Finding the right niche for your blog can be challenging. I’m going to walk you through the entire process so you can choose a niche that you can stick to.
Today I’m going to help you to demystify the entire process, because when it comes to choosing your blog niche it should always be done with the intention of eventually growing it into an authority site, so it continues to grow over time.
And this is the first step on that journey.
Table of Contents:
How To Find Your Blog Niche
Finding your niche all starts with your existing knowledge; your passions, your interests, and your existing skills. Your niche should give you joy.
But what if you don’t have any skills? Don’t worry; we’ll get to that later on.
For example, let’s say you have your, your passion figured out – you know what your skills are and you clearly know what you’re interested in. We need to match those passions or skills with a market demand.
Your Market Is Not Your Niche
So we need to know which people are willing to buy information about your passion, interest or skill. And this overlapping section is where you find your market.
But your market is not your niche.
Let’s pretend that you’ve managed to get in shape, or you’ve figured out how to lose a few pounds. A skill, or interest of yours might be fitness or weight loss.
And if we know that there’s a demand, then your market could be weight loss. But we’re not done yet because we now need to move on to find your niche.
Finding Your Niche
A niche is a smaller area of a market.
I’ll show you what I mean in the diagram. Let’s say we’re going with weight loss for the moment. That’s the market.
We now need to half the market. When we cut a market in half we cut the amount of competition in half too.
And then it’s easier to position ourselves, find our tribe, and build a customer base.
So we think about who customer is, and an easy way to cut a market in half is to choose either men or women.
In the diagram above, the example niche is weight loss for men.
But again, we’re not done yet because to find your blog niche, we still need to drill down even further.
Drilling Down To Your Sub-Niche
A smart way we can drill down even further is by focusing on the customer’s specific circumstances.
In my example, we need to think about the specific situation that men who want to lose weight might find themselves in.
So for example, we could want to help men who are over 40. So we now have an overlapping portion of the market, we’ve cut it in half day by choosing to speak to men. And then we drill down even further by choosing men over 40.
That means your sub niche is now weight loss for men over 40.
If you want to take a deep dive into figuring out who your ideal customer is, read this blog post.
Your Homework
Because this stuff is hands-on, I’ve got some homework for you.
Remember; you do have to implement this stuff to get the results.
Make a list of:
- Non-fiction books you’ve read
- Books you’ve downloaded to Kindle
- The magazines your read
- The websites you visit
- The Youtube channels you subscribe to
Now make another list of:
- All the skills you’ve once learned
- Hobbies you’ve picked up over time
- The things you enjoy doing
- What you like doing in your spare time
- Your jobs and career
We’re going to use both of these lists later on to validate your niche.
A Word Of Caution
I need to give you a word of caution.
If you’re watching a lot of digital marketing and entrepreneurship related YouTube channels, but you don’t have any real skills or credibility in that niche, then maybe choose something that you do have some kind of tangible results with, that you can show other people.
Again, if you don’t have any results, don’t worry because I’m going to show you how to get around that later on.
And okay, making these lists will take some time.
So do give it the attention to detail that it deserves, and really spend the time because this is going to set you up right – hopefully for many years to come.
You’ll know you’ve found the right niche when it’s something you have a decent level of interest in.
You should also feel a degree of passion, and you should (ideally) have some kind of credibility; some results to show.
Do You Need To Be An Expert?
Speaking of results… does this mean you need to be an expert?
Absolutely not.
The results don’t have to be massive.
If we’re talking about weight loss, and if you’ve managed to lose just a few pound over the course of a couple of months, that’s good enough.
You don’t have to be world-class and you don’t have a wealth of knowledge. You just need to be a few steps ahead of your customers.
What If You Don’t Have Any Skills?
Now, what if you don’t have any skills?
Well, don’t let that stop you because the solution is very simple; all you have to do is find the people who do have the skills, or the knowledge that you need.
Here’s a big secret; you don’t even have to produce the content yourself.
There are hundreds of thousands of niche experts already out there, just waiting to share their knowledge.
All you have to do is provide the platform.
Deep Niche Research
Wikipedia is an absolute gold mine of niche ideas, if you use it in the right way.
So let’s think about a niche.
Let’s say, you know how to grow plants, you feel a degree of passion for that, and you want to help people learn how to do it.
If you search Wikipedia for horticulture, it will give you a dropdown list of potential niche ideas. Not only that, each page will show you a bunch of sub-niche ideas too.
Validating Your Niche
If we go back to your list of niche ideas it’s time to validate them.
Tto do this, we’re going to use a few websites.
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Amazon.com
First up is Google. I want you to check for AdWords relating to your niche.
Then I want you to check Facebook for sponsored posts relating to your niche.
And then finally, I want you to verify that books or magazines relating to your niche are being sold on Amazon.
When you have all three of these checked off and it’s looking good, you’ll now know it’s a profitable blog niche.