How to Choose a Blogging Niche

Are you unsure of blogging because you don’t know what blogging niche to choose from?

The internet is so competitive and huge. There are so many blogs about so many niches. It’s almost sickening to think about trying to compete with blogs of today, right? You almost just want to give up and look for something else to do.

Giving up may be your biggest mistake. You might miss the opportunity of a lifetime if you don’t start a blog. I’m here to tell you it isn’t as difficult as you might think it is. But it all starts with choosing the right blogging niche.

In the article, I’m going to show you everything you need to know and then more about choosing the best niche for your blog.

What is a Blogging Niche, and Why is it Important?

A blogging niche is a topic or subject that you write specifically about on your blog.

The niche defines the subject matter expertise of the blog. For example, if you blog about gardening, your niche is gardening.

A niche can be more specific than a broader or general subject. Back to the gardening niche, which is a broader or generic subject; instead, you might blog specifically about indoor gardening using hydroponic techniques. Then, your niche would be indoor hydroponic gardening instead of just gardening.

A niche is important for many reasons.

It allows you to target a specific audience rather than unquestioningly not understand your readership. If you don’t understand who reads your blog, you’ll never know what to write or how to promote your blog.

A niche blog will be easier to market. In particular, search engine optimization will be easier to succeed at with a blogging niche.

Monetization will be easier. Those who spend the most money on blogs are spending their money on blogs with specific niches. Then, you’re able to target specific customer bases that are interested in buying from a specific niche.

There are even many more benefits to choosing a niche for your blog. It’s safe to say that none of the benefits above will be possible for a blog without a niche.

How to Find Your Blogging Niche

Finding your blogging niche can be easy and hard all at the same time.

You need to choose a niche based on three factors.

(1) The niche should derive from a passion, interest, hobby, or expertise.

(2) The niche should have an existing audience on the internet.

(3) The niche should have some kind of opportunity present for monetization.

Even if you don’t plan to monetize right now, you should at least have the option available in the future. You might get into it enough to want to start making money. You might even want to make blogging a full-time gig at some point. Many people have successfully done it and still do it.

Let’s cover our three factors in more detail.

Your niche should be created from your passions and expertise. This means whatever you really love and know a lot about will be your potential niche. It’s good to choose a few passions because you’ll want a few to research for the next factors.

What are your passions in life? I love hiking, biking, camping, blogging, online communities, and emergency management. I’ve turned at least a few of these passions into blogs.

You want to choose a niche with an existing audience. It is hard to create a blog around a topic that lacks an audience on the internet. You might think you scored a non-competitive niche, but in the end, it isn’t being competed for because there is no one to serve the content to. It is more important than ever to create content for an existing audience. Their needs and wants will be how you know what to write about.

Look for your audience all over the internet. Look at every top social media outlet. Look on communities, forums, Reddit, and Quora. Look for other blogs about the niche, too, and determine how successful they are.

Ensure that you have something to sell. Every good blogging niche needs to have a good selling point. If you can define products and services to sell, then it’s a good niche to be in. If you can’t think of any way to make money, you might want to move on to a different niche. Eventually, your blog will cost a lot of money to keep online, so it’s important to have a goal of profiting at some point.

Think beyond the norm when it comes to figuring out what to sell. It can be a physical product or a service. It can be E-Books, membership, courses, apps, and even a paid newsletter or online community membership. The ideas are endless, but not every blogging niche will be profitable.

After you’ve determined what blogging niche to cover, you can begin to move forward. But it’s important to avoid some blogging mistakes and also ask yourself if your niche is too generic before you move on.

Biggest Blogging Niche Mistakes

There are many blogging niche mistakes you can make when trying to decide on which niche to go with. It’s important to avoid these mistakes so that you don’t have to spend your time fixing everything.

The worst mistake you can make is not choosing a blogging niche that you’re passionate about. Many new bloggers make the mistake of choosing niches that are trending or popular when, in reality, they don’t know anything about the niche. This is because your competition will likely know about the niche more than you, and it’ll always be a struggle to compete because you’ll have a lack of knowledge about the niche and remain a step behind it for the most part.

I’ll talk more about this subject later, but not niching down it is often a mistake. Niching down means getting more specific about your blogging niche. As an example, instead of blogging about gardening in general, you’d blog exclusively about tomato gardening. That would be an example of niching down.

Of course, there is such a thing as niching down too much. You always want to make sure an audience is present for the niche you want to go with. If you choose a niche that is so specific that there isn’t a huge audience for it, you’ll likely find it hard to remain active in that niche and even harder to monetize if you wish to do that.

A lack of confidence is a big mistake in choosing a blog niche. If you’re unsure of yourself or you don’t believe in yourself, you’re going to likely have issues with what you choose. Imposter syndrome and assuming you don’t have enough expertise are also mistakes worth avoiding. Believe in what you can do, and you’ll be able to do anything you want to do. And always be willing to keep learning to get better at your niche.

Putting everything before the niche is another big mistake that many bloggers make. Instead of putting products and profits first, you should put your niche first. You should be developing yourself as an expert in your niche. You want to learn as much as you can about your niche. You want to be present in your niche and be well-known. By putting your niche first, you do your part to strengthen your niche, which will keep it strong for maintaining an outlet for profit. If you put your niche first, you’ll be able to continue profiting.

And lastly, if you don’t research your niche and audience before you start, you might fail at it very quickly. Your blogging niche needs to have a presence online before you start blogging within it. It’ll be impossible to grow without an audience presence. If you have no community of niche followers, it won’t be worth trying to blog within it. You want to choose a niche that has a present audience.

Avoid these mistakes to avoid the most significant blogging failures. But if you do find yourself making these mistakes, correcting them as soon as possible is your best move. The further you continue to make the mistake, the harder it will be to overcome it.

Broad Niche versus Niching Down

I mentioned niching down in the mistakes section previously. Niching down is important in blogging. It’s important to understand what it means to niche down versus choosing a broader or generic blogging niche.

A broad niche is a generic niche. These niches are usually the top-level categories of the niche. For example, a blog about cars in general is a broad or generic niche. It’s broad and generic because of how significant the competition is. It will be extremely hard to almost impossible to compete in such a niche unless you’re famous for that niche. Imagine trying to make a blog about all games and all gaming systems. It would be the hardest thing you ever tried to grow because of how oversaturated and competitive the broad and generic niche is.

Niching down means choosing a more specific topic within the broader niche. My hiking blog is a good example of niching down. It doesn’t specifically focus on general hiking topics. Instead, I focus on publishing content about hiking in a specific National Forest and state park system within the region I live in. Instead of it being broad and generic, I focus on my local area, where I can better target my audience.

There are good ways to niche down and bad ways to niche down. It was a good idea for me to target my local hiking communities for my blog. I create the most content for it and typically dominate my competition’s efforts. But had I niched down to only cover a specific state park and no other area within the region, my audience would have been so small that I’d never really grow any larger than I would have been starting out. While it’s important to niche down, you don’t want to niche down too much and never be able to grow.

If you want a better blogging niche, choose a niche that is specific but has an audience present. Broader niches with a lot of competition will be hard to grow in. It won’t be impossible, but it will be one of the largest challenges you’ll ever commit to.

Research and Solve Problems

Another tool to help you determine your best blogging niche is the problems that are often being faced by the audience with the niche.

You want to choose a niche that you’re not only passionate about but something you can develop yourself as an expert within. It’s fine if you’re not an expert right now. You just need to have passion and interest in the niche. But your goal should be to become an expert around the niche and at any topics within it.

Before you start blogging in your assumed niche, try to conduct some basic research that will help you determine if the niche is right for you or not.

You need to research the audience. You want to find where they are on the internet. Most of the time, your audience will be on social media networks. But they could be at other sources, too. They could be on discussion forums and other blogs (especially in the comments section). They could be on Reddit or even Quora. Find out where your audience is and start devoting time and research to their needs.

Your goal as a niche blogger is to focus on making the niche easier for people to love and enjoy.

So, once you find your audience, ask yourself what their needs are. What are the most important questions they are asking about the niche? What ones go unanswered or result in a challenging answer? What are the biggest problems around topics based on the niche? These are what you want to know about.

Then, you want to devote research into solving these significant needs, questions, and challenges. After you solve it, you want to create an easy solution. And that will be the topics of your blog posts.

If your blog posts can provide information and a closer to the most significant challenges and needs in your blogging niche, you’ll rise to the top so quickly that you’ll be shocked at how easy it was to get there.

Analyze Competition and Target an Audience

Upon deciding on what niche to start a blog in, you need to research your audience and your competition.

Your competition is important to note. Find other blogs that concentrate in your specific niche. If there are no other blogs out there, you may be niching down too much and tapping into a lower audience industry. This isn’t always a good idea to create a niche blog with. It won’t be easy to start and grow an unestablished blogging niche. But if you have found that you have competition, then it’s a great start for you.

You’ll want to spend some time learning everything you can about your competition. Understand their writing styles and types of posts. If you see a pattern in the type of post they use (How To, Listicle, etc.), you should make a note of it because that generally means the audience goes for that specific format, and it might be something for you to adopt.

You should also look for gaps and information not provided by your competition but is a challenge and important subject within the niche. Your goal will be to fill these gaps to make you different and better than those you’re competing with.

You should subscribe to the blogs, newsletters, and online communities of your niche. Learn as much about them and collect as much intelligence as you can. The more you know, the easier it will be to start a new blog within your niche.

The same principles can be applied to your audience. Find your audience and research them. Find out why they are loyal to your competitors. Find out what makes your audience tick. How are they engaged? What questions do they have about the most challenging problems with the niche? Find these things out so that you can start creating a strategy on how you will cater your blogging information to their needs and challenges.

Once you understand your audience and your competition and how they integrate together, mastering your blogging niche will become so much easier.

Blogging Niche Monetization

Whether or not you plan to make money blogging, you need to determine if your niche has a monetization factor.

If your niche doesn’t appear to be a good niche to make money, you might reconsider it and choose a different topic that you’re passionate about.

Why?

Because blogging will eventually cost money, if you grow your blog significantly, it will cost so much money that it might become a debt for you. So, in reality, if you’re starting a niche blog, you should at least have a goal of earning enough money for the blog to pay for itself.

But maybe you want to earn money for other reasons. Maybe you want to earn for a secondary or supplemental income. Maybe you want to earn full-time and blog for a living. Both of these scenarios are good goals, and both happen all the time.

It does take work to earn for profit, though.

So, before you start blogging in any particular niche, you should see if there are opportunities present to monetize your blog.

It could be as simple as ads from Google or affiliate links from Amazon. Maybe you want to personalize your profit makers with your own products, services, or digital items. You might want to start a paid newsletter or online community.

Just make sure monetizing your blogging niche is possible. Of course, it will take work on your part, but if it’s possible, then it’s a good thing.

Top Blogging Niches

There are top blogging niches that give you a great audience and monetization outlet if you desire to start a blog within them.

These niches might be niches you’re passionate about. If they’re not, you should really focus on the ones you’re passionate about for the best results. But if any of these top 10 niches are something you have great interest in, it might be helpful to know about how great they are for blogging.

These niches were determined through my own research. I researched thirty different sources discussing what blog niches are the top niches based on monetization methods, popularity, and competition. These 10 niches are the result of my research (from top to bottom):

1. Health and Fitness – The scored the highest
2. Personal Finance and Investing
3. Food and Drink
4. Travel
5. Science and Technology
6. Fashion and Beauty
7. Education
8. Blogging Tips and Making Money Online
9. Video Games
10. Lifestyle

Most of the time, you’ll likely be passionate about one of these topics. But because they’re so broad, they have a significant amount of competition. That makes them a very generic blogging niche. You’ll really want to niche down if you choose one of the 10 topics above.

Niche down after you find an audience present and then start creating content with that.

And that concludes today’s lesson on how you can choose your blogging niche based on the most important factors listed above in the article. Don’t make the mistake of choosing the wrong niche. Use the advice above, and you’ll be on the right track to success and monetization if you so choose. If you’ve enjoyed this article, please share it with others to help support my efforts in creating it. Consider joining my online community dedicated to blogging resources, The Blogging Collective, which is 100% free. Follow me on X for more blogging tips and resources.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing. Learn more about Shawn Gossman by clicking here.