Blogging: Carving a Niche in a Crowded Blogosphere

As the blogosphere consistently becomes more crowded, it’s challenging for many bloggers to stand out. Discovering your niche, a key to being recognized, will instantly give your blog that spark it needs to catapult itself into the cutthroat blogging world. However, sometimes finding your niche is more challenging than writing actual blog posts. Whether you decide to use a very narrow specific niche or a diversified arching niche that covers a large topic area, such as marketing, finding your niche is the key to creating a successful blog.

Write what you know.

What do you love reading about? Whether it’s cars, fashion, or stocks, everyone has a passion they enjoy. Your niche should be something you know a great deal about. The more you know, the more input you can share with others.

Write what you love.

Writers are only as good as the material they put on paper. It is difficult to write about a topic that you have absolutely no interest in. Readers want to see passion behind your writing, so find topics that you love, and write about them. Conveying enthusiasm in your writing will only increase traffic on your blog.

Find an angle.

It’s important to distinguish yourself, and writing about one specific aspect of your niche can instantly separate you from the pack. Find your shtick. The author of the blog She Takes on the World approaches her marketing niche by angling all of her articles to how women can “take over the world and succeed in marketing.” Finding her shtick has enabled author Natalie MacNeil to carve a niche for herself in the crowded blogosphere. Want more examples of how to do this? Four Blogger created a list of the “20 Best Niche Blogs that Stand Out from the Crowd.”

Know how popular the topic is.

Like all endeavors in life, you must do your research. Go to trafficking sites such as Wordtracker or Overture to take advantage of their free keyword tools. If not many people have written about your niche, that means people don’t want to read about your niche of interest. Change your idea, and find a niche that will make your blog sought after. If the anchor text, or keywords, you choose to write about have 5,000–10,000 searches, that means people want to read about your niche.

Discover the profit potential of your niche.

Once you have figured out a popular topic, it is time to see if your niche has profit potential. Type the keywords that you will be writing about into Google and take note of how many ppc (pay-per-click) results appear. The more advertising that other bloggers with your same niche have gotten, the more advertising your blog will get. Instant money! There are loads of tools that will help you discover your competition and how many people search your niche terms per month. Some tools you have to pay for, but some are free—for example, Google has a free keyword tool that will give you insight into ppcs.

Keep in mind that your niche should be a topic you have a firm stance on. Once people start commenting on your blog posts, you will need to know enough to support and argue your ideas.

Whether you’re writing for a corporate blog or just for yourself, make sure to write to the niche audience, small or large. The key to mastering your niche is writing about something that people want to read about. It’s okay to talk about something other than the growing social media world. If you own what you write and people want to read it, then your blog will gain a following.