Wondering how to find your blogging niche? It’s easy enough to build a website and start a blog. But how to find your blogging niche is another story. What should you blog about in order to make your blog successful, and enjoy the blogging journey? What’s the best way to make money from your blog?
Getting your niche mixed up by ‘trying’ to make money, can cost you dearly. Unless you focus on your passion, being yourself and giving value, it’s easy to think you should blog in a certain way, just to make money. But that can alter your writing style and bring you away from a topic which is close to your heart.
How To Find Your Blogging Niche – Top Tips
What makes you itch? What makes you come alive when you talk or think about it? That’s your niche!
Think about these three questions:
- Who Am I?
- What Do I Want?
- What Can I Give?
Meditate on these three questions. When you find a way to be yourself and write about something you love and are passionate about, you’re half way there.
How To Find Your Blogging Niche – My Story
I started blogging about all kinds of topics which I had no interest in! I took a course which taught niche blogging for profit and I built a few niche topic websites. One of them was about harvesting mushrooms. This wasn’t because I was interested in mushrooms though! I knew nothing of harvesting mushrooms.
No, I picked this niche simply because the keywords “When To Harvest Mushrooms” fell into the remit of a niche website. There were a good amount of monthly searches for this keyword, and there was little competition. I ranked my website at the very top of Google for some time for my website, too.
The small amount of traffic got me a few clicks of my Adwords adverts and the occasional sale of a vegetable related affiliate program I had found. But it wasn’t a success! Soon, my rankings fell. I had kept up interest for around 6 months and blogged pretty consistently.
But blogging about something you’re uninterested in takes its toll! I couldn’t keep it up for long. Every article I write had to be researched! I wasn’t writing from the heart!
How To Find Your Blogging Niche – What You Love
Maybe you don’t know what lights you up yet. This can be tough – finding your niche when you’re unsure. I started with the intention of making money – it was all backwards! I blogged about things I thought would make me money. But it was like putting the cart before the horse!
Remember, think about these three questions:
- Who Am I?
- What Do I Want?
- What Can I Give?
When you figure out what you love writing about, you can write a blog every single day and it’s a joy not a chore! When you get here, you can write easily and effortlessly. This is what’s needed to pursue a blog for long enough to make it work for you.
Many bloggers start out as I did, with the intention of making money from their blog. Unless they enjoy writing and write about their passion or interest, it’s much harder to sustain the necessary motivation to keep going over the long term.
How To Find Your Blogging Niche – Don’t Sell ‘Everyone’
Here’s another important distinction to help you get it right. If you try and sell to everyone, you tone down your particular flavour and character. You leave out the truth in an attempt to please. This can come across as being ‘vanilla’ – boring and dull. Hence you don’t engage with the right audience for you!
Being yourself can be pretty tough though. Try and be yourself when someone is pointing a camera in your face and you’ll know how this feels. Writing a blog can feel much the same. If you tone down your particular characteristics and personality too much, you won’t attract ‘your’ audience.
Think about the ‘you’ at your best. Who are you when you’re with your closest friends or family? When you relax and enjoy writing a blog, the real you comes across.
Fitting Yourself Into A ‘Box’
Another mistake I’ve made is to contrive my content to ‘fit’ with what I ‘think’ people want, rather than just writing about what I want! Much of this depends on how honest you are with yourself, your friends and relatives etc. What’s your relationship with yourself? In what ways do you hold yourself back depending on who you are with?
Trying to make a blog ‘fit’ with a product or service you offer can be tough. It might mean you compromise your topic or your writing style. Do you really want to write about the latest product/s you’re promoting? Or is there something else you would love to write about? My first blogging success came from the sale of a product I sold from a product review. See my article “Get Paid For Advertising Online Without A Website“.
It was a short lived success though. With your blog, you want a long lived success! The best way to do this is to write what you want, be who you are and love what you do! This is much more sustainable than trying to ‘fit’ a round peg into a square hole, so to speak!
Relating Your Passion To Products
If people love you they will come! Finding a product which relates to your blog is important too. Without a good match between your product and your audience, your blog won’t make any money. But don’t put money first and your passion second. Your passion will be the driving force of a blog. Without passion, your blog will likely fall flat anyway, and your traffic (visitor volume) will suffer.
To find the right product for your passion, choose products which you would want yourself. Think about the kinds of people your blog will attract. They’ll be like you right?! So they will be attracted to the same products you want for yourself.
To make a blog work financially, you initially need traffic. Then you need the right products for your audience. Or, you can monetise with Google Adsense if you don’t want to use affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets you use many products which can be found on the internet. Your choice of product will effect how well your blog does – but not as much as your content!
Choosing Products
When I first started blogging and learning about affiliate marketing, I was in a massive hurry to make money! My desperation turned into many failures! Have a look at my article 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. I used products from Clickbank which I knew nothing about. I didn’t even buy them myself first to check them out! I was too broke! But I also didn’t know what I was doing, so I blundered and blundered!
When I later found a good education program to promote, it was because I had already found massive value from it for myself. So choosing products you yourself would personally buy has a two fold benefit:
- You learn about the product/s so you’re in a better position to talk about them on your blog
- If you write about your passions and interests on your blog, you’re going to attract people who are like you, and therefore they will often value the same kind of product/s.
Final Thoughts – How To Find Your Blogging Niche
So, remember, meditate on the three questions:
- Who Am I?
- What Do I Want?
- What Can I Give?
Focus on the things which make you come alive. What lights you up and makes you happy? What are your favourite conversation topics? These are clues to what your niche blog should be about. Writing about what you love is easy and fun. Writing about things for the outcome only, isn’t fun! Especially after several months and when things aren’t going so great!
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See also 6 reasons why bloggers fail.