What Should I Blog About? A Primer in Choosing a Niche

Last Updated on 3 years by Christopher Jan Benitez

“What should I blog about?” This is a pretty common question among newbie bloggers. And to be honest, there’s no easy way around this.

Starting a blog may look easy. You think of random ideas that popped into your head and then write about it. Looks simple, yes?

Truth is, that’s not always going to be the case.

When you get into blogging, there are a lot of things you’ll have to consider.

How would you get traffic?

What website theme are you going to use?

Or which CMS is perfect for you?

First things first. Before you start brainstorming your domain name and looking for the most affordable hosting provider, decide first on what niche market you will dive into.

A niche market is a segment of the population where a certain product is focused on. In this case, your blog is going to be your product.

To put it simply, you shouldn’t cater to everyone. And you must not try to solve everyone’s problem.

Don’t get me wrong, though. You can definitely start a blog about whatever floats your boat. But if you are looking to build a following and gain income from it, a blog about anything won’t do you any favor.

Your priority is knowing which type of content your market would want to read and how you’ll be spreading information out using your blog.

How to find a blogging niche that’s right for you?

1. Know your passion

If all you want for your blog is just to make money, you’re going to have a hard time. Sure, that’s what your end goal is but to be truly successful, you need to love what you are doing.

Love may be a strong word but you can start with something that you at least have an interest at.

Here are some topics you could take on:

• Food and Cooking
• Pet Care
• Entertainment
• Fashion

You could also narrow down your niche idea. Instead of something broad like the ones above, you can turn them into:

• Paleo Diet for Women with Diabetes
• Labrador Dog Owner’s Guide
• Hipster Fashion Style for Men

Notice the difference?

Your niche doesn’t have to be broad. But, making it too narrow can be risky too. The truth is, some niches just have too small of an audience and growing it can be quite a challenge.

The reason why I emphasized that you need to love what you’re doing is that even though you are earning good money out of it if you don’t have even the slightest passion for what your blog is about, you’ll eventually lose interest and move on to something else.

If you don’t really care that much to what you’re blogging about, why would you expect your readers to care too? Makes sense, right?

2. Know if it’s profitable

If you consider your blog a business, then the efforts you are doing should also bring you money.

Coming up with the topics that you like can be a struggle, but knowing if it’s profitable is even more challenging.

Search if there’s enough audience

To know if there’s enough demand for your niche, run a quick search on Google Keyword Planner.

Plug in the keyword you want to talk about and you’ll see this result:

As you can see in the red box, there is no number of Average Monthly Search Volume (AMSV) column for the keywords we tested, however, there are huge searches (in the orange box) for other relevant keywords.

This means that people are looking for your chosen topic but there’s not enough data on the niche you are aiming for.

What you can do in this case is combine about five relevant keywords so you can optimize your blog posts to rank higher on Google.

Related: 8 Most Popular Blog Niches that Drive Traffic and Make Money

Find out what competition is like

Now, I want you to go to Google, type in your chosen keywords, and don’t forget to pause your ad blocker.

With the keywords used, there are almost 14 million competing pages. Lack of ads can be a sign that it’s tough to market, or there are just no ads at the moment. But it’s also highly likely that they use other platforms for their ads, particularly social media.

But going back to Keyword Planner, if you plan on doing Google Ads, you can also see here the suggested amount of bids you have to make to rank higher than your competitors.

If there’s too much competition to break into, perhaps you can reconsider your choices.

If there’s little to none at all, maybe it’s not worth it.

Using all these factors I’ve mentioned above, list down all your research and observations. Only push through an idea you are 100% confident with.

Editor’s note: As a free tool, Google Keyword Planner should provide you with sufficient information about a keyword’s search volume. However, if you want to determine a keyword’s exact monthly searches on Google, you should use a tool like Long Tail Pro (affiliate link – 30% off every month!). The tool also tells you how easy or difficult it is to rank for each keyword. Using the metrics provided by Long Tail Pro, you can choose a keyword for your niche that lots of people search and is easy to rank for!

For more information about this keyword tool, please read my honest review about it by clicking here. If you’re truly serious about making money with your blog, then I suggest you take this tool for a spin!

3. Look for enough things to write about

Create a list of topics you want to write about that’s related to your niche. Are they enough to get you through the coming months?

Stock up enough blog post ideas so you can publish content consistently.

If you need more ideas, you can use Buzzsumo and Ubersuggest. Or you could try to solve problems from Quora and make your own blog post about it.

Since it’s just the first stages of your big idea, make sure you have about six months worth of posts topics. Not once per month, but at the very least, you have one fresh content per week.

If you’re having too much headache thinking of topics to write about, maybe it’s not really the right niche for you. And if it comes to this extent, you can consider crossing this niche out of your list and think of something else.

Final words

Choosing the right niche is the foundation of your blog’s success. It’s important that you decide on this early on. However, do note that you’re not really limited to your blog ideas.

At the end of the day, it’s your blog. What happens to it depends entirely on the strategies you do with it.

I’d like to end it by saying that a good niche should always be profitable. That means that not only should you be adept in creating content but you also need to have good marketing skills.

Of course, building a successful blog is hard work and takes a lot of time. But if you’re willing to put a lot of effort into it, you’ll definitely find opportunities and get your blog on the right track.