How To Choose Your Blog Niche and Validate It For Optimal Success
BEFORE you start your website, there are two things to lock down – choosing your name and niche.
A niche is essentially the focus of your website and how you stand out from the crowd. You can have a general niche or one that is more focused. If you’re wondering whether having an online niche is important, I’ve covered some reasons for and against having a blog niche in this post.
Here, you’ll discover:
- How to choose your blog niche and validate it
- Extra questions to ask yourself when considering a blog niche for your website
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How To Choose Your Blog Niche: 5 Questions To Ask Yourself
Knowing how to choose a blog niche can be tricky, especially if you’re starting a website for the first time.
To narrow down your choices, ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you have skills and experience in?
- What are you passionate about?
- What hobbies do you have?
- What can you realistically teach someone, even if you’re only one step ahead?
- What do people say about you? Are you outgoing? fun? chilled?
Your ideal niche will likely fall somewhere between your passions and your experience.
It’s going to be really difficult to write about a topic that you find boring or have no experience in – unless you plan on hiring a team of writers.
You don’t need to be an expert on the topic.
Even if you’re only one or two steps ahead of someone else, that’s perfectly ok.
Once you’ve chosen a subject area, think about how you can niche down even further.
Generally, the more specific you are with your audience, the easier it is to create an audience of raving fans and monetize your skills.
How to make your niche more specific
There are various ways you can niche down:
- Your personality/unique angle – For example, if you have a fun, outgoing personality and plan on creating video content within your blog strategy, you can position your personality to stand out from the crowd. You could also do this if you plan on your blog as a personal brand.
- Audience segment – eg. Crochet for beginners, social media for dentists, cooking for busy mums
- A segment of your niche – This is essentially a small part of a wider niche. So, instead of homes and interiors, you could focus on tiny houses. Another example is to focus on weightlifting instead of general fitness.
- A specific problem – Your content is aimed at helping people with a certain pain point. For instance, nutrition for joint pain, stylish fashion for breastfeeding moms etc.
How to Validate Your Website Niche
Once you think you may have a niche in mind, it’s important to validate it.
Validating your niche ensures that you’re in the best position possible for success. After all, there’s no point in spending hours creating content if your niche is so small that there’s very little interest.
In a perfect world, your niche would have maximum profitability and little competition. That isn’t always possible. Thankfully, you can build a profitable website with a small audience so this shouldn’t deter you.
To validate your niche, follow these steps:
Search for related groups on Reddit
Reddit is a goldmine for researching your potential niche.
A quick search you can do is to see if there are forums associated with your niche, and how popular they are.
Example:
Let’s say I’m thinking about starting a website in the skydiving niche. A quick search of Reddit shows that there are over 35,000 subscribers within the Skydiving subreddit group, so this could be a good topic to write about. Doing further research would key here.
Search books on Amazon
Another great place to research your niche is on Amazon.
For this, I’m going to use Amazon.com as they tend to have more book titles. However, I suggest using the country you’re going to be targeting.
If you reside outside the US, make sure you change your delivery address to a US area code so that you see all available books – you can do this in the top left-hand corner of home page.
Once you’ve done this, simply head to the books department and search for your desired niche. For this example, I’m going to look for hand lettering.
A search in books for hand lettering shows over 30,000 results with bestsellers so this could be a great niche to explore further.
When I click on the first book, I can scroll down the product page to find out more details relating to its sales and popularity.
What does this information mean, I hear you ask? Well, having a rating of 2488 in books means its selling really well. For us, that shows that there is high interest in this topic and creating a blog around this niche could be profitable.
Look on Google Search to find other bloggers within your niche
Finding other bloggers within your niche means that there is interest in your topic.
The more bloggers there are, the more popular the niche is – although that does mean more competition for you.
A simple Google search is best for finding bloggers in a particular niche.
Try typing ‘koi fish blogs’ into your search bar.
Straight away, I see a post naming the 15 best koi fish blogs on the internet.
Even if you think your niche may be obscure, you’ll probably find at least a handful of other related websites online – a good indication that you can offer your perspective on this topic.
Search Facebook groups to determine how popular your topic is
Facebook is an awesome place to research any niche.
For this, I’m going to use a different example – hair extensions
Typing this term into the Facebook search bar for groups brings up several groups. I’m going to ignore the ones related to businesses and focus solely on general groups like those below:
These groups have thousands of members and are getting daily interaction which is a good sign of popularity. If I decided to explore this niche further, I would join these groups to see what content is being posted as this could provide potential blog post topics.
You can search groups for any type of niche. If you don’t find any groups related to your niche, then try some of the other methods within this article. It doesn’t mean that your niche isn’t popular as it could be that it hasn’t started to become popular yet.
Use Google Trends to see how popular your niche is
If you’ve stumbled across a niche that doesn’t seem to be popular or has a lot of competition, searching Google Trends can help you to validate it.
In Google Trends, you can see what topics have been popular in search recently and what niches are growing in popularity.
If you plan on launching an affiliate website, you can even see what shopping trends are popular within a particular country.
You can also search for a niche to determine how it’s trending. I’m using ‘keto recipes’ for the below search.
When you search for a topic, you can also see interest by region, and see which related topics and queries are growing in popularity.
Google Trends is free to use and is vastly underrated. Try typing your favorite niches in to see if they’re trending. If you find that a topic is declining in popularity, then you may want to search for related niches that are more favorable.
Declining trends can mean that public interest is fading away so I wouldn’t recommend starting a website in an area like this.
8 more questions to ask yourself when choosing and validating a blog niche
When you’re thinking about how to choose your blog niche, there are a few more questions you should ask yourself.
- Can you create at least 25 pieces of content for your niche? This can include written, audio, still imagery, and video.
- Is it affordable to get started in the niche you desire? If you need to buy expensive equipment, then it may be best to choose something where you already have access to the resources needed.
- Is there enough interest in your niche? If you can find at least 3 other bloggers within this niche, then there may be sufficient competition to be profitable.
- Who would be your online competitors?
- Are there people within your niche that you could potentially collaborate with?
- What problems do people within his niche have? How can you solve them?
- Can this niche be monetized with digital products, services, or physical products?
- Do you have all the experience you need in this niche, or do you need further education?
To conclude
I hope these steps and questions on how to choose your blog niche and validate it are helpful.
The next step in building your blog business is to purchase your domain name and hosting, as well as think about the name of your website. You can find out how to do those step-by-step in my How to Start A Blog guide.
