4 Steps To Finding Your Dream Niche For Your Blog + Biz
What’s your dream niche?
Finding a niche can be difficult. You have to love it, AND it has to be profitable.
Today, I’ll be going through a formula that every online entrepreneur should use to figure out exactly what niche they should be in.
But first… why do you even need a focus?
First off, if you’re just running a hobby blog and don’t intend to run it as a business, then you don’t need to read this article. Just write about anything you wish.
But if you want to start an online business, that’s a different ball game.
Can you start a lifestyle blog and blog about everything under the sun? Heck yeah. Look at Huffpost or Buzzfeed. Is it going to be easy? NO.
Not unless you have a huge advertising budget to reach millions, or rely on clickbaity headlines to get tons of shares on social media.
What are you even going to sell if you’ve no blog focus?
When you’ve specific content targeted at a specific segment of people, they are more likely to come back and become a loyal reader.
You start establishing yourself as an expert on a certain topic.
Then you sell them good stuff like ebooks, courses, services, products, recommend products as an affiliate, and more.
I will talk more about why having a focus is so important in another post.
Here’s the reality: Not all niches are born equal.
Some will bring you profits faster, others will never.
So what makes a good niche?
I always joke around… being in a niche like blogging/ online entrepreneurship is great, except for the fact that all my competitors are smartass marketers. 😛
The best niches do NOT revolve solely around blogging & biz, trust me. Health, personal development, and finance are some niches that are very lucrative.
Jokes aside, a good niche will fulfill these criteria:
- Passion
- Profitability
- Business Model
- Scalability
- Market size
I’m going to give you the formula to find your niche. If you follow as I say you will end up with a niche that’s both awesome and profitable.
1. Create a list of potential niches
What are you good at?
What are you passionate about?
What do people say you’re good at?
What have you helped others with?
What is your academic and corporate experience in?
Jot down all your ideas. You can look at this list of ideas on what to blog about if you need inspiration.
2. Come up with the general category, and possible sub-topics
For each shortlisted idea, come up with both the broader category and possible sub-topics you can write about.
This ensures that you start a blog with some idea of what you’re going to write about.
It is alright not to know the exact blog post ideas you’ll be writing, but you want to have enough room and plenty of topics to blog about in the future.
For instance, you can start a fashion website, and topics you can cover are: hair, makeup, etc.
But if you launch a new website about grasshoppers, chances are you are going to have to expand one day.
3. Check for profitability
If you’re in this for the biz, your niche needs to be profitable and bring you moolah in the long-run.
The best way to do a profitability check for your niche is to ensure that there is another successful blog out there.
Niche selection isn’t the time for you to be “unique.” You can have a unique positioning for your brand to stand out, but not a unique niche.
If you can’t find a single popular blog out there in your chosen niche even after weeks of researching… it probably is awful news for you (of course, make sure you do a thorough search).
The internet was not created yesterday. You can find information on just about anything online.
Between the creation of blogging and now… it is likely that any ideas YOU have would have been thought of by someone else.
If you can’t find a single successful blog in your niche, you probably should not start a blog in that niche.
Chances are, it’s not profitable, and anyone who’ve tried has failed.
[Tweet “The best way to do a profitability check for your niche is in this article!”]
4. Business Model
Start with the end in mind.
What do you intend to sell?
Having an online business model for your business is important.
Do you want to sell ebooks? Banner ads? Sponsored posts? Be an affiliate? Courses? 1:1 services?
Some niches from the get go do not allow you to monetize in certain ways.
For instance, if you start a politics blog, it is likely that you can only rely on CPM ads like Google Adsense to monetize.
If you start a fitness and wellness website, you can monetize with courses, 1:1 services, etc…
Keep this is mind.
A Note On Scalability
It is okay to start with a narrow(er) niche, but don’t confine yourself in that unnecessarily.
Don’t pick a blog name that confines you to a very narrow topic. I have an article on how you can pick a good blog name.
Don’t pick a niche that’s so narrow that it becomes very difficult for people to stick around and come back.
Scalability is important. Give yourself room to grow and branch out.
[Tweet “Finding your niche? 4 Steps To Finding Your Dream Niche here -“]
In summary
A good niche will be:
- A good fit with your experience and passion
- Broad enough for you to cover multiple topics
- Profitable and proven to work
- Aligns with the business model you have in mind
- Scalable
Now that you’ve learned how to find your niche, here’s your challenge.
Come up with 3-5 niche ideas by today.
Here are some other relevant posts about branding and niching:
- Boring Brand? Here’s How to Make Your Brand Stand Out From the Noisy Crowd
- 4 Steps To Finding Your Dream Niche For Your Blog + Biz
- How to Define The Right Target Audience For Your Blog (And Be Able to Sell Them Stuff)
- Why I Closed My Facebook Group of 580 Entrepreneurs and Started a New Facebook Community From Scratch
P.S. If you’re just starting out (like, you’re a REALLY new blogger and have not started your blog yet), check out this 4-part blogging for beginners guide where you will learn how to start a blog in 20 minutes. It’s been shared over 50,000 times and has helped thousands of new bloggers like you start successful blogs. It’s not that hard. You can do it!
There’s never a perfect time! So feel the fear and do it anyway.
A tiny request: If you liked this post, please share this?
I know most people don’t share because they feel that us bloggers don’t need their “tiny” social share. But here’s the truth…
I built this blog piece by piece, one small share at a time, and will continue to do so. So thank you so much for your support, my reader.
A share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this blog.
Some great suggestions:
– Pin it! (I even made a pretty pin for ya!)
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Thank you so much!
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