So you’re excited to start a blog but you are struggling to think of a niche. Don’t worry, all of the popular and successful bloggers today have been where you are right now.
In this article, I will share with you some effective tips on how to brainstorm profitable niche ideas for your blog; the same process I go through when starting my own.
And I don’t want to sound like an egotist, but the tips I’m about to share with you aren’t just based on theories, but they actually helped me land on some of the most “profitable” niches and find success as a blogger myself. I hope these tips can help you too.
Now, you may have noticed that I emphasised the word “profitable” because I’m certain that you have a specific goal in mind for starting a blog. It’s highly unlikely that you’re planning to spend your time, effort, and resources on a blog just for the sake of having one – or maybe you do and that’s cool too.
Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be amazing if the blog you’ve started can become a passive income source for you?
Now, without further ado, here are 10 tips on how to come up with profitable blogging niche ideas.
1. Get blog ideas based on your profession
Two of the crucial elements of a successful blog is that it should be centered on (1) topics that you are well-knowledgeable about or (2) topics that you are passionate about and interested in.
So if you’re looking for ideas for your first blog, you don’t have to look elsewhere but at yourself and what you do professionally.
Are you an engineer, a nurse, a teacher, or an accountant? Whatever your profession is (may it be white collar, blue collar, pink collar, etc), you can create a blog that helps tons of people by providing them advice and tips about topics related to your profession.
For example, if you’re an engineer:
- You can start a blog for new engineers and provide them hacks and pro-tips on how to land their first job
- You can start a blog for college engineering students and help them choose the right major or how to pass the exams with flying colors
- Start a blog where you show how to operate power tools and equipment
- Blog about the best books, software, and educational materials that helped you in your engineering journey, and so on…
The same idea can be applied to other professions.
2. Blog ideas based on your skills
One of the many good things about blogging is that it’s very flexible, and you don’t have to pigeonhole your brainstorming around your profession.
If you want to avoid moonlighting and you’d rather want your blog to be anything but related to your day job, then it could be about your other skills and expertise.
For example, if aside from your full-time job as an engineer (using the example above) you are also a skilled photographer, then you can build your blog topic around photography.
And instead of discussing things about engineering, you can start a blog about:
- Best cameras for photography beginners
- Advice and tips on how to capture astounding images
- Best camera setting for daytime, nighttime, sunny, rainy, etc
This could also be applied to other skills like sports (especially if you’re an athlete or a varsity in your school), playing instruments, singing, knitting, graphic and video editing, public speaking, cooking, fishing, writing, and whatever things you’re an expert with.
3. Start a blog based on experiences or topics you have knowledge about
Some of the most profitable niches in blogging doesn’t require a particular skill or profession, but simply the sheer knowledge and information that is stored within your brain by real-life experiences.
A great example of this is starting a blog about your travels where you will share your experiences about a particular country’s culture, foods, and tourist spots. Travel is one of the most profitable niches in blogging.
But it doesn’t have to be about travel, since if we look at the fact, how many people are living the dream of traveling all over the world and telling the tale, right?
So other blogging ideas that fall in this category could be:
- Even if you’re not an expert guitarist but you can play the guitar decently, you could start a blog about how to tune a guitar, how to replace the strings, your experiences, etc
- Even if you’re not a chef but you love barbecue (or cooking and baking) and you own a lot of grills (or other cooking equipment), you can start a blog telling people the pros and cons of each grill brand, your experiences with the different grills, why you prefer one over the other, etc
- You like fishing, you can discuss what kind of fishing rod is good for beginners or what kind of bait works best
- Do you like graphic editing? You can share some useful tools and apps and show people how to use and navigate through them
4. Use Amazon to think of niche ideas
Another effective way to get more blogging niche ideas is to visit Amazon.
There are 2 ways you can use Amazon to brainstorm niche ideas:
- Look through your product browsing history (which is somewhat mentioned in #3)
- Use the product categories to find niche ideas because each category could be a niche by itself.
You can also browse the product categories of eBay or Etsy as well.
So, if there are categories that you have knowledge about or interested in, you can run your niche idea through the Niche Selection Formula.
5. Get blogging ideas based on your passion, interest, and hobbies
Blogging requires constant work and producing quality content consistently is one of the most challenging parts of being a blogger.
Therefore, starting your blog about something you are passionate about gives you the ability to overcome this hurdle, due to the simple fact that if you’re passionate about something, you’d love to do it and you will not get bored about it.
So think of the things that you truly enjoy doing or interested in, even if you don’t have enough knowledge, skills, or experience about them yet.
Chances are, you’re always going to be eager to learn and continue learning about those things and you’d enjoy writing about them day after day for years to come.
So, how to brainstorm for blogging niche ideas about things your passionate or interested in? Here’s how…
- Write down all the things you’re interested in and don’t worry too much about anything (e.g. profitability, popularity, etc) and just come up with a big list of topics about things you love and enjoy doing
- Think what do you spend most of your time when you’re not working and list them down; minus the mundane tasks like taking a shower, sleeping, watching tv or going shopping
- See what kind of sites do you often visit online – do you often stream movies, play games, watch YouTube videos, listen to music or read other people’s blogs
Now, it could be that you’ll have trouble trying to figure out what are the specific things you’re passionate about, however, there is a good way to get over that.
Take a closer look at your room and at your belongings, especially the ones you personally bought or acquired yourself.
Your personal belongings might be able to reveal things you are unconsciously passionate about and could be a viable topic for your blog.
6. Find niche ideas with magazines
Now, this is an interesting one because many people (including me before I started blogging) didn’t know that one of the best ways to find profitable niche ideas for blogging is through magazines.
Even if publishers are making a transition to digitalize their business, you can still find plenty of printed magazines (to date).
Take a quick visit to your local bookstore and see what kinds of magazines do they sell. If you can find 3-5 different magazines for a particular topic, you can safely assume that niche is a profitable one because
- Your local store owners wouldn’t bother displaying magazines that no one buys
- Magazine publishers would not waste millions of dollars to print a magazine if they have no regular subscribers and customers
Another telltale sign that a particular niche is profitable is when you find plenty of advertisements when you flip the magazine pages. Keep in mind that advertisers will only pay magazines on that niche if they’re confident to see a return on their investment.
If you don’t frequent in local book stores, you can visit websites like Magazines, Subscription Agency, or Amazon (again) and you can find different magazines and how popular they are.
You can also Google “best selling magazines” to see in what niches have a high demand.
I took a look around and some of the popular magazine niches include fashion, foods, cooking, movies, entertainment, business, lifestyle, and electronics.
7. Get niche ideas from affiliate networks
One of the most profitable ways to monetize a blog is by promoting affiliate products, and you can get access to millions of them on sites called affiliate networks.
So how does this help you get blogging ideas?
Well, you can visit some of the best affiliate networks and see what niches are popular across the industry and has plenty of affiliate products.
Now, while it’s true that starting a blog on highly competitive niche might be challenging especially for beginners, there is actually an upside for this.
If you think about it, starting a blog in a popular niche gives you a guarantee that you will have an audience and target market. There will be people who will visit your blog and look for solutions to their problems.
Whereas even if you become a #1 blog on the least-competed niche, it’s likely that the niche is not a profitable one and you have just invested a lot of time and effort on a blog that might never generate an income for you.
8. Blog niche ideas based on your life accomplishments
In many blog niches, you don’t need any formal qualifications when you tell people “how to do” or “accomplish” something.
In most cases, your audience would be happy to learn your tips on “how to make money online” or “how to start blogging” as long as it is based on your own personal experience and real results (which is kind of what I’m doing right now).
Now, think of the things you’ve accomplished in your life. Perhaps you:
- Finished school and got a degree
- Stayed happily married for 25 years
- Run and finished plenty of marathons
- Lose weight and maintain your physique
- Learned to play musical instruments
- Develop specific skills or a hobby
- Successfully started your own business
- Quit your job and made money from home
- And the list goes on
These are some of the things people would love to learn how to do or accomplish themselves and your blog could be the instrument to let them do so.
9. Niche idea based on your target audience
Your blog content is not just about you sharing your passion and knowledge but its also about who you are writing for. I learned this the hard way when I was starting my blog.
So another way of coming up with blogging ideas is to decide on who would you want to be the majority of your readers or audience.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to get a more clear idea on your blogging niche:
- Will your blog be for parents, teenagers, students, working-class, entrepreneurs, etc?
- Are they male or female? How old are they?
- Is your blog for people living in specific countries and regions or your targeting globally?
- What issues and problem (s) can you help them with?
For example, if your blog is about making money (like this one), will you be writing your content for people who are looking for side hustles, those who want to make a full-time income from home, those who simply want to earn a few extra bucks – or all of them.
10. Use Google Trends
Google trend isn’t just a useful tool on how to choose a profitable niche for your blog but you can also use it while you’re still brainstorming niche ideas.
Google Trends has a section for “Latest Stories and Insights” and “Trending Searches” so you can find what are the things that people are searching for and going “viral” on Google.
You can easily find what are the topics that are trending now and have been trending in the past months (or years), and you could build your blog on those kinds of “evergreen” topics.
And that brings us to the final tip on this list…
Some niche suggestions for you
If you’ve gotten this far yet you still haven’t brainstormed enough ideas for your blog, don’t fret. There are some blogging niches that have been popular over the years and are likely to last for a lifetime (evergreen).
These evergreen and popular niche includes:
- Music
- Health & wellness (unless you are a doctor or a medical practitioner)
- Travel
- Food
- Parenting
- Education
- Self-improvement
- DIY (do it yourself)
- Personal finance (Beware of YMYL, read this article)
If you start a blog around these niches, it’s very likely that your blog will be relevant for years to come.
You wouldn’t want to create a blog for seasonal or short-term niches. (check out #5 on this list to learn why)
But let me make it clear that the idea here is not just to simply piggyback on the popularity of these niches but instead, use them to get niche ideas for your blog.
There you have it! 10 tips on how to brainstorm profitable niche ideas for blogging. I do hope that the tips above have helped you come up with a semblance of ideas on what kind of blog you want to start.
But before you finalize the niche of your blog, I would like to share with you the 8 crucial elements in choosing the niche (if you’re interested) for your blog.
You can watch the video below or read a detailed article I wrote here.
And just in case even after reading this, you still need a few more input on where your blogging niche ideas, here are 240 profitable niches that you might be interested in.
Anyways, thank you for reading this post and if this has been useful, kindly share it with your peers who are also planning to venture into blogging.
If you have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comment section below.
Your friend,
Jack
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