Hey guys!

So… One of the first things you will want to do after deciding to start a blog, is to figure out what you want your niche to be.  A blog niche, if your not familiar with the term, is a particular subject that you want to focus your blog on.  There are blogs on everything under the sun, and I mean everything!  So, narrowing down the topic or topics of your blog is helpful, especially when you want to attract a certain type of reader and a particular traffic to your website.

Some examples of Niches would be:  women’s fashion, costume makeup, African American hair styling, local news, extreme couponing, sport fishing, American politics, and black celebrity gossip.  As I said, the ideas and possibilities of blog niches are endless.

But, perhaps you’re in a kind of rut and you know that you want to blog, but can’t think of anything in particular you would like to focus your blog on?  Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What are your hobbies and what interests you?  What do you enjoy doing on your free time?
• What do you have skills in?  What do you bring value to? What do you enjoy working with, learning from, or creating?
• Think of your passions.  What topics move you the most?  What is your belief system or what organizations or clubs are you part of?
• How can you help people?  What are you the most knowledgeable about?  What is it that can you assist people with?

Ask yourself the above questions and write those topics down.  Ponder on them a while and think to yourself if any of those answers that you provided could be a good idea for you to write a blog about.  Certain topics are good for blogging for as a hobby, but if you want to make money blogging, you may want to do a little more research on your possible niche topics before settling on just one. Whatever the niche is that you decide to go on, make sure that you actually “like” it.  If you don’t, you may struggle with writing about it on a consistent basis.  And, if you start blogging on a particular niche then get second thoughts about it, you can always change, so don’t fret.

Once you have narrowed down your topics, search those topics on Google.

Searching your niches on google will provide you with an idea on how competitive of a topic it really is.  If there are a lot of advertisements in your search, and hundreds of thousands of pages on that topic, then there may be a lot of paid competition.  Another tool that you can use to find out how the market for your niche is, is to research keywords for your niche using a keyword research tool.  If the search volume for your keywords is less than 1000 monthly, it’s probably not worth writing about. Click Here for my detailed article on Keywords.  Google Trends is a very good online tool to use to find the trend for any topic you may want to write on.  One of the very first successful blogs I started was one on Black Celebrity Gossip.  Check out it’s trend below:

I chose black celebrity gossip back in 2008 because it was something I was very interested in at the time, and as you can see from the trend- it was very popular at the time.  I enjoyed reading and writing about music artists, actors, writers and producers.  I found it was a very easy niche that I would have no problem researching, writing, and commenting about on social media each day.

After 4 years though, I got very burned out talking about other people’s lives, and I reluctantly ended my blog on black celebrity gossip.  The goal is find a topic where you will not lose your passion  and  get easily tired.  Since then, I have two blogs- one where I about anything that I want on my personal blog- which fits me a lot better. And then FirstStepBlogging, which I started because I really love sharing what I have learned through my experiences in blogging online.  Whatever the niche you choose for yourself, you should strive to find that “perfect fit.”  Choose a niche that makes you the most comfortable.  Pick a topic that will compliment you the best, and where you can shine through your writings the brightest.  When you stand out naturally online, people will take notice.

To conclude, when you’ve finally decided what niche you want to write about, the last thing to do is to try it out.   You will not know if you’ve made a good choice until you put your feet in the water, so start the blog and see how it feels, and find out if you want to continue or not.

How did you choose your niche?  I’d love to hear about your blog and how you decided what to write on in the comment section below.  Don’t forget to leave a link to your website and please share this post!

‘Till next time…