6 Mistakes People Make When Choosing a Blog Niche

If you have decided to start your own blog, choosing the right niche for it is probably the most important task. The reason for it is that once you make that decision, there is no turning back. You are pretty much stuck with it forever. The only way to change your niche is to close your blog down and to start a new one. But that, as you can imagine, can be a very painful thing to do.

Having been a part of the blogging world for years now, I know what you should be looking out for when making that most important decision. In the text below, I will do my best to help you pick the right blog niche. Enjoy!

1. Going after the money

The number one mistake people make when choosing a blog niche is, of course, going for the money instead of something they truly care about.

To be honest, for me the idea of writing has always been somewhat similar to the idea of making music or painting. In other words, I look at it as something that should come from the heart, rather than from anywhere else.

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Nonetheless, I have met more people going into blogging not because of their passion to write, but simply because they want to make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Yep, you heard it right. From what I have so far seen, more people start blogs because they want to make money. Fortunately, most of these types of blogs do not make it to the fourth month of their existence.

I am not saying that there isn’t any money to be made in blogging – there absolute is, A LOT – but what I am saying is that if you are choosing your blog niche solely based on how much money you can milk out of people, then you are wasting your time.

Follow your passion, and the money will come.

2. Skipping the research phase

If your passion is around a niche that is highly profitable, then you are definitely on the better side of things. I truly congratulate you.

However, if you feel that there isn’t all that much money to be made around the topic that you are most excited about, then you will have to identify that middle ground somewhere between your passion and money. Of course, you can focus only on passion, but you do want to make money blogging sooner or later, don’t you?

Whether you think your niche has plenty of money in it or hardly any, none of it matters. Just like with any business, you need to throw all of you assumptions out the window. Blogging is not an exception.

If you try to assume things, nothing certain will ever result from it. You need to test your opinions, ideas, thoughts, theories and hypotheses, if you are planning to do everything the correct way. And because blogging is something you might end up doing for the next 10 or even 20 years, you most certainly want everything well thought through in advance.

“So what type of research do I need to do?”, I hear you asking. Well, how exactly you do your research is up to you. But if I were you, I would research the following things:

• How common are blogs with the niche I am interested in? (competition)
• How many visitors do they get each month on average? (niche relevance)
• When were they established? You can find this out by visiting websites, such as https://whois.icann.org/en, entering the domain name of that blog and looking at the “Created Date” section. (this gives you a rough estimate of how long it takes these types of blogs to start seeing traction)
• Is the niche popularity stable, decreasing or increasing over time? Use Google Trends to find out. You don’t want to get into a niche that is losing its popularity for some reason.
• How do these blogs make money mostly? (сoaching, selling physical products, affiliate marketing, digital courses, advertisements, product reviews, etc.)

The MORE NICHES you research and the more you know about them, the more educated your choice will be. You will have facts backing your assumptions up instead of just the “gut feeling”.

3. Going too broad

Another very common mistake people make when choosing a blog niche is going too broad with it. To an extent, I also suffer from this problem.

If you look at my blog, I discuss absolutely everything related to self-development, including health and fitness, career and business, motivation and success, meditation, yoga, lucid dreaming, spirituality, and many others. Heck, I have even allowed guest posts related to real estate! I don’t anymore, by the way. I was just so excited at first about people wanting to guest post on my blog. 🙂

Because of how broad my blog’s niche is, it’s very hard for me to attract an audience that will stay with me. Somebody that is interested in spirituality may not care at all about business, and vice versa. Yet I write about both. As a result, I attract everyone, but at the same time, I attract almost no one, and that’s a problem. You, my dear friend, are probably interested in blogging since you’re here, but what about working out in the gym or learning about the NLP Anchoring Technique? Thought so. 🙂

To my defense, I must say that I knew that my niche is very broad even before starting to blog about it. There were two main reasons that I went with it regardless.

First of all, I saw that there were many successful blogs with the exact same niche. This is always a good sign.

Second of all, I knew that I could only write about this subject. Anything more narrow would make me feel limited and would cause me to run out of ideas and to eventually give up.

So at the end of the day, it’s better to niche down, but if you can’t, then do what your instincts tell you.

4. Going too narrow

Going too narrow is usually less of a problem when choosing a blog niche, but it happens from time to time.

If you want your blog to be only about training Dalmatian dog puppies, then you will probably have very little competition on the internet, if any. Not only you would be niching down into the Dalmatian dog breed, but you would also be niching even further into Dalmatian dog puppies and how to train them.

On the one hand, your blog niche is very narrow and unique. On the other hand, you may have niched down so much that you won’t have many visitors, and therefore, probably will not be able to make much money off your blog.

Please note though that the above example is just an example, I haven’t actually researched it. Sometimes even a very small audience can be enough to make plenty of money if there is money to be made in that niche and people are willing to pay. Think dog training books, courses, food, clothes, collars, fur brushes, etc.

5. Not knowing your audience

Although this mistake should not be made if you carefully go through the research phase, I have placed it separately because of how important it is.

Who are you writing for? Kids? Adults? Singles? Parents? Lovers? Business owners? Dog owners? Cat owners? Firemen? Stay-at-home moms? Teachers? Try answering this question right now.

If you want your blog to begin making you money at some point, then you must keep your audience in mind at all times, especially when you are at the stage of choosing a blog niche. The tricky part about knowing your audience is that there may be more than one for your blog.

For example, if you want to write about LEGO products, then you will be writing for kids, won’t you? Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, yes, you are writing for kids, because that is who plays with LEGO. But on the other hand, kids don’t have money to buy LEGOs, especially since LEGOs are not cheap. So you are basically writing for parents that are looking to buy a present for their kids.

Here comes the dilemma, do you write in a manner that would be easy for kids to read, meaning a little amount of text and many images, or do you write in a more of an adult way for their parents? This would probably mean more in-depth reviews of LEGO sets and why specifically one set is better than the other. Or do you write for both? This would be up to you to decide. But before you do, you must clearly identify who your audience is.

Similarly, something that is is popular in the US may not be as suitable for people living in Japan. So if you are planning to write in any other language than English, it may be your advantage, but you must also keep in mind the cultural differences.

I know a fitness blogger from the Philippines that writes for his country’s population. He told me that people from his country don’t usually buy random things off the internet through affiliate links. So instead, he wrote a book, which has become very popular amongst his audience and has earned him tens of thousands of dollars.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

6. Choosing what feels “easier”

Finally, the last in the list of mistakes that people make when choosing a blog niche is them going with what is easier.

Please understand that, in reality, there is no “easier” option when it comes to choosing a blog niche. All niches have their advantages, as well as disadvantages. Because of how big the internet has gotten, there is competition in pretty much whatever you will choose to blog about. And competition, by the way, is a good thing, not a bad thing, as Mr. Trump would say.

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Competition means that people are interested in the subject and that there is money to be made. If there is no competition, then either nobody cares about it or nobody knows about it. Both options are bad for any kind of business, including blogging. Only in very rare occasions people become successful pioneers at something, but you definitely don’t want to be betting on that. Chances that you will for some odd reason be highly successful in something that nobody is interested in are as slim as winning the lottery.

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I knew very well that creating a blog around a niche as broad as self-development would be very hard to grow, yet I did it anyway because I knew that this was my only real option. I didn’t focus on money and was totally ok with the idea that it will take me more time to grow than if I would have chosen something a bit more narrow. I followed my passion and I have no regrets. Neither should you.

Blogging in itself is easy to do and brings a ton of pleasure, but even it needs to be approached in a very balanced and educated way. Do you follow your heart and not care about money at all? Or do you put aside your biggest passion and go for item number two in the list because you know it will allow you to live a financially free lifestyle in the future?

I can’t tell you what’s right or wrong. But everything that I could tell you is written in this post. The decision is yours.

Thank you for stopping by and good luck!

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