Step 2: Choosing Your Blog’s Niche
Before you even think about registering a host for your blog, you have to decide its niche. A niche, (pronounced nee-sh, or ni-ch), is described as ‘a position particularly well suited to the person who occupies it‘.
A professional footballer’s niche would be the sport football. A well-known litigation lawyer’s niche would respectively be law. In other words, your niche would be the occupation in which you’re very good. It could be anything, from academics to law to even doing gross jobs(Eeow! 
).
In the same way, a niche for your blog could be an area of expertise. If you’re an expert on gardening, for example, your niche would be gardening, and you probably should make your blog about gardening, rather than cooking, something you know nothing about 
.
How DO You Choose a Niche?
Ah, the million dollar question. Arguably, one of the most difficult and critical decisions any blogger will make in their life. After all, a niche can make or break a blog, so it’s very important that you choose a niche carefully.
Maki had, more than a year back, written a fantastic article on choosing a niche for your blog. You might want to read it before going further with this article.
What You Have To Keep In Mind
While you’re deciding on a niche for your blog, you’ve got to keep several things in your mind. Here they are:
- Hobbies – Do you have any hobbies? Are there things you love doing? Sports, cooking?
- Areas of Expertise – Everyone’s a genius at something. What’s your specialty? Law? Nursing? Medicine? Think hard. You’re bound to find several.
How to Go About It
Here’s a good way to select the perfect niche for your blog:
First, write down all the things that you love to do or are are good at. Keep writing them down until you have run out of items. Now, cross out those items in which your experience or interest is relatively smaller than in the others. Now, when you finish, your list should be shortened to about 10 to 15 items or lesser.
Now it’s time to select the best among equals. Think even harder, and cross out items from the list. Typical parameters to accept/reject candidates could be your interest in them, your experience, and your expertise in that particular field. Now you should be left with no more than around 5 hopefuls, one of which will make it as your niche.
Now, put them to the test.
Let’s for an example, do a case study. Suppose I’m starting a new blog(medical related) and want to select my niche. I’ve done all of the above and I’m left with two keywords: ‘medical’ and ‘echocardiography’. I’ll put my two items to the test by considering four different parameters: traffic, competition, content potential, and monetization potential.
Traffic
Traffic potential is very important. There is no use of a blog if there is no one to visit it, right? One quick and easy way to check out traffic potential is to search Google for the keywords of the niche you’re planning to exploit. Let’s check out the traffic potential for our two keywords.
Now it doesn’t take rocket science to realize that of course the ‘medical’ keyword is going to have lots more traffic potential than ‘echocardiography’, because it is a whole, general field, where as ‘echocardiography’ is just a specific part of the medical field.
Let’s look what Google has to say about this. First, let’s take a look at the results for the term ‘medical’.
Over 630,000,000 results.
Let’s now look at the results for the term ‘echocardiography’:
Just about 2,940,000 results.
So, I know now that if I choose the ‘medical’ niche, I will get relatively more traffic than if I chose the ‘echocardiography’ niche for my blog.
The above was just a crude example, YOUR trials will probably contain many keywords, and different results.
Note: Use the free SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool to simultaneously get results from several search engines, Google Trends, and others. A great time saver.
To the top!
Competition
Ah… the sweet smell of competition. Just like in the real world, where companies compete with each other for customers, in the blogosphere too, bloggers compete with each other for readership.
It is important that you check the competition for your keywords. It’s technically in the same way as you checked for traffic. Suppose that I will be reporting news about the latest happenings in my niche. So, naturally I’ll want to target keywords like ‘medical news’.
Let’s use Google again. We’ll first search for ‘medical news’ and then for ‘echocardiography news’:
Over 58,000,000 results. Phew!
And now for the term ‘echocardiography news’:
Not too many.
This should be kept in mind that among these millions of results, many are completely unrelated to my keyword. So, if I happened to filter out the junk, I’ll still have a few million targeted, relevant results left. Now each and every of these results is a competitor to me, even if the blog or site belongs to a friend/relative of mine. They are competing with me for the same keywords. For medical news, it is perfectly reasonable that I may have millions of competitors, because the field is so general.
But, if you look at the results for the term ‘echocardiography news’(above screen shot), you’ll find that there are not too many of them. Which means that there are not that much competitors for the keyword than for the ‘medical news’ keyword.
Now, the more the competition, the trickier it is to get hold of a big slice of the traffic pie. So, I must acknowledge that it will be harder for me to get traffic to my blog if I were in the ‘medical’ niche, rather than in the ‘echocardiography’ niche. However, the greater the competition, the greater are the rewards. I’ll get more traffic in the ‘medical’ niche than in the ‘echocardiography’ one.
Content Potential
This is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing a niche. Will I have enough content to last me comfortably for years to come, and beyond?
Now, if I run a news blog, content might not be a problem, because there are bound to be developments in the field every day, especially in the medical field.
But what if I decided that I wanted to give some advice and tips in my chosen niche? Now, this depends on my expertise.
I know I’ve been working in the medical field for more than 40 years, as a professional cardiologist, (a doctor who performs echocardiography).
Now, all this experience and expertise (over 40 years!) is bound to provide me with content for a long time. I know that. But, the question is, would the ‘medical’ niche provide me with more content or the ‘echocardiography’ niche?
Again, it doesn’t take rocket science to guess, and guess correctly, that the ‘medical’ niche has a far greater content potential than does the ‘echocardiography’ niche.
Why? Simply because the medical field is very general and encompasses many fields and subjects under it, whereas the ‘echocardiography’ niche itself is contained within the medical field and very specific.
So we all unanimously agree that it would be wiser for me to go for ‘medical’ rather than the other confusingly long word.
BUT, here’s a problem. Suppose I’ve been working in the echocardiography field for more than 40 years: it has now become my specialty. I’ve become an expert in that. I know more about echocardiography than probably anyone. Moreover, since I’ve been an expert in echocardiography, I don’t know that much about the medical field in general, because all these years I’ve been focusing on echocardiography.
So, wouldn’t it be wiser for me to go for ‘echocardiography’, since that would provide me with ample content for years? After all I’ve been in the center for over 40 years, who knows it better than me? 
Remember that content potential shouldn’t be judged primarily by content availability in general. It should be subjective. The primary factor deciding content availability should be your (and yours alone) expertise on and experience in the subject. That’s a mistake many newbie bloggers make.
If I had decided to go with the medical field instead of the sensible choice (the other one), it would probably have been a very unpleasant and boring journey for me. Remember: the popular option is not always the best option.
Now, even if I did choose to go into the ‘medical’ niche, content would not be much of a problem, because I still have some relevant expertise. And I could research to find content, but then, that depends on personal interests. I’ll be happier doing what I like, not what’s popular.
To help you generate content regularly, try these tools.
Monetization Potential
Doesn’t the sound of the word ‘money’ make you itch?
Suppose I wanted some ROI(Return on Investment) on my blog, and to earn money from it. Now, before we move on, it is important to remember that each niche has a different monetization potential, meaning to say that you might earn much in one niche, but next to nothing in another.
So, I want to see which one of my two keywords ‘echocardiography’ or ‘medical’ would relatively earn me the most money off my blog. The tool I use is Google Adwords Traffic Estimator Note that this tool is limited to only Google Adwords and Google Adsense, but it still provides a good enough overview of the monetization potential of a niche, whichever ad programs you may use.
So, I used the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator to determine the approximate monetization value of each niche. Just fill in the dialog boxes with the relevant information. The results:
‘Medical’ turns out to be possibly more profitable than ‘echocardiography’
Note that you’ll also see other items (like Estimated Ad Positions) but they’re not really of use to us right now, except for Estimated Clicks/Day(I’ll get to it in a moment). The ones you have to look at for now are Search Volume and Estimated Avg. CPC.
So, I know that the term ‘medical’ (obviously) has more search volume than the other term, ‘echocardiography’. Let’s look at the other column now. The average CPC column shows you the approximate cost an advertiser will have to pay for each click on their ads in that particular niche. So, generally, the higher the number, the more you get paid.
Another column worth a look is the Estimated Clicks/Day. What this tells you is the approximate number of clicks by internet users on ads placed in that particular niche. If you repeat my particular search, you’ll see that the keyword ‘medical’ has far more estimated clicks per day than the the keyword ‘echocardiography’.
So, by using this little tool, I got a quick estimate of the profitability of the two niches. What’s left now is to choose which keyword I’m going to go for, which I explain in the next section.
To the top!
So, Which Keyword is My Niche?
So, after you’ve done all your research based upon the four parameters I highlighted above, the time has come to choose which one of your hopefuls is chosen.
This part is somewhat tricky, because you’ll be choosing the best among (almost) equals. The little case study I did above was based on only two keywords. Your list could be made up of 5 or even 9 or 10 of these keywords.
Now, one way to judge all your keywords,would be to give them marks, or points. We studied four different parameters or tests above. Give each keyword a mark out of ten in each test. Now how you give them marks could be very subjective, but that doesn’t really matter, as long as your marks are reasonable.
Now, out of a total of forty, the keyword with the greatest points wins. If there’s draw, put them all in a bag and randomly choose one, or choose the one which you like the most.
But, I think picking a niche is a fairly subjective job, and must involve the emotions and feelings of the blogger. So, if you feel giving each keyword marks isn’t the best way to go, go for where your heart tells you. Only then will you be able to enjoy your blogging.
More in this guide:
