How To Make A Blog Part One: Getting Your Niche Right Is Crucial

What is a niche?

The definition of a niche is “A special area of demand for a product or service”.

For instance, if you were to search for “time management” on Google, you would receive over 137 million results.

Albeit, “time management” is a niche, it is rather large and generic. If you performed a Google search for “time management for nurses”, you would receive over 21 million results.

As you can see “time management for nurses” is a smaller niche than “time management”.

However, each one, “time management for nurses” and “time management” is a niche.

Why having a niche is important?

This is where many blog owners go wrong. They pick a niche because they THINK it will be a good way to make an income. They don’t realize to make money via a blog is not a ‘get rich quick’ activity – it’s a long-term activity and after 2 or 3 months when there is no money coming in, they get bored and give up.

It really is worth spending time on choosing your niche. I’ve come across so many people who start blogging in a niche and they make no money whatsoever. They work hard, they are committed but get that niche wrong and no matter what they do, they’ll never make any income.

Having a targeted niche means that visitors who come to your blog will be looking for what you are offering.

For instance, if your blogging niche was about “time management”, there are a million and one things you could write about “time management” and you will not be providing specific enough advice or products for the majority of your visitors as the niche is too vast.

But if your niche is “time management for nurses”, there is less to write about but you know the visitors who are coming to your site are interested in “time management for nurses” and are more inclined to return again and again (and purchase from you!).

Also blogging in a smaller niche means less competition.

How to determine your niche

Know your subject

If this is your first blog, or you’ve tried blogging in the past and failed it’s possibly because you chose the wrong subject to blog about.  I always recommend you start with a subject you know well and are passionate about – a hobby, specialized skills or life experiences.

Why?

Because if you are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject the blog post creation will be much, much easier.

If someone you love has an on-going medical problem, for example, your experiences and knowledge will help others.  If you love jazz or you own and maintain a vintage vehicle there will be lots of other people interested. A great blog educates and you become the teacher.

Passion is the key

Remember you’ll have to write hundreds of posts for your own blog, comment on others people’s blogs, write articles for distribution and possibly guest post, so the more you know about your subject and the more enthusiastically you can write the easier it will be for you and the more informative it will be for your reader – you want them to keep coming back.

Is there a need for your niche?

If there are other active blogs and forums relating to your subject, then you know there is an interest in it.

Blogs and other forums can be great sources of information and ideas.  If you are passionate about your subject, you have probably already subscribed to your favorite ones.  This is excellent because if you’ve been leaving helpful comments you have already begun building a reputation.

If you see the same questions and problems arising frequently, you can solve those problems and answer those questions by writing a post and linking your comments back to the relevant post on your blog. This helps to increase traffic and add a valuable backlink to your site and we’ll talk about the importance of backlinks in a later post.

There are very few subjects from which you can’t make money online these days and you probably already have an idea in mind. If you haven’t decided on a niche yet, it will make it a little more difficult, and spending some time doing careful research can save you a lot of money, time, frustration and heartache.

So if you have the knowledge, the experience, the passion and there is an on-line demand for such a niche…you could be onto a winner!

But there is one more major key ingredient:

Make your blog a business

Now it’s time to get down to business – and internet marketing is a business – your blog will be your business. If you want to make money from your blog you’re going to have to dedicate a set amount of hours to your business every week, plan exactly what you are going to do, set yourself goals and get organized.

Starting an internet marketing venture costs very little moneywise, just the price of hosting, a domain name, the monthly cost of an autoresponder service and any other tools or software you think you may need. If you can afford to, it’s always a good idea to reinvest any profits you make early on to make your blog creation more efficient. We will cover the best tools to use and outsourcing in a later article.

If you want to be successful this is something you can’t do just when you feel like it. A website can in theory become a completed product. The essence of blogging is like writing a journal – you have to keep adding to it on a regular basis to get subscribers and build readership.

In the beginning your biggest expenditure with knowing how to make a blog will be your time.

Look out for the next post on the series, “How to make a Blog”  – we shall cover the topic of keyword research.