Choosing The Best Blog Niche: Strategies and Tips

By Josh Koop •  Updated: 02/03/22 •  19 min read

Are you a blogger looking for blog niche ideas? This article will provide some pointers about the best blog niches to choose from. Whether you are new to blogging or have been blogging for years, there is always something new and interesting to discover. In this post, we will discuss how choosing the right blog niche can make all of the difference in your success rate as a blogger!

The best blogging niche will be the one you can continually work on for at least 24-36 months creating content consistently for. On average to be successful you will need somewhere between 100-200 posts which would work out to 2 per week for 24 months.

So let’s dig into making that decision so that you can start on the right foot and see this project through to the end. The whole process starts with the niche and why you must choose a focus to be more successful.

what-blog-niche-to-choose

Want to Start Your Blog (the Right Way)?

There are some keys to choosing and starting your blog in the right way to give you results. This is the key to your entire site and will be where your content will need to be focused, if you need support the course from Income School can get you access to a community and has shown amazing results.

While there is a lot of “mommy” blogs or “lifestyle” blogs out there they can take years and years to establish if you don’t already have a social media or similar following to start off with.

This is why the first rule of building a really successful blog is to find a specific niche or topic, that your entire blog will circle around on this for a target audience.

Do you really need to choose one niche?

While some may say a generic or wide blog where you can talk about anything can be done, the truth is that having a specific niche will be the best way to get found online.

You need to focus on your content and topics, as this will help you to establish your overall expertise and trust with the reading audience.

Building trust then helps you to grow your readership at a faster rate as you know what your audience is looking for and will be more willing to return.

By targeting a specific niche and topic you establish authority and topical relevance with Google and other search engines helping your search engine optimization and getting you ranking faster over time.

Last but not least this helps you to build your content plan so that you always have topics to cover to grow your site, most blogs will fail due to a sheer lack of content on-site and being created.

So, What is a Blog Niche Anyway?

A niche is a frame of reference for your content, for example, if you chose “origami” as your niche then all your posts and content would be related to this topic.

This allows the search engines and their crawlers, what comes to read your content, a basis for how to understand your website. Since they see that post after post is about origami they can begin to rank content in regards to this.

As you post continually on this same topic Google and the other search engines begin to test your content with readers to evaluate the quality and this helps you build credibility in their systems.

So, if no niche already jumped out to you, how or what niche you should decide to blog about will be the focus of what we will discuss in this next section. Hopefully, you can come out of this with your focus and be able to begin ideation, or building the keywords to build a blog up!

How to Start Brainstorming a Niche

When choosing a niche for your blog you will want to find things that are interesting to you, whether you have deep knowledge of them or are interested in learning more about the topic.

Most will be interested in choosing a profitable niche while this won’t be the main focus of the content you generate many want to at least recoup the costs for hosting and plugins they use to give out information.

Some good steps to help you begin your personal brainstorming session and hopefully find the niche you will start your blog on:

Each of these may help you identify a topic that you can begin to build your blog around that you would be interested in possibly building into a full site.

While the above steps are great it may be hard for some people to find a niche or idea they want to start with so below I have an extensive list of profitable niches and ideas, which many people have used as inspiration when finding blogs topics.

Validate Your Brainstorming List

Now you will want to work through your list asking some very specific questions of yourself along with getting some idea from Google and other tools as to the possible search volume that exists.

Some of the things below you need to consider while you are validating your brainstormed list to make sure it is the right niche blog for you:

While you may or may not have answers to each of these let’s dig into why each is important to your overall choice. This way you can make the choice from the right understanding and find the perfect niche for you.

Will I love writing about this one year and 50+ posts from now?

Many will start a blog and fail to reach 50 posts, of those that reach 50 posts many will be so tired of the subject that they quit choosing instead to move onto another site.

This blog will be a part of your life for a long time to come, so you really need to be able to stick with it, at times it may feel like you are eating Brussels sprouts for the 50th day straight but you need to eat them all the same.

Do You Know Enough About This Blog Niche?

If you are looking at choosing a specific topic what is your overall knowledge level on the subject in general.

If you are very knowledgeable this can give you a head start in building a blog, but this isn’t a limitation as you can choose a blog topic you know little about but want to learn as this would help you know your readers much more.

Are there other people who want to read about this topic?

You want to also make sure that there are many others who are interested in this topic and that there is a volume of people searching for the topic online.

An easy way to see what the search interest exists is a free tool, called Google Trends, which can provide information vital to your ideas and if they are consistent in search, what you would prefer is a pretty flat and reliable search or that it is growing consistently over time.

This can help you to know that it is a solid niche and is reliable for the long term to provide you enough search to make it entertaining, nothing about writing to a ghost town is exciting!

Is There a Paying Audience for This Blog Niche?

If you are looking to make an income from your blog then this question is very important, are there items you talk about that have people willing to pay for?

If you can find something you love, like for instance gardening, that people will pay for items like tools, plants, and more then you may have a winner to start developing further.

How Many People Are Searching in Your Blog Niche?

For search volume itself, you can use many different tools, the one I choose to use is SEMrush as it provides me solid information on keywords along with their estimated search volume. If you want a little less costly option then KWFinder is a good choice also.

You can also use free Chrome plugins like this one, or this one. They are both absolutely free and just run inside your Google Chrome browser and show you data while inside the SERP, they are more limited but focused.

Is This Niche Likely to Be Around for Years to Come?

I’ve written about fidget spinners before because they were lightning in a bottle, if you had a site on them you probably made a lot of money for about 6 months while the fad was exploding.

What this doesn’t show you are the implosion and losses that came afterward when the fad died out, if you had a site that only focused on fidget spinners then your income took an absolute beating.

As you can see writing about fidget spinner would have been the wrong choice as it was short-lived and likely very many people were building blogs around them at once which made search volume drop even faster than normal.

What you want to do when evaluating your blog options has to be centered around the longevity of the topic, does it have staying power or is it short-lived?

Is There a Moderate Amount of Competition (or More) in Your Blog Niche?

While many may think that having competition is a drawback on a blog this is actually the opposite, the more blogs the more competition, and typically the more traffic that exists.

In addition, having other bloggers in your space doesn’t mean you can only view them as competition, instead, they could be your collaborators and you can build together building both of your audiences!

My only worry from a competition side would be with sites like Healthline, and the juggernauts in the industry they cover, like REI in the outdoor space, as these can greatly hamper your growth.

Would You Be Happy to Be Associated With This Blog Niche

Can you talk about this publically, and would you want your name linked to this topic for years to come? This is very important, if not then this is a red flag you need to take seriously.

The blog niche itself may be great but if it isn’t something that won’t make you proud in the future then what’s the point? You want your name linked with success and pride so just pick wisely!

Does Your Niche Suit Evergreen Content?

Instead of having to constantly publish new content to attract readers, having to stay up to date with news or celebrity gossip can just drain your mojo and kill the enjoyment.

Choosing a niche that has a lot of evergreen content, that is content that stays the same over a long period of time allows you to post content that stays valid for years and years bringing in non-stop traffic without constant work.

This blog post is filled with great information for people trying to find a blog niche that’s going to be good for years along with continually bringing you in to read it.

Search for your blog niche ideas on Pinterest

The other thing that can be interesting is to see how your niche is represented on Pinterest, since it is an image-based search engine it can provide more interesting details as to how bloggers approach the niche.

Pinterest is a hugely popular search engine behind Google and YouTube, and if they are looking for your niche you can bet there is a lot of people doing the same!

Pick a Smaller Sub-Niche to Start

For most successful blogger approaches they decided to choose a domain that provides them the ability to grow and expand content but also allows them to focus on a particular part of a sub-niche to start.

This approach helps you find your target audience and to begin building yourself up as a blog, then as you grow you can then branch out into other sub-niches within the main niche or topic.

For example, you want to write about ballpoint pens and writing, instead of choosing a domain like “amazingballpoint.com” you would want to look at choosing up like “amazingpenmanship.com” where you can write about ballpoint pens but then move to calligraphy, etc as you grow as a blog.

Time To Do a Little Keyword Research

So, now you have an overview of your niche’s popularity and momentum from the questions above. You can use the Google Trends numbers as a more comparative number though it is a less accurate estimation of absolute search volume counts.

Meaning, it is not clear how many people are searching for the things that you want to sell right now using trends alone.

That’s why keyword research must be done more thoroughly (if this term is new to you, check out our beginner’s guide to keyword research). Basically, keyword research will tell you how many individuals are looking for terms in your field every month.

Google Autocomplete Searching for Free

So here’s what you should do:

First, brainstorm a list of keywords related to your niche. If we stick with the ballpoint pens example from above, some good starting points would be:

Once you think of some keywords, make sure to check how popular they are. You want to take those ideas and plug them into a keyword research tool like SEMrush or KWFinder to check them out.

SEMrush and keyword magic to find keywords

When you do this, then the tools will suggest other related keywords in addition that you can explore. This helps you explore your niche even more.

What Number of Monthly Search Volume Means its a Good Blogging Niche?

This is an interesting concept but it can be misleading, some blogs could have limited search volume but those same people come back continuously when they find a good resource.

For a first blog, I would say you want the main keyword to be searched by tool guesses at least 100k monthly if possible. This means there is plenty of traffic for the main keyword where you can get your portion of the pie.

There are many more ways though that are better to figure out what the traffic is and how you can decide if you want to take on the other bloggers, there is nearly always someone, to take search rankings from them and grow your own.

Build An Initial Keyword List (Minimum 50 Ideas for Blog Posts in Your Niche)

What you are looking for is a starter list of ideas for your blog to start with, these ideas you want to be low competition keywords and ideas that have lots of forums and shorter blog posts in the top 10.

This will give you a solid chance to rank at the top of Google with your newer blog posts. It is not likely you will rank on the first page if there are higher competition sources which is why you want to choose these first 50 well.

Check Main Blogs for Current Advertisers

In these first days, I also suggest checking for what ad providers are being shown on the blogs on page one. The biggest three for bloggers are Ezoic which is who I use (access at less than 1000 pageviews so you could start immediately), Mediavine (currently 50k sessions to sign up), and AdThrive (100k page views to sign up).

Since you know the requirements to sign up for their services allows you to have an idea as to the volume of traffic their site gets. This is important because you want to have a good chance of making sales with the traffic that your new blog gets, if it’s not much yet this can be an issue so check these first ad providers well.

This isn’t an exact science though as if you get into AdThrive, for example, you can bring in additional sites at as low as 30k pageviews. So this just is to give you a base idea of the range of consistent views the site has to have without any tool use.

Can I Make Money With This Niche?

Now, this won’t be a need for everyone as some people just want to write bout what they are doing and what they are interested in, those will experience a long time before gaining traffic.

For the rest of us who are working on building a blog to build a new income method, a focus on your niche choice needs to include understanding the potential for monetization down the road.

Do a Google Ssearch for ‘Best [insert niche] for’ Looking for Blogs

This helps you see what exists currently for “buyer intent”, what things others have written on specifically to get clicks and convert those clicks into a purchase to make a commission.

This can also be a nice tool to help expand the keywords for your niche and give you more directionality to creating content for your new blog.

See How Others In Your Niche Make Money

Checking out existing blogs can help you learn how they are monetizing their blog and what they are doing to get traffic and who they partner with for affiliate or other income models like digital products, affiliate programs or programs, and more.

You can also copy many of the things that work for them, there is no shame in building from someone else success as it’s typically been tested by lots of people beforehand.

This doesn’t mean you have to do it exactly but perhaps it will give a good idea of how an existing blog is working to get traffic and how they are turning that traffic into an income stream.

Amazon affiliate is the easiest way for any new blogger to look at monetization. They have a large range of products and typically list the most popular or top-selling items, you can check those out to see if there is potential for affiliate sales.

This will give you an idea of what people are shopping for with your niche so it helps lead back into topics that might be helpful in blog posts and targeting certain keywords.

Amazon is also one of the simplest conversions available as a large number of clicks that you send to Amazon will possibly buy something. They don’t even need to buy the item you sent them to Amazon to buy as you get credit for everything they add to the cart!

Check for Big Affiliate Programs

Amazon may be easy to convert but they pay a very small commission overall, hoping you make it up in sheer volume. Looking outside for other affiliate offers can yield 3-4 times the income from conversion and sale so they are well worth investigating.

For many sites in your niche, you can check their footer first for a link that says something like “affiliate”, “partner”, “ambassador”, or similar wording.

Then you apply and can wait to see if they approve you, for many of these I would apply once you get through the first 50 posts so you have something for them to see if they check out your website.

Are There Options To Make Your Own Product

This can be a way to make a very good profit on your traffic and do much better than any affiliate program, making a product can be a digital product like an info product (pdf or ebook are big ones), courses, memberships, or other.

Then you could look at physical products, or possibly into white labeling someone else’s product with your website brand. Each of these can be an amazing way to build up an income stream from your site, many will feature many of the above together.

Top Blogging Niches That Will Make Money

If you still find you can’t figure out a niche I put together a large list below of options that may be a fit for you. Take some time to look through each and see if anything seems like it could be a fit for you.

Many of these niches have been investigated by myself so they are not just “potentially” good but “definitely” possible with some effort on your part.

These aren’t the only options but it’s a big list of possibilities that you can look into and see if its something interesting for you as many are easily profitable blog niche ideas.

Health and Wellness

Diets

Stress Management

Money Topics

Insurance

Crypto

Investing

General Blog Niche List

Mom Blogs

Dad Blogs

Travel Blog Niches

Vacation Hotspots

Vanlife

Boating

Air Travel

Fitness and Sports Niches

Sports (All Types, Professional or not)

Yoga

Rock Climbing

Blog Niches for Hobbies

Baloon Animals

Foraging

Hunting

Outdoor Activities

Food Blog Niches

Diets

Recipes

Food or Dining Reviews

Entertainment Niches

Movies

Music

Gaming Overall

Celebrity

Gaming Blog Niches

Specific Game

Specific Genre of Game

Mobile

Console

PC

Relationships Blog Topics

Dating

Green Blog Niches

Solar Power

Wind Power

Recycling

Electric Vehicles

Education and Career Blog Topics

Any career honestly

Pet and Animal Blog Niches

Dogs

Cats

Birds

Lizards

Caged Animals

Exotic Animals

Technology Blog Niches

Josh Koop

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