Finding Your Blog Niche

I’m excited to be writing this article because if you’ve looked at the title you know that we’re talking about narrowing down and finding your blog niche and I really feel like doing so is one of the really important steps in building your profitable blog.

I get so many questions about how in the world you’re supposed to do that. In fact, I would probably say that this is one of the most frequently asked questions, definitely in the top five.

People know that it’s important to narrow down their niche but they’re just not quite sure how exactly to go about doing something like that and it’s actually really easy.

I feel like narrowing down your niche is important because if you try to help everyone and you have a very broad niche, in the end you’re probably not going to help as many people as you’d like to.

It’s better to just become really proficient at one thing, teaching one thing, helping people in one category as opposed to trying to spread yourself really thin and cover a lot of different things.

You want your potential customers to identify your strengths automatically, like as soon as they land on your page. If you try to be good at personal finance, fashion, food and family, that’s a lot of balls to juggle.

It can be really difficult to do that so just be a rockstar at one specific category and it’ll make it much easier to build your business from there.

I have a really easy four step formula that you can use to figure out exactly what it is you want to write about. I used it when I was trying to figure out exactly what niche I wanted to be in.

List Your Skills and Passions

List all of your skills and your passions. This isn’t the time to hold back, don’t be shy, don’t worry nobody’s going to look at the paper and even if they did it doesn’t matter, you’re working on your business.

The whole point of this first step is to really just pour everything onto the page. You definitely want to list all the things that you’re good at. You want to be able to teach people things that you’ve mastered but at the same time you also want to blend in what you’re really passionate about.

I’m really good at working with numbers but I’m not crazy about accounting or teaching accounting or anything of that nature so that’s not really my vibe. Even though I’m good at it, it’s a skill of mine, it’s not something that I want to teach for the next 5 years or 10 years.

Think of those two things, write everything down you possibly can and then look over and see if there’s something that falls under the skills and the passions category for you.

Pick Your Category

List what you think your category should be. Now people can sense lack of enthusiasm from a mile away so you definitely don’t want to choose a niche simply based on the idea like that’s where the money is or anything like that.

One, you’ll probably burn out very quickly because it’s not something that you’re passionate about. It’s just something that you want to write about to make money.

Two, if people don’t see a skill or a passion involved in that niche then they’re likely to pick up and go to the next blog and find something that’s a little bit better.

You want to be able to find something that excites you so maybe that’s why it wouldn’t be under the skills or passions list but something that you could definitely turn into a proficient skill of your own.

You’ll also want to do some keyword research just to see how competitive your niche is going to be. There’s plenty of keyword research tools out there that are make for this specific purpose.

Learn more about: Top 3 Keyword Research Tools

Narrowing Down

Start narrowing down all of your different categories. So at this point you’ve got all of these different things that you’re writing out and you’re probably going okay, I could probably write about this and this and that’s a good problem to have.

It’s good to be able to have many choices but it is important to go ahead and start narrowing them down. When I started blogging I was writing about a million different things and I quickly realized it was too much.

I could technically write about all of those things and it was a lot of fun but if I wanted to become really really good at something and establish my authority in a certain category I needed to narrow it down to one or two.

What I recommend doing and this is what I did myself is just kind of write about all those different categories. Get a good feel for what your readers like, what you like to write about.

I thought I would enjoy the fitness niche but then I just wasn’t as crazy about it as I thought. I didn’t have the talent for it so that was just one way to just kind of you know move that off the list and then try the next thing.

I recommend doing this over a period of thirty to sixty days and then slowly weeding out one category after another until you’re left with one or two categories that you really feel like you can build a profitable blog off of.

Here’s a great article from Blogging Explorer that shares 100 Blog Niche Ideas

Make a List Of Possible Blog Posts

The final step is to write a list of at least fifty blog posts that you think you could write about that category. Fifty sounds like a lot I get it but if you think about it there are 12 months in a year and each month you may write multiple blog posts.

If you’re doing that, 50 is going too quickly get to 250. 50 won’t be hard to get to in a year. If you’re building a profitable blog don’t think short term, think long term.

You want to be able to write consistent posts throughout the year, providing value to people and if the category that you have narrowed down to is just so focused and so narrow that you can’t come up with a list of 50 blog posts see if there’s a way that you can broaden it a little bit.

A really good example would be if you chose your category to be budgeting. Maybe you would get to the point to where you wrote 50 different blog posts. You feel like you’ve just written about it way too much and you’re sick of it.

You might want to broaden your category a little bit and say okay I think I’m going to write about personal finance and not just budgeting. So then I can cover different tactics or things like that. That way you can stay in the money category but also touch on related subjects outside of that.

Finding Your Blog Niche – Conclusion

So that’s my really easy formula for finding your blog niche. I know it can seem overwhelming at first but getting started and taking action is always the hardest part.

I hope you guys enjoyed the post If you have any specific questions you’d like me to answer please let me know by leaving a comment below. I love hearing from you and make sure to share with your friends.