Defining your niche is important if you want to build a successful blog, but how do you choose one? Following is a series of questions that you ask yourself as you make this important decision
Do You Have Experience or Expertise in the Topic?
List the topics that you know something about. What have you had training in? What have you had experience in? What topics do people always come to you to find information on? What are you currently learning about or wanting to learn more about? Once you have a list, give each topic a rating in terms of your level of “expertise.”
Are You Interested in the Topic?
List the topics that you know something about. What have you had training in? What have you had experience in? What topics do people always come to you to find information on? What are you currently learning about or wanting to learn more about? Once you have a list, give each topic a rating in terms of your level of expertise. Go to Google Trends , and type in some of the keywords from niches that you are considering blogging about. Google Trends charts search volume for different search terms. It tracks only some words (generally popular ones), but it gives a great trend analysis of whether a niche might be growing or shrinking. Compare two or more niches by separating terms with a comma. When selecting a niche, you want to determine the audience size, the level of competitiveness, whether there is any money to be made, and how well you can populate your blog with content over the long term. Though many bloggers say there is no such thing as competition in blogging and that we are all friends, it could be too much of an uphill struggle to try to break into an over-crowded niche when other just-aseffective niches are available. How much competition is too much? You might be surprised to learn that in some cases you actually want competition. There are two reasons why you cannot find many competitors for a particular niche:
1. You are a genius and nobody else has thought of writing about your topic.
2. There just isn’t enough interest to sustain a blog long-term.
In most cases it will be the second option, but you can test a niche by creating a new category on your personal blog and seeing what kind of reaction you get.
Do You Have Experience in the Topic?
List the topics that you know something about. What have you had training in? What have you had experience in? What topics do people always come to you to find information on? What are you currently learning about or wanting to learn more about? Once you have a list, give each topic a rating in terms of your level of “expertise.”
How popular is the your Topic?
Go onto the internet and take a few minutes to do a little analysis of the array of online magazines that you see on display there. What are people into at the moment? Which topics are most prolific when it comes
to what people are reading about?
Competition Neglecting
This question attempts to find “gaps” that are not yet filled in the marketplace.
Though your competition might have the advantage of an established audience, you have the advantage of flexibility and can position your blog very quickly to fill a gap in the niche that you might observe. In doing so you create a sub-niche within the larger topic.
When analyzing your potential competitors you might like to ask some of
the following questions:
• What do they do well?
• What are the boundaries of the topics that they focus upon?
• What don’t they write about?
• How often do they post?
• How long are their posts?
• At what level are they pitching their blog (beginners, intermediate,
advanced)?
• What questions are their readers asking in comments?
• What style or voice do they write in?
• How do they monetize themselves?
• What types of posts seem to get the most attention (comments,
Trackbacks, incoming links)?
• What is their design like? What do they do well and what do they do
poorly?
• What are other blogs writing about them?
• If they have an open or unlocked stats package what can you learn
from their stats? What pages are popular? Where does their incoming
traffic come from?
Doing this type of analysis of your competitors will not only help you
to work out if there are any gaps that you might fill with your blog, but
how you might do it.
The key objective in thinking this way is to develop a blog that is unique and differentiates itself from other blogs.
Is the Niche Able to Be Monetized?
If you are interested in earning an income from blogging you will need to factor in some investigation of whether the topic you’ve chosen has any obvious potential income streams.
• Look at your competition — Check out how other blogs and websites in the niche are monetizing their sites. What ad networks are they using? Are they promoting affiliate programs? If the competition has
advertiser pages, how much are they charging for them?
• Search for affiliate programs — Head to your favorite search engine and type in your potential topic and “affiliate programs.” You’ll be surprised what will come up when you do this—quite often this will reveal some potential products that you could make some commission on. Try it with a variety of keywords in your search.
• Search Google —Do a simple search on Google for the main keywords of your potential niche and see how many ads come up above and down the right-hand side of the search results page. This is an indicator
that advertisers are using Google’s AdWords advertising program for these keywords. This indicates likelihood that there will be advertisers if you use the Google AdSense program to monetize your blog.
• Check out Amazon—Search on Amazon to see if there are related products there that you might be able to link to and make a commission on via their affiliate program.
Tools for Helping You to Choose a Niche for Your Blog.
Many tools have been developed that are helpful for bloggers in the process of selecting a niche topic for their blog. The following tools are ones that we use in this research phase:
- AdWords Keyword Tool—Sign up as an advertiser with Google AdWords and you get access to a number of useful tools that you can use without actually needing to use AdWords to advertise. One particularly useful tool is the “Keyword Tool” , which you need to be logged in to use. This allows you to type in a keyword (or phrase) and will give you an indication of how many people searched for that word in the past month as well as tell you how many advertisers are competing for that word in AdWords. This gives you an indication both of the popularity of the niche as well as whether there is potential income in it. This tool will also give you other keywords that relate to the ones you enter, which is also useful to know.
- Google Trends—Google has a Trends tool that is useful for looking at search volume on Google for different search terms. Though it won’t give you specific search numbers and doesn’t produce results for every term (it tracks just the most popular ones), it is useful for working out whether a niche is growing or shrinking and it allows you to compare two different terms to show you how big one is in comparison to another.
- Technorati —A blog search engine that gives you the ability to see what others are writing about on your chosen niche topic . It also has “popular” tools that show what’s hot around the blogosphere at any given point of time.
- Google Blog Search—Google’s Blog Search will help you to get a picture of who else is blogging on a given topic.
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- Wordtracker —Wordtracker is a popular keywordresearch tool with a free trial that helps you to ascertain how many people are searching for different words and how many other sites are competing in those niches. Yahoo! Buzz—Yahoo! Buzz (http://buzz.yahoo.com/) is a summary of information on what people are searching for at the Yahoo! search engine.
- Yahoo! Buzz—Yahoo! Buzz is a summary of information on what people are searching for at the Yahoo! search engine.
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