If you’re reading this, then you might be struggling with the niche for your blog. You may not know what to write about and feel like a failure because of it. But let me tell you: I’ve been there before! And if I can do it, so can you!
Qualifying your blog niche is the best way to make sure that you’re writing about something that people want to read. If you don’t know what qualifies a blog niche, then this article will help!
I’m going to give you some tips on how to qualify your blog niche and get started writing posts that will attract an audience who is looking for what’s in your content. Let’s dive right in…
- Stay Away From Over-Saturated Topics
We all have interests that are just too specific to become their own blog niche. Although these can be great topics, they’re best left for smaller websites rather than large blogs. If you want to write about the best “dog water bowls” for example, then it might be best not to write about that because your content would be best filed under “dogs – best bowls for dogs”.
- Stay Away From Broad Topics
It might seem tempting to write about things that are related to one another, but do not represent a large portion of the market. If you have interests in travel, parenting, and interior design…then stick with travel. You can always branch out later when you gain more experience in your blogging niche .
- What’s Different About Your Opinion?
This is where the best blogs come into play; they’re all different in some way. It could be the opinion of the writer, his writing style, or how it relates to other things around him/her. Essentially…what qualifies your blog niche must be something different than what other blogs in the same category are doing.
- Make Sure Your Content Is Marketable
At best, you might have a killer post that has great content and will gain lots of views if published; but at worst, you’ll have another blog on the list with dull content that would best be left unpublished. When you qualify your blog niche , make sure to read through your content and give yourself a critical eye; ask yourself the questions, “would someone pay for this?” or “will this post gain lots of views if published?”.
Your blog will ultimately fail if it doesn’t have good content because everything else like traffic, design, and SEO can only go so far.
- Traffic is King!
Without traffic, your best blogging niche idea will struggle to get off the ground. It’s best to start with a blog that gets lots of traffic but doesn’t have much competition because you’ll face heavy competition when seeking to grow and develop it in the long-run.
Now you have an idea about what to consider while qualifying your blog niche.
Let’s move towards other factors that affect the validation of blog niche.
Besides general assumptions on what works and what not in the qualifying blog niche, here I want to specifically point out one single thing, “Money”.
That’s the end goal of many bloggers, so you need to think twice about the commercial intent of your blog.
So your ultimate goal is to select one blog niche where you can easily bring traffic and make money out of it.
That’s fine!, and ‘Deep Niche Research’ is the only way to chase blogging success.
Let’s look into,
The Deep Niche Research
This is going to be a very crucial step in qualifying your blog niche.
As it is a part of research you need to have a list of blogging niches that you are interested in. (Already shortlisted)
I personally recommend having a worksheet with a list of blog niche and associated micro-blog niche.
But remember, before actually start working on making content for your blog, niche qualification is a must.
This will give you an exact idea about your blog lifetime competitor along with useful starts.
That’s not all,
Blog niche qualifications worksheet helps you in planning activities for making and publishing content, blog promotions strategies.
Here are research areas on that you need to collect information in your worksheet,
1. Competition
It’s important to get the right level of competition. If it’s Too high and you won’t be able to compete. And if it’sToo low and it might indicate that your niche is not worth fighting for.
So here is a trick to figure out competition in your niche –
High Organic Traffic Sites
This is going to indicate the ceiling of your niche. Are you happy in a niche that potentially has a cap and can’t grow into a mega-site? Or perhaps there are plenty of opportunities to already grow in an ideal situation.
Low DR Sites Ranking
If there aren’t many low DR (Domain rating or Domain Authority ) sites ranking, that could indicate that getting your site off the ground could be tricky. While it’s not impossible to compete, bear in mind you could have your work cut out for you in the early days of your site.
So the final takeaway to qualify, blog niche competition for your upcoming blog is to find low DR or DA sites with decent organic traffic.
2. Monetization
This is a highly important factor in qualifying blog niche. You’ll need to make sure there are plenty of revenue sources available for your site.
Keep Ads revenue or any paid post / promotions revenue aside for now and think on product based blog revenue, be it your products or affiliate products.
Affiliate Program Quality [Critical!]
This one is critical. Your entire site will be built around affiliate commissions to start with, so if there aren’t any good programs offering good commissions, you could end up putting in a lot of work for very little money!
What’s more, you should pay close attention to the actual quality of these programs – remember, even though Amazon pays pretty badly these days, their storefront converts extremely well, so the alternatives need to have some serious clout behind them if you’re not keen on using Amazon.
Successful Info Products
Bloginsidr.com/course
Info products are huge but less critical and paints a long term picture for your site. Later down the line, you’ll want to make sure you can rely on more than just affiliate commissions to make money on your site, and creating info products is one way to do so.
If you can’t find many info products, you’ll need to think about how happy you are with the alternative monetization options that are at your disposal in the long term.
Minimum CPC
A high CPC is a great vote of confidence from Advertisers who really know what they’re doing when it comes to market research. While not all good niches have high CPCs, if you do come across a niche with a high CPC, you can rest assured that this is a lucrative niche where money is being spent.
3.SEO
This is BIG!, really really big. I must say, seriously think about Blog SEO before qualifying any blog niche. As all your SEO efforts will define your blog success.
From a technical perspective, you’ll need to ensure that the niche is solid. You can’t just throw any site at Google and hope that it’ll rank after all!
Low Competition Commercial Keywords [Critical!]
Another critical one. There needs to be a selection of easy to find commercial keywords. This is essential for early success. It’s incredibly hard to compete against bigger established sites that already dominate the obvious bigger keywords, so we need to hit those low competition ones first.
Here I’m considering Ahrefs as a Keyword Search tool.
A particularly deadly combo to look out for is a lack of low competition keywords and lack of good affiliate programs. You’ll end up doing double the work for half the profit!
Seasonality
Seasonality isn’t a bad thing in itself, but you’ll have to ask yourself if you’re happy to accept that some months may not be great while others pick up the slack.
This does put you at risk though. If you have a particularly bad peak period, that could leave you short during your low months so you’ll need to really nail the sustainability of your site.
Growth
Once you are in good niche, then you can plan blog activities (Content creation and promotion ) accordingly.
Getting into a growing niche is always going to be great. You may even become one of the early adopters if you’ve hit the perfect niche along the way.
Just be wary that growth doesn’t always last forever though and don’t forget about the long-term prospects of your niche.
Naturally, getting into a dying niche is probably not the best idea, but don’t forget that when one niche dies, another could be born!
Link Opportunities
Without Backlinks nbo one could even imagine SEO success for blog.
This is one of the least important sections to consider as there are a wealth of link building tactics you can implement.
Remember, you’re going to have a much easier time if link opportunities are plentiful.
Consider this a measure of how easy things will be later down the line for your blog.
When it comes to link building – overall though, where there’s a will, there’s a way when it comes to link building.
4.Community
How do the community aspects of this niche look and how involved do you plan on getting with it?
Social/Community
There are communities for almost every blog niche you think of. And believe me this is the only place where you can learn a lot about blog niche.
Social community is a place where people open up their mind, share real problems and genuine feedback, which is extremely important.
So joining a well-rounded community expands your options later down the line ensuring you won’t just be relying on Google but allows you to look at things like Facebook or YouTube to grow later on.
Credibility
Credible matters everywhere over the internet. How credible can you be in this niche? Could be a game changer for you. Some niche’s require qualifications, others are fine believing that of a hobbyist instead.
In some cases, you can easily outsource the work to an expert, but is that within your budget? Additionally, does your niche fringe on the YMYL (Your money or your life) restrictions set by Google?
Finally, Are You Still Interested? [Critical!]
Perhaps the most critical decision of all. Are you even still interested in this niche?
Bear in mind you’re about to enter the next few years living and breathing this website and if the niche you’ve chosen absolutely bores you, your chances of success will plummet significantly.
Now this is a time to make a decision and qualify a niche for your upcoming awesome blog.
Make Your Decision (Or Repeat This Process)
In an ideal world, you should be left with the perfect niche for yourself. Remember, you can bend the rules and go against certain things that you learned earlier.
if you’re happy with the consequences. There is no completion to follow the above process for qualifying a blog niche.
If, however, you ended up removing all your niches from the process by this stage, don’t worry. This is perfectly normal and happens to a lot of people. I strongly recommend that you don’t just jump into a dud niche because it’s all that’s left.
Take a break, pick yourself up, and repeat this niche research process. It may be frustrating now and it may take you a long time, but it’s absolutely worth it. Trust me, you don’t want to mess this decision up!
All the best!
