It’s the first step of starting your profitable blog, and it’s the most crucial step of all.. find your niche.
A niche in blogging terms is a topic that you can excel in, due to a few factors..
It can be a field that you have expertise and can write better than most of the others.
It can be a topic or product that has more demand than supply.
It can be a really specific topic of interest that not many have started to work on.
Now before you even think of finding your niche, first write down a list of topics that you are interested with, or otherwise have the capability of writing about it.
My first advice for all newbies is to write something that they are really interested with, else they may find themselves short of writing ideas pretty soon.
From you list of interest, we will do some filtering based on the potential of that topic in terms for possible traffic and the monetization value, as well as the competitions it’s facing from other websites.
A few tools that you can use to make comparison are from Overture, with their keyword selection tool and view bids tool. Just type in some keywords and make some comparisons on what keywords will have more potential visitors, and which will have higher potential income value. [Learn a bit more on how Overture tools work]
Note that the Overture tools are suggested as reference, the results are base on Yahoo search engine and Overture advertising program, thus the numbers and figures are not 100% reliable or to be precise.. not reflecting the whole market.
Lots of the time logical sense and common sense are more applicable and workable.
There’s another factor that needs consideration as well, that’s the origin of potential traffic. Normally visitors from English speaking country (US in particular) will bring higher income potential. [Read more about geo-targeting]
It’s not easy to find a topic that are balance on both traffic and monetization value, and those keywords that shine on both occasions are very much exploited by established websites, and will be tough for newbies to compete with.
So I will suggest that you find a topic that have decent traffic and income potential, and with little competition.
I’ll give a simple on how to find a possible niche, base on the football topic..
Many people are interested with reports on English Premier League, and there is potential to write about the topic.
The keyword of “English Premier League” is however very much covered online, you need to be more specific to compete with the media and other websites.
You can think of writing about a football club instead, “Manchester United” seems good but still, many people are writing about the popular club.
Now how about Fulham? A smaller club but I bet that there are enough fans to generate some decent visits. Do a search on Google and you’ll probably find that not much websites are writing about “Fulham football.”
That makes “Fulham” a possible niche.
Finding your niche is very important, and sometimes it’s based on trial and error. I will suggest that you start 2-3 blogs instead of one, depends on your time allowance, so that you will have better chance to work on the right niche.
The success of your blog often depends on finding a good niche, so spend some good time on it, take another day if needed, but don’t take weeks to do this. In the end it’s action that matters, you need to start a blog anyhow if you want to have a successful blog.
I am starting 3 blogs in conjunction with this LEARN TO BLOG project, to show the comparisons on how niche matters. It’s going to be a long story, I’ll start a new post on these 3 blogs and the reasons I’m writing on the topics and niches.
