

3) Is There a Large Audience?

There’s little point in building a blog if nobody is going to read it. Broadly speaking, more readers means more money for you, so the bigger the audience the better.

As a good “rule of thumb” here take a visit to a good newsagent and look at all the thousands of magazines they publish.

Looking around my own recently I found everything from fish keeping to mountain biking, investing to video gaming.

If there are magazines in your niche then this is generally an indication that there’s a large-enough audience to consider building a blog around.

Highlight these ideas on your list, as they’re likely to be strong contenders for a new blog.

4) Are There Other Blogs in this Niche?

They say that “no man is an island”, and this is just as true in the blogging world. Bloggers are a social bunch, and building relationships with other bloggers is one of the very best ways possible to grow your readership over time.

So take a look around to see if you can find other blogs in your proposed niches. Broadly speaking I would suggest avoiding those topics that don’t have any other blogs in them, as you’ll likely find it difficult to properly promote such a site.

5) Are People Spending Money?

Lastly you need to be certain that people are ready and willing to spend money on your niche. The more money people are spending the likely it is that you’ll be able to make money through accepting adverts and promoting products.

The easiest way is use common sense. Do your friends who are interested in your potential niches spend money? Taking two examples, people planning to get married spend huge amounts of money on dresses, receptions, invitations and so on so this could be a hot market.

On the other hand something like skateboarding might not be such a great niche. After all, once someone has bought a skateboard, and maybe some pads, what else will be they be buying? Ideally your blog will target a group of people willing to spend money.

Spend some time today assessing all your hobbies and interests using the above guidelines in order to decide on a final topic that you’re going to build a blog around.

In lesson #2 we’re going to take this idea and start turning it into a real blog. Next time things start to get really exciting as we’ll choose and order a website address together…