Are you looking to start a blog but aren’t sure what it should be about? Read this article for 7 great ways to discover your blog niche.
When you’re just getting started blogging you might be wondering what should your blog be about. How can you come up with a blog niche that people actually want to read and that will hold people’s attention? In this post, I want to share with you how to come up with a blog idea and how to narrow down your ideas, so you have just one idea to focus on while you’re building your blog.
Since this is the Two Hour Blog, I want to encourage you to really find your focus before you get in too far with building out your site and creating content. This piece of knowing what your blog niche is will help you to move forward with a very focused and efficient plan to help you make the most of the time you have each time you sit down to write a blog post.
This blog post will walk you through some ways that you can come up with your blog idea.These are simply different ways to go about determining a solid blog idea or blog niche that will help you to really stay focused. Make your way through this list of ideas and questions to get you brainstorming, and hopefully after doing some of these exercises, you have a blog idea you feel good about.
Think about what you’re passionate about and what can hold your attention
The first way to come up with a blog idea is to simply start with thinking about what you’re passionate about.
What are some things that you do in your daily life that you get really excited about? What are different things that you do or think about or talk about that really hold your attention?
You can think about conversations that you’ve had with friends or participated in different Facebook groups that you’re a part of that you love to dive into. Think about if there are any forums that you’re a part of that you love to add to a conversation.
Basically we’re looking for here is to think about the things that you do for fun. Are there things that you are already spending your time on that you could start a blog about? Are these things that you could actually be excited to write about and share the details of with your readers?
Think through your daily life and consider if any of them are blog worthy. Or will hold your attention long enough to write a blog about.
Think about people you’d like to help
Another great way to come up with a blog idea is to think about people that you would like to help.
Is there a certain group of people that you feel passionate about teaching them something or sharing your expertise of whatever it is that you’re good at with?
Spend some time thinking about the groups of people that you really enjoy spending time with and connecting with. Or people you already are connecting with daily and enjoy.
For example, maybe you’re a teacher and you love to spend time with other teachers. You could blog about different strategies you have for managing your classroom. Or you could blog about different ways you keep your classroom clean during cold and flu season. You could start a blog about what teachers do over the summer because that’s such a great time to develop a different passion project.
Think about a group of people may be that you would like to spend more time connecting with and different ways that maybe you could help them or even just add to a larger conversation within a specific community.
Think about what problems you want to help people with
Another great way to come up with an idea for your blog and your blog niche is to think about the problems that you want to help people with.
Think about things that you have solved on your own in your own life that you can share with others. Maybe you’re amazingly good at building playhouses for the backyard, or maybe you’re really good at sourcing light fixtures for people’s DIY bedroom revamps.
Think about the things that you can help people with different problems that you have solved and if there is a large enough potential for writing more about it. Sometimes it’s key to tap into the things that you have conquered and the things that you have found solutions for that will help you find a blog idea you’re really passionate about.
A blog is simply a place to help other people with something that you have already learned yourself. Think about different things that you’ve learned and different ways that maybe you can add a spin to what it is that you have learned. You can share what you know in a unique and interesting way that people would love to hear from you about.
Consider your goals
When you’re thinking about coming up with a blog niche or a blog idea, one thing to keep in mind is to consider your goals.
What’s the goal of starting a blog for you? Is it for a creative outlet? Is it to make money? is it both?
Really think about the reasons why you’re starting a blog. This is especially important in the beginning when you’re just getting started, because it can be helpful for you to determine how you spend your time when the time you set aside to blog comes around. It will keep you focused on what matters and help you stay away from shiny objects that might distract you.
If you’re starting a blog to make money, you’re going to want to make sure that the niche that you choose is one that is profitable. This can mean being profitable in terms of creating products and selling them, or by gaining enough of a readership to gain traffic and traction from SEO to help you get advertisers or sponsorships on your blog.
Now, I will say that sometimes choosing a niche is just extremely difficult and deciding on what you want to blog about is really really hard. I would highly recommend if you’re having a tough time deciding what to blog about that you choose a niche or a blog idea with the knowledge that it’s okay to shift and narrow in your focus later on in time.
In my time as a blogger, I have shifted my niche to be more specific. I started a blog in 2014, and since I couldn’t narrow my niche, I chose to write about health and wellness in general. It became really clear to me after a few months that some types of blog posts just weren’t interesting for me to write. Also, posts I did enjoy writing that were about a specific topic really did well on my site – more than others. So I took that as a sign to narrow my focus in to be only about that topic.
It’s okay to start with a broader topic if you can’t narrow it down right away, and be okay with shifting it or becoming more narrow and fine-tuned after you’ve been at it for a while.
Is it going to make you money or have the potential for being profitable?
A great way to determine if your blog idea is a good one, especially if you want to make money from it, is to consider if it will be profitable.
A great way to do this is to type your blog idea into Google and see if there are any products that show up around this idea. All you need to do is type in the high level idea you have, like “soap making” and see if there are other resources for learning how to make soap. When I did this, I found tutorials, bars of soap, and even soap making supplies being sold. This is a good sign that this blog idea will be a profitable one.
Another great way to find if your idea is going to make you money is to type the idea into Amazon. Are there products or books related to what you want to blog about? If so, that’s a great sign that you could teach something in this niche and be successful too. Or even to become an affiliate for some of these products, so you can recommend them and earn a commission every time someone buys them.
What are you willing to share the boring details about?
One thing to keep in mind when coming up with a blog idea is that people will learn just about anything from a blog these days. People love the boring details, and you need to be willing to show up with them.
For example, some people might think that you have to be a food or DIY blogger in order to make money from blogging. But these ideas are too broad. And people LOVE the details. Even the boring ones.
Think about if you were a DIY blogger who wrote about how to make furniture, paint houses, and decorate rooms. It’s all great, but it’s not very specific. If you wanted to learn from someone who really knows their stuff, you’d probably want to know the intricate details of each of those over the broad concepts of a lot of different ones. So instead of being a DIY blogger, you might consider only blogging about making furniture. And not just furniture, but furniture you make with recycled materials.
In this example, you can gain a much more interested and invested group of readers who are into recycled materials, making furniture, and DIY, than if you were just a DIY blogger covering anything and everything you could think of that fell into the DIY niche.
Think about how much you can write about your idea
Now that we’ve gone through some different ways to come up with a blog idea, I want you to spend a little bit of time trying to narrow it down. Up until this point in this post, I hope that you’ve been able to take notes or look at these different ideas. Right now, I would encourage you to to get out a piece of paper or start a new document and write down all the different ideas you’ve come up with while reading this.
Go through the points one more time and write down any more ideas that pop up. The next step from all of your ideas is to see if any right off the bat look like things you know you don’t actually want to blog about. It might have been a good idea, but it’s not for you. Cross those out.
With the remaining ideas, you’ll go through them one at a time and try to come up with three to five main topics branching off from each of them. For example, if your topic was blogging on minimal time (ahem, hello Two Hour Blog), your topics might be Start a Blog, Blogging Tips, Productivity Tips, and Make Money Blogging.
Once you have these main topics, or categories is what they’re called in the blogging world, you should be able to come up with 10 to 20 different ideas that spin off of each of these. So for Start a Blog, you might have 10 or 20 different content ideas that you could write about. Maybe one of them is “how to come up with a blog idea” – ha!
The goal of this exercise isn’t to waste your time, but to get you to think through how much content you have top of mind that you could write about your blog idea. If you are struggling hard to come up with ideas for each of your main topics or categories and it feels like way too much work, then it might be a sign that blogging about that niche isn’t right for you.
The thing about starting a blog is that you need to have A LOT to say. You need to be able to cover the details in painstaking step-by-step instruction. You also need to be able to see things from a bird’s eye view. Going through this exercise of knowing how much content you have top of mind about each topic will help you narrow down and visually see what topics you can talk endlessly about, and those that might have just been good ideas but not something that light you up talking about.
On that note, you’ll definitely want to make sure that as you do this exercise, you’re asking yourself if the ideas get you excited. Do these categories and topics light a fire? Do they make you want to share your thoughts on them? Or do they make you kind of gloss over? This is all important stuff when choosing a blog idea, because you’ll be writing about this regularly, and being bored isn’t a good way to get started.
Narrow down your ideas to just one
Once you’ve done this exercise for a few different blog ideas, I’d encourage you to keep narrowing them down until you have just one. You might have made a list of 20 different blog ideas, been able to create categories and topics for one or two. Now is the time to just narrow them down. It might not be obvious what to choose, but just choose one so you can get started. Getting stuck in this space isn’t productive for more than a week or so.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Does this blog idea make me want to write?
- Am I willing to cover the nitty gritty details on his idea?
- Is this idea a money-making idea?
- Am I comfortable writing hundreds of pieces of content on this idea?
- Do I have experience with this topic?
- Do I have something interesting to bring to the conversation around this idea?
Of course, there’s no one right or wrong way to come up with a blog idea, but I hope that by asking yourself these questions, you can get closer to deciding on an idea that not only lights you up and gets you excited, but will help you get started as quickly as possible.
I hope that this post has helped you to come up with an idea to get you started blogging. Remember that your blog idea is super important, so spend some time really being sure this is the idea you want before investing a lot of time in it. If you need more help getting started blogging, be sure to check out all my other posts to Start a Blog.