How To Choose A Profitable Blog Niche

Niche is the backbone of a blog.

I just can’t say anything more than this to emphasize its importance.

And for most of us, it becomes the hardest part to find a profitable niche for our blog.

Sometimes you just can’t come up with a good niche or even if you find one, it’s either highly competitive or you just don’t find it interesting.

But don’t worry, I am here to help you with all of that.

By going through this article, you will not only be able to find a profitable niche for your blog, but it will also be of your interest.

Moreover, you will be able to scale your blog in that niche too, because I will be telling you the right ways to do market research.

So let’s begin!

What is a Blog Niche?

In simple words,

“A blog niche is a very specific topic that you will write articles about on your blog and those articles will focus on a very targeted set of audiences with specific needs.”

Before diving in detail, let me tell you why you need a niche for your blog so everything that I explain later will have more relevance for you.

Why is having a Blog Niche is a must?

Starting a blog without a specific niche is like shooting arrows with your eyes closed.

Yes, it is exactly like that.

This is a very common mistake that almost every new blogger makes.

You might be thinking why can’t you just write about everything that you find interesting. Right?

Well, let me tell you why having a focused niche is a great idea.

1) Easier and Better SEO:

There are a lot of ways you can get traffic to your blog but no one can deny that organic traffic is the best one.

So how can you get it?

By doing the SEO right.

Here is how it works.

If you have a niche blog it will be easier for you to optimize your blog for your target keywords.

Most of the backlinks that you get are going to link to your homepage and except for this, if someone is going through one of your articles and they really like it, then there are a good amount of chance that they will visit your homepage to know more about your blog.

So it is always a great idea to optimize your homepage correctly for target keywords.

You can put your main keywords as anchor texts linking to your articles.

Pro Tip: Try putting pillar pages or SILO pages here, because they link to many other articles.

This will help people see your content easily and they might end up reading other articles as well.

Plus it will also help understand Google your blog’s main topic. Which in turn will increase your blog’s relevance in the eyes of Google and it will consider your blog as an authoritative platform for your target keywords.

This way Google will push your articles up in SERP.

Let’s understand this by an example.

Suppose I have two blogs:

About Keto Diet
About Photography, Mobile Phones, Hair Care, and Keto Diet.

So if you land on the homepage of my first blog and you are just interested in Keto Diet, then it will be more relevant for you. You will go through many of my articles and you might even consider subscribing to my blog because that’s all you want to know about.

Now if you somehow land on my second blog’s homepage, it will not interest you much. You might also feel confused as to where you can find content that you are looking for. All my articles related to other topics will be just clutter for you. Right?

So having a specific niche is always going to benefit you.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is interlinking.

So if you have a niche based blog then it will be easier for you to interlink your content easily.

This will guide your readers from one article to another if you interlink them correctly. So if a reader comes to your blog just to read one article, they might end up reading many. This helps in your bounce rate which in turn improves your blog’s authority.

Moreover, it will also help Google Bots crawl through your blog easily.

This helps in indexing and improving SEO.

With the help of interlinking, you can also implement SEO techniques like SILO or create Pillar Pages.

Pro Tip: SILO, HARO, and creating Pillar Pages can help you outrank the competition that has much higher authority than you.

2) Helps build a loyal audience:

When you blog about a specific topic then you can cover every aspect related to it in detail.

Just make sure that your content is high quality, SEO optimized, and answer the query that your audience is making.

If you keep putting articles with these qualities for a prolonged period, you will start earning your reader’s trust.

They will start seeing you as an expert in your niche.

So they will directly come to your blog whenever they have some query, instead of searching it on Google. This is called recurring traffic.

This brings me to my next point, Monetization.

3) Better Monetization:

In 2020, blogging is just not a hobby, it is a full-fledged income source for millions of people like you and me.

The kind of effort and time we have to put in our blog to get it ranked is absolutely immense.

And all of it will go in vain if we don’t earn enough from our blog.

So monetization is absolutely a very vital part of the whole process.

As I mentioned in my last point, a niche blog with good content will earn you an expert image and you will create a loyal audience.

This way, they will trust you whenever you will recommend a product or service to them. So your conversions will increase.

Other than this, a niche blog garners targeted traffic.

So even if you get less traffic then some other high-authority blogs that write about everything, you will convert more audience into customers.

Pro Tips:

Always put your audience first. Money is just a by-product.
Never recommend a product that you personally don’t like.
Creating good sales funnels increases your conversion rate.

4. Better Content Planning:

If you have a definite niche, you already have a well-defined audience.

So you can go and research about their pains and problems.

You can do so by analyzing your competitor’s blogs, social media platforms, forums like Quora, or by asking them directly.

Then once you know about their problems and pains, you have to do market research to find the solutions for their problems and pains.

These solutions can be an informational blog post answering their questions, or it can be a blog post where you will recommend a product or service that will solve their problem.

5) Superior Marketing Strategy:

What is the use of having a great blog when people aren’t even aware of its existence?

You need to market it correctly.

Experts prefer the 80-20 rule.

That means you have to spend 20% of your time in writing your content and 80% of the time in marketing it.

Now let me come to the point.

I am sure that by now you are aware of the fact that a niche blog will give you a specified audience.

Right?

Now to show them your content, you have to know where your audience exists.

I mean on what platforms they spend their time.

90% of the time these are going to be the same places where you found their problems.

So basically you will market your content on the same platforms, plus some other places as well.

For example, if you have a blog about hair care and you know Pinterest is a great place where your potential audience spends their time. So you will focus on promoting your content there.

Niche Defined In Detail

By now you have a general idea about what niche is.

But you aren’t aware of technicalities related to it and how the market actually works.

Knowing these things will help you understand and choose your niche.

So let’s explore it in detail.

If you observe keenly, then you will notice that almost all the blogs belong to these following categories:

Dating
Health
Wealth
Lifestyle
Education
Spirituality

These categories might look like niches, but they are not.

They are too broad to acquire a like-minded audience.

This diagram will clear things up.

Under the health category, we can see sub-categories like mental health, fitness, nutrition, etc.

Even they are too broad to be niches.

For instance, if you choose fitness as your niche.

You might think that you will be able to target all the people that are interested in yoga, calisthenics, and bodybuilding.

Well, you are wrong.

As I explained earlier, you won’t be able to optimize your blog for any keywords, because they will be highly different for yoga, calisthenics, and bodybuilding.

And also, the people that will come to your blog won’t find all of your content relevant.

Most of them will be interested in just one topic.

But if you take Yoga as your niche, it would be perfect.

What is Micro Niche?

A micro-niche focuses on an even smaller audience than a niche.

There will be several micro-niches under a niche.

Basically, with micro-niche, you target an audience that has just one specific problem.

Let’s continue with our example of Yoga as a niche.

Under Yoga, there can be several sub-topics, such as yoga for anxiety, yoga for kids, yoga for weight loss, or yoga mats.

These are micro-niches.

A micro-niche website will have 5-10 pages and mostly will offer one or two products to solve it’s audience’s problems.

If you take “yoga for anxiety” as your micro-niche.

You will create a blog where you will add necessary pages like Home page, Contact Us page, About Us page, and you will add a few informational articles.

All of this will be optimized for just one specific keyword, which is “yoga for anxiety”.

Also, you will create a course in which you will guide your audience to perform some yoga that will help them with their anxiety. And you will pitch that course to your audience with the help of your articles.

If you don’t want to expand your micro niche blog to an authority blog, then you can use a domain name that has your target keyword in it.

This will help in SEO.

But if you plan on expanding it into an authority blog in the future, then you should use a much more generic name.

This will save you from the hassle of rebranding.

Micro niche blogs are great for people who want to make a quick buck.

But they have a limited scope of expansion.

So you can start with a micro-niche and buy a generic domain name that will be related to your niche and not micro-niche. Then once you have covered your micro-niche properly, add another micro-niche from the same niche. And keep doing so.

But always cover and market your existing micro-niche properly before adding a new one and all the micro-niches should fall under the same niche.

You don’t want to have two completely adjoint micro-niches in the same blog.

Discovering The Perfect Blog Niche

Step 1) Finding your interests

Your interest is going to be a very important factor in your blogging journey.

If you really want to be a successful blogger and create a blog that will stay competitive, relevant, and profitable for years to come, then you will have to write several articles that too consistently.

Hence, picking something that you are passionate about will surely help.

It is not a sure shot to success, but it matters.

So in this step, we will try to find a topic that can be your passion or something you love.

But you shouldn’t worry if you don’t have any real interest.

I will help you with that as well.

Scenario I – If you already have an interest.

If you already have something that you are passionate about, then it’s fine.

But don’t think about making it your blog’s niche yet.

See, there are a lot of things that make a perfect niche, and your interest or passion is just one of them.

We will discuss all those things in the next steps.

For now, just hold on to it.

Scenario II – If you are unsure of your interests.

If you fall under this category, then don’t worry.

Many of us are like that.

And you know what, chances are that you already have something that you really like, but you aren’t just aware of it.

So here is an exercise that you can perform to find your hidden interest.

I am going to ask you to make a list of a few things.

Just make sure to write them on a piece of paper.

To make it more exciting, we are gonna do it together.

So let’s grab a pen and paper, and start writing.

Make a list of anything that you find interesting.

Make a list of your hobbies or something that you do more often than other things.

Write down the things that you can talk about for any amount of time.

On what topics your friends ask you for help or what are the things that you know/do better than others?

Scenario III – If you just want to start with a niche that is profitable and not your interest.

Well, I was a bit dicey on adding this point. Because I didn’t want to overwhelm you guys. But hiding it would not be fair. So I am adding it.

Just read through it carefully.

If you are someone who just doesn’t care about interest and wants to start a blog in a profitable niche, then let me tell you it’s possible.

But if you are new in this field, then it’s not a good choice.

Since you are a beginner, you won’t be able to keep putting new content ones or twice every week for a long period of time.

At the start, you will be all hyped up and motivated, but slowly you might feel burned.

And since this niche will be completely random, you will have to work around something that you don’t really like.

This will definitely affect the quality of your content, and that’s not something you should compromise with.

So my advice is that if you are just starting your career in blogging, start with something you like.

Once you succeed with it and gain some experience, then you can try setting your foot in some niche that’s just profitable and doesn’t interest you much.

Step 2) Different ways to approach your blog niche

1) Presenting your own unique angle

In today’s times, you can find hundreds if not thousands of blogs on any topic.

There is a good chance that in your selected niche there are other existing blogs that are already doing great.

And if you try to compete with them directly from the beginning, you won’t be able to succeed anytime soon.

It’s not like you won’t be able to succeed at all, but it will surely take a good amount of time.

Now if you are thinking about how much time it can take, then let me tell you that it depends on many factors.

Such as competition in your market, your keyword and SEO strategy, and a few other factors. But mainly it depends on the competition.

So instead of directly going face to face with them, try to present a unique angle that will complement them.

Here is a great example of it.

When I was in college, I started my fitness journey and I was kind of a nerd, to be frank.

And NERDFitness grabbed my attention because I could relate to the vocabulary that they were using.

They helped me a lot with their articles.

I literally read hundreds of them.

They kept me engaged because I could relate to them.

And that happened because of the unique angle that they presented.

Fitness for nerds.

Who could have thought it, right?

It’s fun and unique.

And that’s why they succeeded.

Obviously this unique angle is not the only factor behind their success.

They have amazing content on their platform and if they wanted, they could have presented it directly, like any other fitness-based blog.

But they decided to give a twist to their niche, and this is surely an attention grabber too.

No doubt, they could have targeted a bigger audience if they didn’t choose this unique angle, but then there would be nothing special about them and they would be competing with other well-established blogs in their niche.

So guys, try to find a unique angle for your niche, it surely helps.

2) Slide through the cracks

No matter how good or thorough a blog is, they will always miss something.

They will leave cracks and you can slide through them.

That’s how you do it.

You will search this query on Google with your niche replaced.

Then you will see many listicle articles.

You will then go and analyze the blogs mentioned in these articles and look for the missing content.

It is surely a time taking process, but it is going to be fruitful.

There is one more way to do it.

You can use tools like AnswerThePublic.

You just type in your keyword or niche in the search bar and hit enter.

And you will get blog post/niche ideas in the form of questions, prepositions, and comparisons.

They also provide ideas sorted by alphabets and related topics.

This tool used to be free for a very long time, but now they offer a pro version in which you can select a region and it has some other premium features as well.

But the free version itself is enough, though you get a limited number of searches.

Step 3) Can you really stick to your chosen blog niche?

Now you have found your interest and have given it your own unique angle to make it a good niche that you can work with.

But are you really capable of tackling this niche for years to come?

Can you really write 50-60 or even 100+ articles in your niche?

If the answer is yes, then it’s fine.

And if the answer is no, even then don’t panic.

Well, let me tell you one thing, this might look overwhelming right now.

But if you are really pursuing your interest or you are actually committed to becoming successful, then you will be able to do it.

You might lose the initial excitement after a year or two, but you can always hire someone else to write.

However, even then you will have to do some research to give good topics and outlines to your writer.

Fiverr and Upwork are great platforms to outsource your work.

So, I have a quick trick to help you in this situation.

Try writing just 5 blog posts of around 500-700 words in your niche over a period of 15 days.

If you feel comfortable and enjoy the process, then continue with this niche.

And if you feel otherwise, then try to find a new niche with the steps we performed earlier.

Step 4) Does your blog niche have a good number of audience?

Without a good readership, you won’t succeed with your blog.

So before committing yourself to a niche, you have to make sure that there are enough people who are interested in your niche as you are.

To do the research, we are going to use a tool called SEMRush.

It is a premium tool, but for our current task it’s free version will be enough.

Just type your niche in the Keyword Magic Panel’s search bar and it will show you all the related keywords and their volume.

It will also show you the number of related keywords.

The more volume you have, the better it is.

But make sure that you have at least a total of 200,000 – 300,000 search volume for all the related keywords every month.

Well, it actually depends on the niche too.

In some niches even if you get fewer visitors, you can earn more.

It all depends on the monetization capability of a niche, which will be discussed in a further step.

Step 5) Does your blog niche have a future?

The blog or the website that you are creating is going to be your business.

You are investing your time, money, and skills in it.

So you don’t want it to lose relevance in the near future.

Hence, choosing a niche that is going to exist and will make you money in the future is important.

For example, if you decide to make a blog about the iPhone 11, it will lose its initial hype within a few months.

All of your hard work and money will go in vain.

You will have to start again from scratch.

So make sure to choose a niche that is evergreen.

For that, we will use Google Trends.

You will put your niche, keywords, or some sub-topics related to your niche in the search bar.

It shows the data in the form of spikes.

This way you can analyze the volume of your searched keywords over a period of time.

If it is not going down, then you are good to go.

You can use filters like country, time span, categories, and platforms to get your desired data.

Generally, a time span of 5 years is ideal to analyze a trend.

Step 6) Checking the profitability of your blog niche

Helping someone without your blog should be your priority.

That’s what ethical blogging is.

But for your hard work, you should get rewarded.

Obviously, this is the main reason most of us start a blog.

And there is nothing wrong behind this mentality.

If you are earning money by helping someone with their problems, then nothing is better than that.

And if you see, that’s how every business works.

So, before committing to a blog niche you should check if you will be able to make money from it.

If your audience is ready to spend money or not?

To do that, we will again use SEMRush.

But this time we will focus on the CPC of all the keywords related to your niche.

The CPC stands for Cost Per Click.

Basically, this shows how much money an advertiser is willing to pay Google to get a single click from a user.

If your desired keywords have good CPC, say $3-$5 or more, then you are in the right niche.

So now you know that you can make money in your niche.

But knowing just that is not enough.

There are multiple ways to monetize your blog and you want to make sure that you can leverage most of them to maximize your profits.

Some of them are as follows:

Contextual Ads: Contextual ads are those ads that are displayed by an automated system on your blog. They are called contextual ads because the displayed ads are relevant to the content of the blog page.

Hence the CTR increases.

To run contextual ads on your blog, you sign in to Google Adsense, or you can use private ad networks like Mediavine or media.net.

I personally prefer to use private ad networks, because they pay better and their customer support is also better.

Affiliate Marketing: This is the best way to monetize your blog.

Most of the digital marketers and bloggers rely on affiliate marketing to earn the major chunk of their income.

It works in a very simple way.

You promote someone else’s product on your blog and when someone buys it by clicking on your link, you earn a commission.

This might look small, but it is not.

People earn thousands of dollars by affiliate marketing.

To check if your niche has affiliate products or not, you search “your niche + affiliate programs” on Google.

Then you join these affiliate programs and start promoting their products.

You can also join affiliate networks like Rakuten, ShareASale, JVZoo, CJ Affiliates, or Clickbank. They also have several affiliate products that you can promote.

Except for this, shopping websites like Amazon or etsy also offer affiliate programs.

Selling Your Own Products: This is a much more time taking process than affiliate marketing, but you get to keep all of the money to yourself.

You can sell your ebooks, courses, or physical products on your blog.

For this, you can use a great plugin called WooCommerce.

Paid Consultation or Training: This is another great way to monetize your blog.

If you are an expert in your blog niche then you can offer consultation or training to your audience, and you can charge them for the service.

Sponsored Posts: With time when your blog’s authority increases, different companies in your niche starts asking you to review their products on your blog.

So you can just write your honest review and get paid for it.

Yes, it’s that easy.

Well, these were some of the ways you can use to monetize your blog.

You should use multiple ways but make sure to do it with complete honesty.

After all, you are here to help others and create a business that people can trust.

Step 7) Analyzing competition in your blog niche

How soon you can rank for your targeted keywords depends on a lot of things, but what kind of competition you have in your niche is the main factor.

So before starting with your niche, it becomes important to check for it.

But before diving into the research part, let me tell you that have no competition or high competition are both equally bad.

If you have no competition, that means you don’t have a market for your niche.

And if you have high competition, then it will take you a lot of time to see any notable growth.

So a moderate competition is a perfect zone to target.

Now we will try to analyze the competition.

For that, we will be using a free tool called Ubersuggest by Neil Patel.

The parameter that we will be focusing on is SEO difficulty.

SEO Difficulty: It shows how hard it is going to be for you to rank for a keyword. It is measured on a scale of 1-100. 1 being the easiest and 100 being the hardest. SEO difficulty below 20 or below is considered to be easy.

We will start by searching for our niche or targeted keyword.

It will then display us a lot of data like search volume, SEO difficulty, CPC, and much more.

But we will mainly focus on SEO difficulty.

In this case, it is 78.

And this is very high.

But don’t lose hope, this is the difficulty for just the searched keyword.

Ubersuggest shows us related keywords (that are long-tail keywords) and we can choose a keyword with lower difficulty from them.

This will open up a new tab that will show all the related keywords on the left with their search volume, SEO difficulty, and Paid difficulty and on the right, it will show the SERP for the searched keyword.

We can then search through the related keywords to find a keyword that has a minimum 500 search volume and SEO difficulty of less than 20.

In our case, “teeth whitening home remedies” is a great keyword.

It has a search volume of 6,600 and an SEO difficulty of 17.

So when you are starting your blog, try to target long-tail keywords.

They have a lower search volume but they are easy to rank for.

Once you gain good authority, then you can focus on high difficulty keywords.

So, these were all the steps that you needed to find your perfect blog niche.

And if you have been this far with me, then I am sure that you will be able to answer this question.

What is a Perfect Blog Niche?

A perfect blog niche will have these following qualities:

It will be of interest
You will be good at it
It will have a good number of audience
It will be relevant in the future
It will be profitable
It will have moderate competition

So if you are lucky enough, then you should have a great niche in your hand.

If not, then don’t worry.

Go through this process a few more times and I assure you that you will find something worth going on with.

However, if you can’t find any interest within yourself then I suggest you go through the list of “100 best blog niche ideas” below, and I hope you will find something that you like.

Final Words

You should not complicate the process of finding your blog niche, but rushing it is not good too.

If you have an idea or interest, try to validate it by using the steps I shared and if it fits in all of them, then and only then go on with it.

If it doesn’t fit, find a new niche and try validating it again.

And I promise you will find a great niche.

So, that’s all from my side.

I hope you have found this article helpful.

For any questions regarding this topic or any other topic, leave a comment below.

I will be more than happy to help you with it.

Thanks and Regards!!