This article explains all you need to know to choose the best blog niche for a new blog.
Starting a blog is a really big decision; whatever your reasons are, it’s a big one, and for you to be reading this post right now.
I am sure one of your aims is to start a blog that would make you money in the nearest future.
A few years ago, blogging was a little bit easier than it is right now. Then you can blog about anything, gain an audience with time, and still make a reasonable income from your little effort.
Then, you don’t have to spend countless hours searching the web for the right topic to blog about.
But in recent times, blogging is now competitive. The number of blog posts published daily online runs in millions.
Due to this, it is imperative that you conduct proper research before starting a blog.
I have come across so many blog posts about starting up a blog, most of which focus mainly on setting up your blog, hosting, and choosing a domain name.
But only a few resources are available online for new bloggers on how to choose a niche topic when starting a blog.
The few guides I have stumbled upon mostly focus on conducting keyword research for a blog post. They are mostly applied to blogs that are established already.
My aim in this blog post is to show you how actually to start a blog the right way.
I will show you how to choose the great blog niche; how to choose the right keywords that you can easily rank for on the internet (remember that blogging is now fiercely competitive).
I will also show you how to use the free tools that would enhance your keyword research process.
When starting a blog, you ought to choose a niche that meets the following three criteria listed below.
Table of Contents
Questions to ask before choosing a blog niche
Is anybody interested in the topic?
One of the most important criteria to test for is to confirm if people are interested in the topic you want to blog about.
It will be challenging to make money from a blog that that is of no interest to people.
So the first thing you want to check is to see people’s interest in the topic.
If people are interested in the topic, then you can go on and check it through the other criteria.
But if there is no public interest, you have to drop the niche idea and consider another niche.
How do you check if people are interested in the topic?
There are various ways of judging people’s interest in a particular topic, and I will show you a few of them right now.
For this particular post, I would choose health as my broad topic.
Take note that this is broad, and starting a blog with “health” as your main focus is a total waste of time at this particular point in time.
The reason is that we have numerous authority blogs like on health. If you decide to go for health, your new blog may never see the light of the day while competing in the niche.
So what you want to do is narrow down your topic a little bit, so I would be focusing on the “women’s health.”
This is also fairly broad, and it is as competitive as the general health topic, so you would want to narrow it down to something that looks like this:
Health—-> Women Health—–> Pregnancy —-> First Trimester/Third Trimester.
I guess you understand what I am driving at here!
Take a look at the column and see how I have narrowed down the topic from the broad health (which is fiercely competitive) to a blog that publishes a post only about the first trimester (early stage of pregnancy) or third trimester (late pregnancy stage).
The idea here is to go down the lane from broad to narrow topic.
Now, it’s agreeable that the deeper you go, the lesser your audience. It should also be noted that the deeper you go, the higher your chances of survive as a blogger.
Now for my chosen example (First trimester), let’s see if people are really searching for topics in this sub-niche, and here is how to go about that:
First, head over to Google search and enter the last word in your niche pyramid, which, in my case, is “the first trimester.”
When I did this, it says that there are about 12 million results with contents on this topic.
Don’t be scared about the number of pages/domains written here. Google has billions of contents on its server, so you are on the good side if the number is less than 15 million.
Once there are numerous results on this topic, it’s a good indication that the niche is popular among searchers.
Now, let’s move on to the second stage, which is to check the popularity of the Keyword (in Nigeria, the specific country am targeting) and see if it gets regular searches over the entire months of the year.
Point your browser to Google Trend Nigeria then enter your search term; in my case, “first trimester” in the search box. It would show come up with the page below.
Studying the trend result, you will discover that the search is not dropping. Rather the search is on a range with an increasing tendency.
It does not only prove further that people are interested in the niche; it also shows that the interest is growing over time, and the earlier you start a blog on the topic, the better it is.
The last stage for testing this criterion is to check the actual search volume for this keyword in the Google Keyword Planner tool.
If you don’t have a Google account, you would have to sign up to use this tool. Once you are done with creating your Google account, you can log in and continue.
Just type “Google Keyword Planner” into the Google search box, and click on the first result that comes up. So far you’re logged in, you should see this page.
Click on the “search for new keywords using the phrase, website or category” and enter your keyword; which in my case is “the first trimester” Check the image below to see how to set your search properly:
Take note that in the targeting section, I selected “Nigeria” because it’s my country of the target.
Checking the image above, you can easily deduce that the term “first trimester” is being searched between 100 – 1000 times in a month in Nigeria. That’s the exact search for that keyword.
But note, the result is specifically for search on Google search only.
Many experts will tell you to shun this keyword and search for something around 1000 searches per month. But the truth is that this is the type of keyword you should blog about.
Check other related terms and see their search volume as well. When you blog about “the first trimester,” you would mention the term “symptoms,” etc.
All these terms would bring traffic to your site, and it will eventually accumulate into thousands of searches per month.
The key thing to note here is that this niche is super targeted, and your chances of survival are very high.
How Competitive is the niche?
Checking the competitiveness of a keyword is not one of the easiest things to do.
The reason is that the metrics are always changing, and there is no particular way actually to see the competitiveness of a blog.
But you can use some free tools to measure your chances of survival.
If you check the search result of the “first trimester” above, you will notice that all the blog posts on the topic are from blogs ranking globally, which means two things, there is no blog covering this topic in Nigeria, or they are not doing well.
If you start a blog on this topic, targeted mainly at Nigerians, you stand a chance of getting on the top page when somebody from Nigeria searches for your terms because Google takes localization of contents very seriously.
So let’s check how competitive the niche is.
You would have to download a free tool called MozBar.
It’s a plugin for the browser that analyzes a page and tells you the domain authority, page rank, and the link analysis of the page.
This is the basic data you need actually to check if a niche is competitive.
When you check the first ten results of the search terms, if the Domain Authority and Page authority are higher than 40, then you will have a hard time ranking your websites on the first page.
Now point your browser to MOZ to download the plugin for competition analysis. Select your browser and download the addon as instructed.
Once the addon is installed on your browser, activate it and head over to Google to search for your keyword (first trimester) again.
Please note the following acronym for MOZ.
- PA = Page Authority
- DA = Domain Authority
- RD = Root Domain.
After searching for the keyword, I don’t have to tell you that your chances for survival in this niche are next to none! Provided you are trying to rank globally for this keyword.
It would take you years of HARD WORK to get any traction as far as Google is concerned.
Basically, I would shun this niche and move on to something else because of the high-ranking site.
It would take a lot of hard work to make it to the first page of the search result page.
So at this point, you want to look into some other keyword or go ahead with your current keyword, provided you have a method of optimizing and ranking very fast.
But for fear of not being called a coward, let us see what the first page results contain. If the contents are crappy and poor, we can maybe give it a try.
So I will open check through the first few pages listed in the results.
If the page content is not well optimized for on-page SEO, you might stand a chance here.
After checking the first few pages, I discovered that the niche is a “no-go” area. Almost all the pages have about 5,000 words that are well-optimized for search engines.
When you stumble upon keywords like this, the next thing is to continue your search for better keywords.
Because your chances of survival are very minimal, it would take years of hard work and high content.
And in the right sense of it, any keyword that takes more than three months before getting organic traffic from Google is a poor one, and I would generally advise new bloggers to stay away from such.
Is the Niche profitable?
For this part, I won’t be using my selected keyword for the examples.
When it comes to monetizing a blog, the first thing that comes to bloggers’ minds is ads, Google Adsense, or other Google Adsense alternatives.
However, monetizing a blog goes way beyond that. You can make a huge income from your blog without showing any ads whatsoever.
To test the profitability of a niche, you can head over to popular forums like Nairaland to see what people are saying about the topic.
You can then create your products or promote affiliate products that solve a particular problem or answers a question within the niche.
If the niche has many search volumes for “buying keywords” such as keyword + sales, keyword + reviews, keywords + buy, etc.
You can rest assured that it is a very profitable niche that you can capitalize on.
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