Finding Your Niche Among Niches
Perhaps you already have an idea about where to start. You’ve heard it said, over and over: Find your passion! And if you already know what your “passion” is in life, you’re luckier than most!
It’s certainly true that blogging about subjects you’re knowledgeable in makes good business sense. But you shouldn’t let that limit you. I’ve found – especially when dealing with running multiple blogs , that it’s often a good thing to stretch out of your comfort zone and research a new subject. Sometimes, having to learn new facts keeps us fresh, or – far more important – opens up doors we would never have opened, left to our own devices. And sometimes these are the doors that lead into worlds that make us sit back and say, “Now I know where my passion lies!” But Surely It’s Not As Easy As That?
If that’s what you’re saying, you’re right. In fact, choosing something solely because you really enjoy it is probably the biggest mistake you could make, when starting out your first Niche Blog or Blogs.
Sometimes we are “short sighted” about our interests. We assume people know things, when they don’t (or could care less). We think they like competitive show jumping, because we do – when actually, what 80% of horseback riders are really interested in is hacking quietly along forest trails on sedate horses.
But there’s far more important reason not to do more than spend a short time figuring out what sort of blogs we’d like to run. You need to know, of course:
- What the current trends are
- Where the hottest niches lie
- Which niches make money
It’s really as simple as that!
So by all means, have a general idea of the fields you could work in. But then check them out and confirm your theories. How do you do it? Let’s start with a simple exercise. (You didn’t think this was just going to be all reading, did you?)
Go to Magazines.com
The current most popular magazines featured, dead center.
Hot Niches listed to the left and right.
So what else do we have?
- Money
- Celebrities
- Women’s Health
- Budget Travel
- Cooking Light
To name just a few
Of the examples above, “Budget Travel” and “Cooking Light” would be the sort of niches you want, because they narrow down a general field like “Travel” into a specific aspect of travel – budget travel.
Just as “Cooking Light” narrows down a specific aspect of the broad “cooking” niche – food that is light in taste and/or calories. In which case, your target market might be:
A. Women trying to stay thin
B. Men and women with heart conditions
C. Men and women who are diabetic
So you click on the Magazine, and the headlines and sub heads give you a stronger clue… “Heart-smart cooking” and the words “family friendly”.
You are probably thinking by now it would be even better to go down to the corner store, and look inside this particular magazine. The slant of the articles (and seeing who is picking them up and leafing through them, if you’re lucky) can tell you more clearly than all the surveys – and more quickly – about the ideal target subscriber for a Niche Blog on this subject.
Other Ways To Find Sizzling Niches
This is just one “walk through” of how to start researching niches.
Other ideas include:
- Finding forums on the subject you’re checking out
- Seeing what’s being discussed on them
- Reading other blogs to see what grabs you and what doesn’t (and – more to the point – what grabs their readers! Check the “comments” columns. A blog with a lot of enthusiastic or argumentative comments is touching on a “hot” subject.)
- Check out popular shopping sites like eBay Pulse
Check out keywords being searched for in free utilities like WordTracker, Google Trends, AdwordsKeytoolExternal and if you want to try something new to many marketers, DigitalPoint’s free Keyword Tracker.
The most important thing is to start thinking specifics for your niche
You need to focus on:
- Who you are talking to (picture a specific customer or subscriber)
- What aspect of a broader niche are you focusing on? (Stick to that one specific subject – if you want to explore “Cooking With Wine”, for example, as well as “Cooking Light” – start a second Niche Blog!)
The Perfect Domain Name: Does It Exist?
This one’s a no-brainer: The perfect domain name would be your primary, best-ranking, long tailed keyword.
And here’s where it gets tricky.
You really DO want a .com domain. However, there are web companies that track searches for good keyword domain phrases.
They snap them up – and buy them outright. You might find the perfect keyword phrase, go to re-check it in another keyword tracker – and come back two minutes later to find it taken.
So What Do You Do If It’s Gone?
You can basically:
- Re-test different variations of the keyword (e.g. if “cookingwithspam.com” is gone, try playing around with the words and test the phrases “spam cook” or “spam cooker” or “cook with spam”, etc.)
- DO NOT settle for any of the “vanity” extensions. They’re not true extensions, and they don’t work, to put it bluntly.
- DO NOT use hyphens, if you can possibly help it. (You can try putting “the” in front of your niche phrase, as a last resort – e.g. “thespamcook.com”
- DO NOT use the trademarked proper names of any company or product in your domain name! (E.g. if you wanted to promote Pepsi products, you absolutely could not call yourself something like “pepsicoupons.com”).
Blogger Or WordPress (Free Or Paid) For your Selected Niche?
It’s incredibly easy to set up a free blog hosted on Blogger.com. You can even monetize it with Adsense. WordPress too allows you to host your blog on WordPress.com, but if you are serious about Niche Blogging, you shouldn’t consider the “free” option for an instant. You need to have full control over your blog. You don’t need a third party deciding if your content is acceptable, if your monetization methods are in keeping with their guidelines.
And you don’t need to have your blog suddenly disappear (along with all its revenue) one day. (This is the biggest danger of having a blog hosted on a free platform.)
Besides, if you ever want to transfer your blog to its own domain in the future, you can’t. You’ll have to rebuild your list of subscribers from scratch.
And if there is even the faintest idea that you might sell a blog one day (and Niche Bloggers often do, once they know the ropes) you need it on its own domain. This leaves you with one option that outshines the rest: Install your blog on its own domain.
3 Simple Ways To Turn Your Niche Blog Into An SEO Magnet
This can be summed up in 3 words: Content, Keywords and Plug-in Content – You need strong, original content that supplies valuable information to your target market.
And (unless you have created this particular Niche Blog specifically to “flip” or re-sell) you need to pack it with posts – and keep adding to them.
Fortunately, there’s an easier way than sitting down and making yourself write every day. Do all your research at once – and write as many posts as you can. (Aim for at least 30 to start out.) It sounds like a lot – but the beauty of WordPress lies in the fact that you can enter all your posts at once, and set them to automatically publish every few days (or once a week, or twice a week – whatever interval you set!)
Keywords – These are crucially important in Niche Blogging. The tried-and-true rule is to do solid keyword research for your subject, and pick a keyword or related keyword that garners good results in Google’s search engines to build each post around. “Seed” the keyword phrase in the headline, and first and last paragraph, providing your post is longer than 500words.
Plug-ins – Plug-ins make an enormous difference to your blog’s page rank and visibility. These handy utilities can be your best friend – or your worst enemy.
The typical “newbie” mistake is to get carried away with these wonderful little “experts in a box” and load your site with far too many of them. But remember – for every widget or plug-in you apply to your Niche Blog, your load in time will slow accordingly.
A better idea is to use a minimum of vital plugs. The most basic and vital ones you’ll need are:
Akismet – a powerful “comments” spam filter. Without it, I guarantee you’ll have to clean hundreds of spam links daily from your comments section in the dashboard, once your blog has attracted even the smallest readership.
You will need an API key for the Akismet spam filter – but when you’re installing the plug-in, it easily walks you through the process of getting on.
And once you have your API key number, you can use it again and again on other blogs.
All In One SEO Pack – by Michael Torbert. The best way to optimize your blog for search engines.
WordPress Database Backup – simple and quick to run. You can set it to email your back up, or store it on your site.
WP-PageNavi – one of the basics! Adds advanced page navigation to your blog
SEO Friendly Images – I really like Vladimir Prelovac’s plug-ins. They’re fast, super-efficient and 100% reliable. This one adds the “alt” attribute to your photographs or images, boosting your search engine friendliness and impressing the Google bots.
Google XML Sitemaps – generates a proper sitemap of your Niche Blog, which Ask.com, Yahoo, MSN Search and Google all use in their indexing.
Writing Blog Posts That Matter
We’ve already covered basing your blog around a keyword (and repeating that keyword as part or all of the post headline) in our “Content” section.
But there’s more to writing posts that will really hook the reader in and keep them coming back, day after day.
Your blog posts have to be timely and relevant to your niche. If there is a sudden shortage of Castilian leather in your “Stylish Shoes” Niche Blog – write about it!
Solve the problem – let people know of a direct source where they can still buy Castilian leather high heeled sandals. Suggest high quality alternate brands.
Publish a post about revitalizing the nearly-worn-out pair you already own. In other words, back to the basics – solve a problem or provide unique information your subscribers can really use (especially if it’s “insider” information – people love secrets! And remember to write only to one person – your ideal subscriber. Picture him or her in your mind’s eye as you write.
