In this post, I discuss how to find your blogging niche, and why focusing all your blogging efforts on one topic is important. I will also show you how to decide on a niche that is perfect for you. This is the first article in my blogging series, so if you have any feedback or requests, leave a comment. I would love to hear from you!
Welcome, blogger!
Hello there. I am so glad you have taken the leap and decided to dip your toes into the wonderful world of blogging. Before we get started, I just wanted to say a little something about starting your very own blog.
Look through Pinterest and a thousand and one pins will come up along the lines of ‘how to make $3000 a month blogging’ or ‘how to build a six-figure blog’. The internet is full of articles and posts on how you can quit your job and make a full-time income blogging about what you love. Ideal, right?
And while this might be the reality for a very lucky bunch of people, it isn’t always the case. And sure, if you hustle and work hard, it will pay off, but I don’t advise you to quit your job just yet. If you are starting a blog with the sole purpose of earning a lot of money, let me tell you now that you may not enjoy it very much. The only reason I have stuck with blogging for so long is because I get to write about something I genuinely enjoy and that brings me so much happiness. I would be doing it whether or not I earned money from it. In fact, I didn’t really make any money from it in the beginning.
So before we get started, I just want you to be sure that you are doing this as a way to talk about what you love, and not as a way to earn some quick cash. Because I do want you to enjoy blogging as much as I do, and the only way to be sure of that is to make sure that you would be doing it, even if it paid nothing!
Niche, dude
So now that I know that you want to write a blog about something you are passionate about, you need to figure out exactly what that is. This will become your blog niche. What is a niche? It is, simply put, a topic that all your blog posts will revolve around.
Why should I only focus on one topic?
I know, I know. I have told you to blog about what you love. But what happens if that is more than one thing? What happens if you love both cooking and gardening?
I can’t stop you from blogging about everything you enjoy doing. Hey, some successful blogs do it. But if you want to build an audience, and build a community with which you can chat to and share your experiences with, a niche can help you do that.
Why? Because if you build your blog around one topic, your audience will know what to expect from you, and they will keep coming back to read your posts. Someone who finds your post about, say, vegan chocolate chip cookies, will come back looking for another good vegan recipe, or a good cookie recipe. Readers expect consistent and relatable content and having a niche will help you to build your own tribe of loyal readers!
Having a niche will also help you think of what to write next. If your blog was a general one and you blogged about everything under the sun, it can be very easy to get a little overwhelmed when thinking about what to write next. If you had a very clearly defined niche, such as ‘cheap student recipes’, or ‘knitting for beginners’, it helps you narrow down exactly what you could talk about next!
Won’t my readers get bored? Will I get bored?
Simply put, no. And no. I have been blogging about food for 7 years (and vegan food for 4 of those 7 years) and I could easily do it for 50 more. When you are writing about something you love very much, it’s difficult to stop talking about it.
In fact, the more you write about something, the better you become at talking about it. Trust me. 4 years ago I struggled to describe a dish as anything other than ‘really, really delicious’. As I kept doing it, I figured out how to talk about food in a way that let my readers really imagine what it really was like to taste.
In short, you become an expert in your niche! And we all know experts LOVE to talk about whatever they specialise in (I have sat through many a lecture where the lecturer has gone off on a tangent about their area of research). And if you have built an audience blogging about one topic, they will really appreciate all the content you create about it.
Monetising is easier
So while making money off your blog shouldn’t be your sole objective, at some point, all bloggers consider it. If you have carved out a clearly defined niche, this makes monetisation a little easier for you.
While all blogs, whether they have a niche or not, can own an Adsense account and make a small sum from that, a majority of a blogger’s income comes from sources outside of ad revenue. I have written an entire post (OUT SOON) about how to make money blogging, but in short, sponsored posts and product revenue are the two biggest earners for bloggers.
Companies are more likely to want to collaborate on a sponsored post if you have a niche and an audience who follows you because of this niche. They will be more confident that their product will be something your audience will be interested in, and will be willing to pay more for you to talk about it in a post. **Side note -In my monetisation article, I also talk about how to chose which brands to work with, as doing a sponsored post with a company whose product doesn’t quite fit with your niche can actually make your audience lose trust in you!
If you have created your own product (e.g. you have a recipe ebook and you run a cooking blog, or you have created a set of Lightroom presets and you run a photography blog), it is much easier to market it to a group of people expecting that kind of content from you. It’s easier to sell Lightroom presets to an audience with a keen interest in photography, and they are also much more likely to own Adobe Lightroom than your average joe.
How to chose your niche
Sometimes it’s easy to figure out exactly what it is you enjoy doing and writing about. For me, choosing my niche was easy. I have always loved cooking and when I turned vegan, I found that there was very little information out there on how to cook vegan food, interesting+creative vegan food, on a student’s budget.
However, I get that for some, your niche is less clear-cut. So here is a little activity for you to do narrow it down
1. List EVERYTHING
Get out a piece of paper and a pen. I want you to list everything you love to talk about, or what you like to do. Or anything you think you are good at doing. It’s okay if you don’t think it will make a good blogging topic. Just list it out. Do you enjoy watching movies? Do you like bullet journaling? Are you really, really good at tidying up? Hey, Marie Kondo has built an empire on her ability to keep things neat. Nothing is too silly. List them all.
2. Ask some questions
Okay, you have a list. It may be big or small but hey, everyone’s is going to be a little different so don’t worry too much about it. Now I want you to go down the list, and ask yourself these questions about each topic.
Can you write an entire article on this topic? For example, you like watching movies. But could you write an entire blog post about, say, the latest film you watched? If the answer is a resounding no, cross it out. Draw a big, fat line through it. If you cannot imagine writing a single post about it, how can you blog about it for (hopefully) years and years?
Does it fill you with joy? I am borrowing a leaf out of Marie Kondo’s spark joy here, but hear me out. When you read the topic out aloud in your head, do you get a fluttery feeling in your heart, and is your brain already whirling thinking of all the things you want to discuss regarding the topic? If the answer is YES, super duper. If it is no, cross it out.
Ask your fam & friends. Without showing them your list, ask your friends and family about three or four things THEY think you love to do, talk about, or are good at doing. Look through your list and if they have mentioned something already on your list, highlight it. If you have asked several people and they have all mentioned the same thing, write a little number beside the topic representing the number of people who listed it.
3. Pick your niche!
Look through the list and pick out the ones that have not been crossed out, and have been highlighted. If you have more than one, chose those with the highest number beside it. Some of you will have one topic by the end of this activity, and this will be your niche! Yay!
If you have more than one, I want you to imagine writing several posts about each one of them. Which one feels most natural to talk about? Which one fills your head with ideas and gets you buzzing to get started? Choose that one.
If you have done this whole activity and do not have a single topic that isn’t crossed off and highlighted, that’s okay. Maybe your friends and family just don’t know what you really like doing, because you don’t talk about it a lot. Maybe you’re a more private person. If this is the case, just ask yourself the same question in the previous paragraph for all the topics you have not crossed off yet.
It’s okay if narrowing down your list at this stage is scary. Sleep on it, go for a walk… take a week or so to think about it. By the end, you should have one topic that you love just a little more than everything else. And this, my pal, is your niche.
4. Just do it already
Now, take the plunge. Write a post. It’s okay if you aren’t a good writer, or if you have not set up your blog yet. Write it on a word document, or in a notebook. You can always write it up once your blog is set up. Don’t dwell on all the other topics on the list you did not choose. Confidence, pals, is key.
If it feels a bit unnatural, or if you are struggling a little with writing the post. Stick with it. It takes a while for your creative juices to get going. As someone who didn’t write a lot before I started a blog, writing a post, my FIRST post, took me a while. It wasn’t because my niche wasn’t right for me, I just needed to build up my confidence. And the only way to do that is to keep writing. You know, ‘practice makes perfect’ and all that jazz…
Make that Blog!
Now that you have your niche (hurrah!), it’s time to set up your blog (POST OUT SOON). You can do this after you have written your first post, or before. In my next post, I will discuss the different blogging platforms out there, the pros and cons of each, how to register a private domain name, and how to get your blog lookin’ pretty. Till then, just keep brainstorming on post ideas, practise writing, and keep doing what you’re doing!
xx Sasha
To hear more about blogging articles, and get access to some exclusive content and recipes, join The Sasha Diaries Resource Club! Just sign up in the form below. No spam, pinky promise.
Leave a Reply