and why it really matters!

Why are niches important in blogging? If you’re not a blogger and you’ve never considered becoming one, it’s likely that the word ‘niche’ has left you baffled and completely uninterested. But the truth is that niches are important, they’re just often forgotten about by those who should know better.

Niches are important because they’re what will help you find your audience and provide your blog with a steady stream of new content or visitors. After all, if you’re blogging to make money, it’s your niche that will help you find those who will be most likely to buy from you.

It’s important to make sure that your niche and audience overlap as much as possible, and before we get into finding your niche based on your passions and interests, let’s first go over some of the most common blogging mistakes.

A typical mistake that bloggers make is to try and appeal to way too many people at once. While it may seem enticing, this just isn’t a good way to run a blog. Bloggers who are this broad are likely to have very low quality content that either goes totally unnoticed or meets with extremely harsh criticism. If you try to reach everybody – you’ll reach nobody!

The best way to find your specialty is to pick one niches and only write about your area of expertise. If you take this step, you’ll be sure to reach out to the people who are immediately interested in what you have to say.

Another common mistake is trying to be everything to everybody. This can go hand in hand with the previous one – you’re trying too hard and it just turns off your readers because they’re not getting anything out of it. You want to be yourself, but you also want to be interesting to people. Try and find your niche and only blog about that – it’s too hard not to write about things that interest you!

Most of the time, people don’t know what they’re really good at, so it’s difficult for them to determine where their niche is. However, there are a few times when we do know exactly what we’re good at: we love it and we love talking about it! If you can pinpoint something you’re passionate about and write about it regularly, chances are your readers will be interested in what you have to say and follow along regularly.

Before you decide to dive into blogging, it’s important to decide on a niche. Don’t be afraid to be a little bit unique! Try and find something that nobody else has tackled before or something that you really know a lot about.

Almost every blogger dreams of taking their blog from side project status to full-time endeavor, and the different ways in which they hope to do this vary just as much as their blogs themselves. And while one blogger may have decided that becoming a well-known expert in their niche is the best way to grow traffic, another may have decided that building relationships with readers and promoting affiliate deals is the fastest way for them to reach their goal.

However, these two niches are actually very similar because, ultimately, they both boil down to one thing: having a niche!

– But what if you’re already blogging but haven’t narrowed it down?

The best way to determine your niche is to look at your current blog and analyze the content you already have posted, and what you have planned. Are you writing about lots of different topics or are you focusing on one or two overarching themes? The more focused your blog is the better-off you’ll be because you’ll be able to focus on what’s working and what your audience wants. If you’re writing about multiple things that don’t really fall into any one category then it’s time for some hard decisions – decide which topic(s) you chose to pursue blogging about first and then go from there.

Sometimes, it makes sense to start a new blog if you already chose and established yourself within a niche but want to share more on topics that are far from it. Great example – we started blogging almost 7 years ago (as of this post going live) on a food and health blog. Of course, teaching ourselves the ropes from building to establishing, to maintaining, we became subject matter experts on blogging and really wanted to share that! It didn’t really align with the food blog, and the few tester posts we did really never hit with our existing audience, so we decided to build 2 new blogs!

It’s important to remember that you don’t always have to be the expert on niche(s) that you write about. You can also learn along with your readers, but it’s also important to know your own strengths and weaknesses. If you’re not an expert in something, you can always do research and come back to it later on!

You should never feel bad for knowing your niche and going for it! It’s better than having no niche at all! So what are some things that can help you find that elusive niche? Well, there are a few ways:

How to pick your niche:

1) Figure out what you like and do best.
2) Determine which topics you know a lot about or enjoy learning more about.
3) Analyze your past work and notice which types of related topics you’ve covered.
4) Look at your social media followers and browse the areas of interest they’re following you for.
5) Write down these 3-5 themes, look at them together, and see where any overlap might be.

Remember, just because you picked a niche doesn’t mean you’re stuck in a box or can’t ever post “random” things or post about yourself! In fact, regardless of niche, you should let your audience get to know a little (or a lot) about you! Random content can always be tied back to your niche in some way. Behind the scenes, day in the life, introducing yourself once in a while, etc are all ways that ANY niche can include some lifestyle content!