Do you want to start a blog but are not sure what niche to go into?
In this blog guide, I’ll be guiding you on how to choose a niche for your blog and actually crush it.
Blogging has proven to be a great source of income for a lot of people today.
Creating content consistently for a specific audience can turn your blog into a full-time income if done well.
You see, today, blogging has evolved and a lot has changed.
Back then, you could start any blog without paying much attention to what niche you were going into and still have a successful blog.
I mean, if you look closely, most old influential bloggers do not have a specific niche they focus on.
You’d see blogs posting content on literally any topic.
Today, the blogosphere has changed and you might not be doing your blog good by talking about any topic on your blog.
Niching down is super important and you need to pay attention to it.
To be able to build a successful blog, you must find a sweet spot to serve your target audience. For me, starting out, I had problems selecting a niche to start my blog.
Even though I knew I needed to find a sweet spot to blog about, figuring out which blog niche to go into was challenging.
I looked around for tips and asked questions on group boards but I was still confused.
I came up with;
technology
music
relationship
I asked questions like…
Which niche will be best for me?
Which is more lucrative?
Which will I enjoy doing the most?
Will I cut through the noise?
Should I go publish content on all 3 categories on one blog?
And because I didn’t have a guide just like this, I didn’t pick the right one.
I went into the technology space. And I failed!
I remember creating my very first blog, which was a technology blog on BlogSpot (blogger.com) and telling everyone about it.
I created content for about 4 months and guess what?
My traffic never went past 0-10 per day.
It was literally zero!
I never got any leads, I never made any money, and I never made any impact too.
It took me a while and I created another blog and navigated my approach completely; I went into the content marketing space and within a month, I grew my blog traffic to 10,000 monthly.
How?
I simply did my research and went into something that actually fit me and my brand.
And in this guide, we’ll be discussing the exact steps that I took (and still take because I still create new blogs) 10 years ago to create several successful blogs in various niches.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this blog post:
We’ll talk about how to begin brainstorming niche ideas for your blog so that you come up with things to blog about.
We’ll look at the exact way to validate your blog ideas to find the perfect blog niche for you.
Next, I’ll show you exactly how to come up with lucrative blog post ideas around your blog niche so that you can begin publishing new blog posts immediately.
Finally, you’ll get a long list of 50 profitable blog niche ideas for new bloggers today.
What is a Blog Niche and Why Do You Need One?
Did you know that the most successful blogs on the internet target a specific niche market?
To be able to understand a blog niche, what’s a niche?
In business, a niche is simply a specific fragment or a specialized market for a particular product or service.
It is a particular segment of a business or brand that appeals to a specified audience.
Now, this isn’t too different from blogging!
A blog niche is a specialized segment of the blog market or blogosphere.
It is a specialized area that a blogger focuses his content or blog posts around.
If a blogger creates content that teaches people how to cook, then his niche is Cooking.
If a blog publishes content around yoga, that’s a yoga blog and the blog niche is Yoga.
In a nutshell, it’s a specific topic that you create your blog posts about.
It typically means the blog market that you carefully select for your new or existing blog.
For me, I wanted my blog to be about technology, music or relationships.
These were the blog niche ideas I had when I was starting my first blog.
My intent was to create content around what I was knowledgeable about and I ended up going into the technology space.
This decision didn’t turn out so well because I didn’t pay attention to questions like…
How congested is this space already?
How easy will it be to break through the noise and create a brand name for me?
And as a result, I created content no one was willing to check or spend time reading.
I didn’t know what products to create and sell?
I didn’t know which types of blog posts to create that would attract people to read.
I didn't even know who I was targeting and as a result, the blog failed and I had to restart.
That’s how important niche blogging is today and you must pay attention to it.
The concept of niching is not new in blogging but only recently have bloggers and marketers started taking it up more seriously.
Niche blogging reduces the cost of running a successful blog as you’ll only need to spend a little to have your blog posts up.
When running generalized blogs can come with incurred expenses like having to pay for a bigger hosting bandwidth to accommodate high traffic and content volumes.
To accommodate many posts, you’d have to pay for more storage with your hosting platforms.
For example, when I got into blogging, I only used the free blogger hosted by Google and within a few months, I had to switch to Hostgator, a paid hosting platform that allows you to create a powerful blog.
But at the same time, I wouldn’t have to create so much content because my blog niche is the B2B content marketing space which sort of sets a boundary to the number of posts I publish.
Your niche spans around 3 things and in this post, we’ll help you find yours too. These are;
Your specific niche topic.
This is the general topic idea you want to go into.
Your specific audience or target customers.
To run a successful niche blog, you must find a specific target audience that you want to serve.
Your blog posts will only focus on helping this set of people.
And your niche monetization strategy.
This will help you plan out a blog funnel that’ll generate income from your blog.
To cite an example, I am a content marketing blogger who helps software businesses with content & SEO challenges.
And I plan to earn from my blog by creating a service that helps software businesses with content marketing.
Get the idea?
Now pick a blog niche to focus on but why can’t you just write about anything you want to?
Now there are several reasons you should pick a sweet blogging spot but one of the most important things is that having a specific niche to blog about helps you to create content your specific audience will be interested in.
I mean, I believe you know how difficult it is to try to please everyone.
And creating a blog about everything means trying to please everyone and that won’t work.
If you want to create a successful blog, you must target a specific audience and help them solve a specific problem or problem around a topic.
And if you create a specific type of blog post, you are sure that a specific group of people would be interested in your blog posts.
For example, if I create posts about content marketing, I should expect digital company owners and digital entrepreneurs to read my blogs.
This way, I am sure they would be interested in most of my posts.
Another reason to have a niche for your blog is to avoid competition and stand out easily.
Think about it, when I started blogging, I went into the tech space and I failed. Why?
How many giant tech blogs do we have?
How many giant tech influencers do we have?
Have many tech bloggers do we have?
Take a look…
I failed to check the competitive status in the tech-blogging industry and in this guide, we’ll also show you how to check if there’s so much competition in your blog niche.
How to Brainstorm Niche Ideas for Your New Blog
To be able to come up with a good blog niche, you must begin by brainstorming random ideas first.
The process will help you juggle ideas for your blog even as a beginner.
Selecting the best niche for your new blog is one of the hardest aspects when starting a blog today.
There are a lot of things you must research and pay attention to.
In the past, one could start a blog and publish topics in various niches but today, the most successful bloggers tend to pick a niche to focus on.
Now how do you begin brainstorming ideas?
The purpose of this step is to help you juggle a list of things you can blog about.
What are things you love doing?
For me, I started out by writing out a long list of everything I was good at.
I also included things I noticed I tend to love spending my time on. I had ideas like;
Table tennis - I was really good with this and I enjoyed teaching people.
Soccer - I always had a deep love for this.
Technology - I naturally developed a love for the internet.
Making money - I learned some money-making skills I believe people need to learn.
Spirituality - I love talking to people about living a good and fulfilled life.
Music - I love good music.
Vlogging - I love the idea of documenting your life on video. I love to keep memories.
What are the things you do during your spare time?
Think about your accomplishments, past positions, or experiences.
I was able to come up with about 15 niche ideas for my new blog.
You can also use social media networks to check what’s trending and see what you can possibly blog about.
People tend to drop really helpful comments on community networks like Quora and Facebook & LinkedIn Groups.
So let’s say you’re in the email marketing space, you’d go to platforms like Quora and find questions about email marketing.
If you devote a good time to researching your niche ideas, it will be easier for you to navigate through the next steps of building a successful blog.
A simple hack I tell people is to refer back to their educational institutions.
What courses to you naturally perform best in?
If you think about it, it’s easier to brainstorm blog niche ideas this way because most times we tend to do better in some courses/subjects compared to others.
I was great with Technical Drawing and as a result, developed an interest in Architecture as a discipline.
Thus, I could consider starting a blog in the Architecture blog or a real estate blog.
At this step, try not to think about how profitable the niche ideas are; in the next steps, I’ll show you exactly how.
Just put down ideas you feel could be great into great blogs and at this stage, you should have a list of 10-20 niche ideas for your blog.
Next, let’s filter this list down to 3-5.
Which Ideas Could Actually Develop into Great Blogs?
Pick a topic (or topics) you enjoy talking about.
You see, starting a blog is more than just your passion.
You could create a wonderful blog around a topic you’re so passionate about and it still won’t cut through.
This is because a niche can feel so great but will not be a good selling point.
Think about it; I came up with blog niche ideas like technology, music, and football.
Do you think it will be easy to monetize a football blog? (Asides ads?)
This will limit the level of growth your blog can attain.
When I got into the digital marketing space, I had a good idea of what products and services to sell.
For example, I had experience with Wordpress blogs so I could sell Wordpress services and also sell Wordpress e-books and courses for beginners.
Get the idea?
I also had experience with Mailchimp thus I offered Mailchimp set-up services and email and funnel marketing services.
This allowed me a better approach to growing my blog’s traffic and revenue.
Also, if I had gone into the football niche, what blog posts would I publish?
There are quite a few ideas but I didn’t feel I was knowledgeable enough to create consistent content in the football space.
I would even be confused as to who to target.
What you must do is filter your blog niche list and take out ideas you might not be too comfortable with creating good content consistently.
Ask yourself;
Can you consistently create blog posts weekly for a year?
If it’s something you feel you might get tired of, then stay away from that niche.
Naturally, you should be able to come up with random content topics for each blog niche you have.
As a blogger, one of the most frustrating parts of running a blog is coming up with quality content ideas to blog about.
If you’re able to generate profitable content ideas for your blog consistently then you’re on the track to a successful blog.
Validating your blog niche idea will help ensure you’re going into a market with sufficient content ideas to write or blog about.
There are certain tools that can help you validate your blog niche idea and here are the top 3 I suggest:
1) Check Google Keyword Planner (GKP) for Keyword Volumes for Each Blog Niche.
To do this, head over to Google Keyword Planner (click here) and log into your Gmail account.
Put in your niche keywords and click on Get results.
A strategy I use to get keyword ideas is I run a general keyword search on Google and check for related keywords.
Let’s use email marketing for instance.
2) Use Quora to source out questions your target audience is asking online.
Quora is a powerful tool and we can get useful comments that can help you build a better blog.
It is the one platform I always use when finding lucrative content ideas to blog about.
And this platform works in any niche. On Quora, you can get questions on topics ranging from Programming, Cooking, Poems, Business, Investing, NFTs, and more!
Check other related blogs and competition
The next thing you should do when finding the right niche for your blog is to check similar websites or blogs and see what they’re doing.
In every blog niche, there’s competition; this could be high or low.
And the sweet spot is finding the right spot between these.
There are several influential blogs in my niche when I started. Blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, and Wired were already crushing it in the delivery service days.
I had little to no chance of thriving in the tech industry.
There were a lot of tech experts, influencers, brands, and SEO tools that were already trending at the time.
What I did was I got a lot of competitors in the market and I paid close attention to what they did.
To begin with, I simply set up email alerts for some influential blogs just so I know what strategy they’re using.
Find one or two of your competitors and you can use Google or AlexaRank to find more related or similar websites to the ones on your list.
With Google, when you run a few search strings for keywords or brand names in your industry, you can get a few ideas to juggle around.
Now that you have a long list of competitors.
There are a few things to pay close attention to. Here;
What type of blog post do they publish?
What products or services do they pay more attention to?
Do they post more videos or written content?
Do people engage with them?
These will help you better understand your blog niche and how to craft a more effective approach to your marketing and branding.
Validate Your List & Find the Perfect Spot
Validating your idea is a key step in finding the right blogging market for your new blog.
You can have the best idea possible but if you don’t validate, check and confirm that there’s a paying or listening audience for your blog, then you’d still struggle as a blogger.
There are certain steps to take to ensure your blog niche doesn’t fail months into starting your blog.
Can I write about this for 2 years?
If you aren’t willing to bend and put in consistent work, then you should go into that blog niche.
How many people search for these?
As we’ve shown, you must look at the search volumes on search engines like Google.
You can use tools like the Google Keyword Planner for this.
What's the competition in this niche like? And how easy or difficult will it be to break through the competition?
Is this market or niche even profitable? Is there a paying audience?
People could seem so interested in a particular question but the real question is will they be willing to pay for your knowledge?
Will this blog niche still be profitable in the next 5 years?
Blogging is a long-term online business that allows bloggers to share their ideas and generate income while doing so.
I used to check Google trends and provide them to us.
Next, Draft 10 Blog Post Ideas for Your Niche (and guest blog if you can!)
A very powerful blogging strategy that I think you should know is the ability to use certain digital tools (like community forums) to source content ideas to write about.
You see, this is also a unique strategy to find out if people will want to pay attention to your new blog or not.
Once you’ve come up with a blog niche for yourself, the next step I advise is to come up with a list of blog post ideas to write about.
And when I started, I came up with 20 lucrative content ideas.
Now to find blog post ideas that will help grow your blog business, each content idea must focus on achieving 3 things;
Excite your target audience to read.
Educate your readers and help them solve a specific problem or challenge.
Entice your t readers to join your email list or buy your products or services.
The first step in coming up with great blog post ideas for your niche blog is to look for questions your target audience is asking on the internet.
Think about it…
If you want to serve your audience best, why not look for and answer the problems they’re facing?
I go on platforms like Facebook, Quora, and X to find out what my target customers are searching for on the internet.
Let’s use Quora as an example;
Let’s say you’re in the finance niche or finance market, here’s how to come up with lucrative content ideas using Quora.
Head over to Quora.com and create an account.
Use the search bar and run searches relating to the finance space (use your niche).
Some keywords we could try out are;
How to save money
Tools to save money
Budgeting
Invest money
Investment tools
Investment platforms
Student loans
Home buying and more.
So if we try some of these, we’ll come up with these;
All of these are lucrative blog post ideas to write on.
And because they’re real live questions your specific target audience is asking on the internet, it’ll most likely attract traffic (traffic worthy).
You can also use platforms like X to pull out lucrative topics to blog about. Here’s how;
To do this, go to X Advanced Search and log into your X account. On this dashboard (below), key in your search as follows;
[please use your personal niche keywords for this]
You should get real questions asked by real users on Twitter.
And one thing I love about Twitter is that no matter how old a tweet is, you can still locate it as long as you can remember certain words in the tweet.
Now, these ideas should allow you to get guest post opportunities to start testing your blog niche.
Guest blogging is a really powerful blogging strategy that will help you see if people are willing to listen to what you have to say.
But why’s this strategy so powerful?
Because you simply get a blog that has already built an audience and has established its brand.
This way, your message is getting read by a lot of people (unlike starting and posting on your new blog no one knows about).
You should be able to get influential blogs that have built a solid fan base and accept guest bloggers as well.
Your guest blog posts should focus on
WHAT ARE THE MOST PROFITABLE BLOG NICHES TODAY?
Now that you’ve learned how to brainstorm niche ideas for your blog and confirmed the lucrativeness, you might be wondering what the most profitable blog niches are, especially today.
Certain blog niches have been known to do well compared to others.
And for this guide, I’ve decided to do my research and pull off this long list of the top 20 most profitable blog niches on the internet.
NOW HERE ARE 20 BLOG NICHE IDEAS THAT ARE STILL PROFITABLE TODAY:
Digital marketing
Cryptocurrency
Email marketing
Blog marketing
Funnel marketing
Blogging and making money online
Personal finance
Budgeting
Copywriting
Saving for retirement
Building a startup
Entrepreneurship
Freelancing
Investing
Financial independence
Food and recipes
Real estate and property listing
Personal development
B2B and B2C
Web design
Are they certain niche blogs or bloggers we should learn from?
I think yes and we decided to check and add them to this blog guide to make it complete for you.
You can check and follow these blogs to learn a thing or two from them.
All of these blogs have email lists you can join and see how they’re able to run successful blogs and you can pick a thing or two from that.
When I started, I looked at and followed certain experts I called mentors at the time.
I signed up for their mailing lists, followed them on social platforms, and read their blogs.
I even had a unique strategy to drop thoughtful comments whenever they post.
This allowed me to see what my competitors were doing and how I could do better.
By looking and carefully analyzing their works, I could find loopholes to fill up.
I went through the comments and wrote down the ones I needed to put attention to.
Some ask questions, leave reviews, or even product ideas in blog comments and I think they’re powerful.
Are You Thinking Of Running Your Own Blog?
Let me know in the comments section below.
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I'm Simon Zaku
Founder, IbiFoundry.com.ng
Mail: simonzakucom@gmail.com
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