Choosing a niche is one of the hardest decisions in blogging, but it doesn’t need to be as stressful as we make it.
That said, it is important, we need to take selecting our market seriously.
If your goal is to earn an income from your blogging then you need to know if your niche has the potential to make you money.
- A profitable blog requires a profitable target audience and you need to know that audience very well.
- You need to be able to convert your blog topics into blog traffic,
- … and your blog traffic into blog profit.
Different Definitions of Niche
- Some people say a niche is a specialty, for example offering a specific product or service. For example, an Eye Surgeon versus a General Practitioner. Rivian is a USA Electric Car Maker versus Ford or GM who make all kinds of vehicles.
- Others define niche as identifying a specific target market. For example, people with allergies, intolerances, beliefs or preferences are a market for specialty foods, supplements, restaurants/takeout, and recipes.
I see it as identifying who you can most help, and what help they need, so it is a bit of both. The more expertise and experience you have in a subject, the more helpful you can be …
… but you don’t have to be an expert!
Your approach to the niche can be “follow along as I learn and try things“. People can benefit from your research and even mistakes, so don’t have a lack of credentials or subject area fame hold you back.
Choosing a Niche with Motivation + Good Spending Habits
Niche selection is worthy of a whole book just in itself, but know that it is not enough that people are interested in the topic, there needs to be
- Enough people, in places that you can reach.
- They need to be willing to spend money (somewhere, with someone).
- and you need to be able to succeed long term with your new blog.
On the topic of the audience needing to be people with money to spend, I need to say that they need to be happy to spend it in ways that you can help them with.
Helping people achieve something, or relieve a problem, are the main routes to how bloggers make money.
I am guessing most of us know someone who will spend a great deal of money on their interests, while there are always people we know who have “passtimes” where they spend very little.
But there are also circumstances where people in a niche will spend a lot, all at once, and hardly any money later.
Consider custom keyboards as an example. They can be super expensive, and require a lot of research, but the repeat purchase cohort of the audience is a much smaller percentage than that of the whole.
The only money my father in law spends on his Golf is his annual membership, apart from very rarely he might treat himself to a new golf club.
On the other hand, makers will make big purchases, buy tools, purchase materials, sign up for software plans, and even buy downloadable digital plans and designs.
PC gamers have to keep up to date with hardware requirements, then there are the games, downloadable content, controllers, and so on.
How to tell a niche has money in it
One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make when launching a blog with the hope of making money online is selecting an audience that refuses to spend money!
Note I did not say the audience does not have money, they refuse to spend it.
Big difference.
- Take a look at the existing players in the community you are investigating, how are they currently earning an income?
- Check out Website Sales marketplaces such as Flippa and search for keywords, how many are revenue generating?
- Do print magazines exist for the niche? Do they attract advertisers?
- Browse and search Amazon, how many products are targeting this niche?
- What do people in the niche like to (or need to) purchase? What are the prices they are willing to pay?
- Are there affiliate programs for this niche?
- Can you find paid apps or online services that target the niche?
- How easy is it to find busy Facebook groups, Discords, discussion forums?
- Are there any paid memberships?
Toward the end of this article I have a huge tip for knowing for sure your niche has a large profit potential, but I won’t spoil it for you now – suspense!
Defining Your Niche Audience
Once you found a motivated niche, then you have to see if you can realistically serve that niche.
Who can you most help? Who can you most easily reach?
This is the opposite of most people’s approach when defining their new blog, they tend to think “What do I want to write about” but it is just as important to know who you are serving as it is to know what you will get out of the deal.
For content to be compelling to a person it has to meet their fascinations, goals, needs, or desires, right in the moment they see it.
It also has to not raise any red flags, by which I mean a modern internet-savvy audience is always looking out for scams, fraud, and lying liars.
I like to use marketing pen portraits to build a detailed profile of my audience, their needs and desires, and how I can approach them.
Who are your niche competitors?
When looking for a new niche and researching about that niche, I like to load up Google and do some searches for general, wide subject matter keywords, starting with variations on the niche name.
- Do you find there are a lot of tutorials or is the subject area more about news?
- Are there features in the Google search results such as “People Also Ask” and FAQ answers?
- Would you describe your competition as putting out great content, mediocre content, or spammy content?
Lots of niches attract spammers and scams just because they see money in the niche, (you only need to look at the ads on Twitter by random weird names all promoting drop-ship products at 9000x markup) but you can stand out by just being legitimate.
As mentioned already, you want the niche to be buzzing with activity, but you also need to see a gap you can fill.
If you find there is just way too much out there already, it could be an early sign that you need to niche down.
Niching Down
You will find the bigger your search terms are, the more likely there are areas dominated by big corporations, or established bloggers who have obviously put a lot of time and effort into their blog.
Google will rank websites with “Topical Authority” higher than new players and it can take a while before you can convince Google that you are more of an expert than the existing competition.
Of course, Google being Google that is not a hard and fast rule – look how many times Forbes ranks for topics they have no business ranking for!
If you niche down into smaller sub-categories of the larger niche you might discover pockets that are easier to compete in, where other bloggers are also beginning their blogging journey and might not even have their own domain name.
Using tools such as Redditlist we can discover popular niches that have a following. On Reddit these topics are called “subreddits”, and as Reddit has a massive audience, it is worth exploring for inspiration.
Hang out and listen. Which ideas, subjects, pain-points, or questions come up on a regular basis. Which subjects are people always looking for free, cheap, or pirate solutions versus those where people are willing to spend money for a solution?
My brother was doing well with his gadget blog, but he saw even more success by focusing on high-end audio equipment.
Niching down gives you a fighting chance to stand out, but also means you can specialize.
If, for example, you were thinking about starting a travel blog, it would not be a wise idea to just call the niche “travel”. Instead maybe focus on certain locations, ways of travel, or a certain demographic:
- “Travel South America”
- “Travel for the over sixties”
- “Travel with a laptop”
The main questions at this point are
- How much quality content do you find?
- Can you compete with it?
- What is missing that you can provide?
Does your niche have enough traffic for your new blog?
A danger when niching down is that while every topic known to humanity will have people in it at this point, some niches will have richer opportunities than others, and not every niche will have blog topics that you, personally, can write about.
The best way to determine what it would take for you to get visibility in the niche that you are researching is to perform some more keyword research, and to check out Trends, to see if the field is growing or stagnating.
While keyword research is an element of search engine optimization, it is also a way of generating new content ideas. It is also useful to see how many people are looking for your topics in Google search along with how strong your competition is likely to be.
Visitors who arrive at your blog via search engines are described as organic traffic, that is traffic you earned rather than paid for.
Once you have an established website you will use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools to measure how much traffic your articles and your SEO efforts are generating, but at this point, we want an estimate of potential.
Using a keyword research tool (the below example is done with Ahrefs) , enter some words that your niche is likely to search for and see what the volume and difficulty of that search are estimated to be.
For our hypothetical travel blog, I entered “Paris France” for searches in the UK and got results ranging from hotels to flights, and “what to do” with a decent search volume and competitive but not impossible difficulty.
Keep in mind that the results are only estimates of the number of searches the tool guesses are performed for that search, in the region you select, and the estimates are not how many people will click on your search result to view your articles.
The longer your search phrase is the more specific the search, which often means fewer competitors but also likely lower traffic potential too. These are called “long tail” searches and are the key to getting visibility for a brand-new blog.
My search for “best bakery in Paris” did not even have any results for the USA in the tool, but for the UK it showed a volume of 200.
Testing your niche
To see if you can make a go of a niche you can test it.
Use social media posts, a YouTube video (or a TikTok/Reel/etc), or even a guest post, and gauge the response.
It is funny to see how well some topics capture your audience’s imagination while others feel like swimming against the tide.
Once I had Maker Hacks ticking along it made testing out new niches easier because I could tell even though these other subjects were not an entirely comfortable match to what my readers wanted to see, I could still get a healthy response to them.
Even this website here in this incarnation was only started after I had seen a response to things I had said, written and shared.
Before I wrote about marketing, content or blogging, I was just hanging out in SEO and webmaster communities. I was still writing about web development and programming at that time.
Even the programming websites came out of seeing my advice get traction on message boards and email discussion lists!
On the other hand, I posted a video about how to set up a WooCommerce site and embedded it here on my blog annnnnd … so far after two months it only got 38 views.
I hear loud and clear that this is not a topic I should pursue.
That is not to say I couldn’t ever make it work, and it could be just the YouTube algorithm chose not to share it because of various reasons.
It’s just I have easier, more fruitful paths ahead of me so why make life harder?
Examples (My Own Niches)
I already mentioned the Maker audience. That niche is probably too wide, but I like it.
One topic I did spin off into a separate blog was my site about retro computers. There are a lot of overlaps, but enough people are not at all interested (for example, they were born after 1995), that I felt it warranted its own site.
My third topic is tabletop wargaming and roleplaying games. Again, there are aspects in there of “making” (crafting scenery, etc), but my maker audience wouldn’t be interested necessarily in the games.
Of the three niches, the third is the one I have struggled the most to write about because it ideally requires other people’s schedules to line up with mine, and therefore it is the interest that gets the least of my attention.
Making is something that I have always done, since I could hold a pencil anyway, and god-willing will always do. That means, even if it is just posting a photo to instagram, I can find “content” to share.
So you can see, while “follow your passions” isn’t necessarily a recipe for success, it does certainly help with getting long term and consistent action toward your goals.
More Niche Examples (Other People)
Is it too late to start? Nope. Not even in extremely established scammy and hyped-up niches like Make Money Online.
My best example of this (probably of all time) is Kimberly Mitchell. She proved that even in this highly competitive and bloated field, it is still possible to stand out.
This sounds obvious in hindsight but she had the brilliant idea to put the viral “do this weird trick and make $10k in 30mins” guru advice to the test and simply shares her results.
What about niches that have been around forever?
TheCrafsMan (sp) combines a soothing Bob Ross/ASMR voice over, puppetry, and obvious expertise and talent, to make absolutely unique “steady crafting” videos.
He was the first person I saw who attracted a massive following, not by making wooden planters or refurbishing a kitchen, but by giving tutorials about sculpting action figures.
Do you have to do clickbait? No way!
The Why Files has millions of subscribers, and you can see … why … if you just watch a few minutes of any of his videos.
As well as the lovely humour, and expert delivery, featuring the snarky Hecklefish, the scripting, editing, and research are top notch.
Unlike other YouTubers in the niche, he doesn’t just react to the blurry glowing orb smartphone video of the day with a “gasp face” thumbnail, he goes deep into topics and has a compelling storytelling approach. Also, uniquely, he gives a balanced viewpoint, neither entirely promoting or debunking. Even topics he admits he would love to be true, he gives the facts and digs to get to the truth.
Even if you are not into ghosts, cryptids, aliens, and mysteries, I think every content creator would do well to watch at least one of his videos all the way through.
Can you still be successful reporting the news? Yes. Yes, you can.
Anton Petrov has a science news YouTube channel where he sits in front of his camera, probably his phone, with a green-screen effect and managed to acquire 1.28M subscribers.
Just for a moment consider his extremely famous and well-funded competition, but still he succeeds.
I love his delivery, his scripts are very well researched and written, and he makes complex and confusing topics simple for even me to understand.
The Lazy Way to Niche Identification
In all three of my niches, the audience is not just identifiable, they self-identify. There are niches that are just that way, for example there are science fiction fans and then there are Trekkies and Whovians.
This leads me to a huge piece of advice that will not always fit, but when it does it is amazing.
When you find a niche with a healthy events scene you know you have a winner!
Events are a big risk, logistically stressful, and expensive for both the organizers and the exhibitors. That means people need to be very confident indeed to participate.
What you get when you research exhibitions and events are ideas about audience size, especially audience for a given geography, and you can see where the money lives and the money is spent (think sponsors, ticket prices, vendors, etc).
Yes, we can think of the huge events, such as Comic Con, or E3, or SXSW, but again we can niche down and find some cool surprises.
- Rather than Comic Con, think of all the communities that still hold events even though the TV show or book series they are fans of were long ago cancelled.
- There is a “Tour of York“, which is already a niche I guess, but it has a Taylor Swift Silent Disco theme.
- Instead of “Electronics” or “Gadgets”, look at the passionate sub-sub-niches. There are 3D printing events going on all the time, all around the world. My brother with his audiophile reviews gets flown out to lots of great locations to look at the new hi-fi gear.
- I even found an event for people who want to learn how to run events!
Next Steps
Once you have selected a niche, or have short-listed some niches, the next things to do would be:
- Join some communities, facebook groups, forums, Discords, etc. Start interacting and especially, listening.
- Sign up for some newsletters and follow content creators. See what they are up to, what they promote, and their interactions.
- Test to see if people respond well to your ideas, even if just a social media post, a thread in a forum, or a guest post.
Then, and only then, start building your website …