Niche Selection 101: How to Choose a Profitable Blog Topic

Starting a blog is a journey.

One of the first steps you’ll take at the beginning of this journey is learning how to choose a blog niche.

Your blog niche will:

• Set the tone for your entire blogging experience.
• Determine whether your blog gets lots of traffic or virtually none.
• Pin down whether or not you earn money blogging.
• Influence whether you love blogging or hate it.

Don’t stress about it, though! Although choosing your blog niche requires some work, your time and effort will be worth it.

This post will help you choose a perfect blog niche that makes money and make you proud, setting you on the path to fully enjoying all the benefits of blogging.

What Is a Blog Niche, Anyway?

A niche is your blog’s subject matter. It’s your blog’s area of expertise. Your blog niche is what your blog is all about.

Your niche determines what you’ll be thinking about, writing about, talking about, and researching for hours every day. It is the topic on which you will be creating all of your content.

Do You Absolutely Need To Have a Blog Niche?

Is a blog niche really necessary? Well, that depends.

If you’re blogging just for fun, then no. A niche is not necessary. There’s no reason why you can’t blog about whatever you want to blog about, just for fun.

When you blog just for fun, be prepared for very little traffic. Unless you’re a celebrity or you know a whole lot of people who are very interested in everything you have to say, you won’t get much interest in your niche-less blog.

If you want to…

• establish yourself as an expert on a certain topic
• raise your brand’s awareness
• build a portfolio of your work
• make money blogging

…then, yes, you do need a blog niche.

The Benefits of a Blog Niche

Having a blogging niche is not only necessary; it is beneficial. It benefits you, your audience and search engines.

A blog niche benefits you by defining your focus. It helps you home in on what type of content to create.

A blog niche benefits your audience by bringing the right audience to your blog. It instantly lets people know your blog’s focus and purpose. Upon landing on your blog, people interested in learning about your niche will see that your blog is a place they can find.

A blog niche also benefits search engines. Without a niche, search engines will struggle to determine your blog’s purpose. If you don’t clarify your purpose, search engines will not rank your blog highly. If they don’t place you on the first page of search engine results, then very few people are ever going to find your blog.

After you choose a niche and launch your blog, you’ll become one of the go-to people on the internet for information about your niche. So choose your niche wisely.

How To Choose a Blog Niche in 3 Steps

How to choose a blog niche is a very important decision and this doesn’t have to be a difficult. It doesn’t need to take a long time, either. These 3 steps will help you easily choose your niche and be happy with your decision.

Step 1 – Decide What Niche Makes Sense for You

Your first step is to define what niche makes sense for you personally. In order to define this, you need to do some thinking.

Ask yourself these questions about yourself:

• What am I knowledgeable about?
• What can I write lots of blog posts about?
• What do I know that other people don’t know?

Write down your answers to the above questions. Now ask yourself a couple more questions.

• What are other people interested in?
• What information do I see too little of on the internet?

Now, look at what you’ve written down. Think about your answers to these questions. Within your answers, you should be able to see a niche idea or two or even more.

Now you need to discover how interested people are in these niche ideas. It’s time to do some keyword research.

Step 2 – Do Keyword Research

Keyword research will help you see precisely what people search for on the internet. Knowing what people are looking for then will help you become more clear on choosing your blog niche.

To do this keyword research, you’ll be using one or more keyword research tools.

For this research, you need to know that all keyword tools are not alike. Some are completely free. Others let you do just a limited number of searches for free. All keyword tools have benefits and limitations.

While doing your keyword research, it is also important to realize that different keyword tools tend to turn up slightly different search results. For this reason, it may be best to utilize more than one keyword tool. Afterward, you can average out the results.

Try these free keyword tools:

• Google’s Keyword Planner
• SearchVolume.io

In addition, try these limited free search keyword research tools:

• KWFinder
• Ubersuggest
• WordStream
• SEMrush

To do keyword research, input each of your niche ideas into the search bar of each tool. A list will pop up of common search terms related to your ideas. These search terms are called keywords.

Next to each of these keywords, you’ll see approximately how many monthly searches people do for that keyword. This number of monthly searches shows you whether or not your niche ideas have the potential to get blog traffic.

When you see a very high number of monthly searches for a keyword – several thousand or more – it may seem that you could get a lot of traffic with that niche idea. However, It’s more complicated than that.

A very high number of searches means that that niche idea is very popular. Because it is so popular, many blogs in that niche probably already exist. Your blog would have a lot of competition. So it could take quite a bit of time before search engines rank your blog highly enough to compete with more established blogs. Because of this, your blog would struggle to get traffic, at least at first.

Conversely, a very low number of monthly searches – 100 or fewer – means that the niche idea is unpopular. There is not much interest in that niche. Because there is not much interest, there probably wouldn’t be a lot of competition for a blog in that niche. But there wouldn’t be much traffic either.

Now you understand that you don’t want to use keywords with a very high search volume, but you don’t want to use keywords with a very low search volume either. So what kind of search volume should you look for?

I recommend starting small. Target keywords that have an average of 100 to 500 searches per month. This will make it easy for your new blog to get search engine traffic, even with a domain authority of zero. That is because these low-volume keywords are not very competitive. 

Your blog will then begin ranking for those low-volume keywords. It also will gain some domain authority. Then you’ll be able to target more competitive keywords with higher search volume and, thus, broaden your niche

Your keyword research will not only show you how many searches each of your niche ideas receive, it will help you see many variations of those keywords. These variations will give you more niche ideas. One of those new niche ideas may end up becoming your blog niche.

Step 3 – Discover the Most Profitable Blog Niches

If you’re like most people, you’d like to make money blogging.

In order to make money blogging, you first need to know what blog niches can help you do that. So you need to discover what blog niches are profitable.

Some of the most profitable blog niches out there are:

• Recipes & food
• Personal finance & investment
• Career advice
• Technology & Gadgets
• Blogging & making money online
• Online side hustles
• Lifestyle
• Health & Fitness
• Gaming
• Review & comparison
• Fashion & beauty
• Travel
• Business & Marketing
• Parenting
• Do-it-yourself projects

Now that you know some of the most profitable blog niches, choose one or more on which to focus. Next, see if any of the niche ideas you landed on by doing steps 1 and 2 fits into these profitable niches you’ve now chosen.

What if making money blogging is not just one of your goals but your primary goal? In that case, go about choosing your blog niche in reverse.

Begin with step 3, choosing one or more profitable blog niches. Then, narrow your search using steps 1 and 2.

When choosing your blog niche, be aware that your niche does not have to be completely unique. In fact, your niche almost definitely will not be completely unique.

Approximately 600 million blogs exist throughout the world. Because there are so many blogs, the chances of you inventing a unique blog niche are very small.

So don’t worry about the uniqueness of your niche at all. First, focus on choosing a niche that works for you. Later you will make your blog completely unique through the content you create and your writing style.

Conclusion to How to Choose a Blog Niche

Your blog is where you’re going to be spending a lot of your time. You want to enjoy that time. After all, your blog is not your boss. You don’t want to work for your blog. You want your blog to work for you.

In order for your blog to work for you, you need to choose a niche that you can turn into a very successful blog using your own unique knowledge and style.

So take your time and choose wisely, using what you’ve learned here about how to choose a blog niche.