Blog Planning: Choosing a Niche
This second post, I have to admit it, is an article I posted in another blog before closing it down to replace it with this one. It’s a long article, but I hope you’ll enjoy it!
The Niche Approach
A lot of bloggers are tempted to create one blog where they will talk about all of their interests. You may be interested in photography, Korean movies, and vegan cooking, but most of your visitors won’t be interested in all three. Many will go elsewhere if only one in 10 posts matches their interests.
Having a niche will help you become an authority on the subject and naturally build a loyal following. It will probably also make you feel less overwhelmed by the wide variety of subjects to tackle.
Darren Rowse of ProBloggers.net made the switch from one blog featuring many topics to multiple niche blogs in 2004:
Since I moved to this approach I’ve gone from 1 blog with 1000 pages that had around 900 daily visitors and earned just a few dollars per day to having 20 or so blogs with over 11,000 pages with 25,000 daily visitors that earns a few hundred dollars per day. Of course there are other factors that have led to this growth – but if I had to narrow it down to one factor it would be the niche blogging as a key. (One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs?)
Of course, niches can be more or less precise. It could be as large as Chinese culture, and as precise as street art in New York City.
Choosing Your Niche
Passion
You must write on a subject you are really passionate about and will stay passionate about in the long run. This is important. Most bloggers give up because they lose interest in their own topic. I’ve done that myself. Don’t fall into that trap. You may have many interests, but most of us only have a few passions. What are they? Writing about your passion will help you stand out from the crowd and persevere. You will want to do research on the subject, you will want to write good articles about it, you will want to go the extra mile, not only for your readers, but for your own satisfaction as well.
Test of Time
You may have found a topic you are passionate about, but is there enough to say about it on a weekly basis for years to come? You should already be drawing columns on a sheet of paper, with a niche in each one and a list of ideas for future articles below. Are you having a hard time finding more than ten ideas for a niche? Keep digging! One article per week means 52 ideas to sustain this topic for a whole year!
Brainstorming
Popularity
Hopefully, your passions are not too obscure because your niche also needs to be at least a bit popular. If there are only a five searches a month done on that subject, you will have no readers and no revenue. On the other hand, if your niche is so popular that there are already thousands of blogs talking about it, you need to think hard about how you will distinguish yourself.
You didn't think hermit was such a popular keyword, right?
To find out if your niche is popular, I recommend using Google Adword’s Keyword Tool. Simply type keywords you think people will use to find you and look at the columns Local Search Volume and Global Monthly Search Volume. It will give you an idea of how many searches are done each month for those keywords in your country and across the world.
Wow! Who knew hermit was such a popular word, right? But what the figure above actually shows is that people searching for “hermit” might not be looking for your website on how to become a hermit. They could be looking for info about the hermit trush (a bird), Herman’s Hermit (the rock band), Hermit the frog, The hermit (tarot cards), the hermit crab, and so on. So in our case, the popularity of the word “hermit” can be quite misleading. The number of searches for “hermit life” is probably a better indicator. The goal here is to find out the number of people who are really looking for you. Because let’s face it, someone looking for hermit the frog, who lands on a page about hermit life, won’t stay long and certainly won’t buy anything. You don’t really want to attract them.
How many searches are enough? It depends on your goals, but you should know that if your site is in the first position on Google’s search result pages for a specific keyword, around 45% of people will visit your site. If you are in second position, it drops to around 12%. Here are more numbers:
- First place: 45% will visit your page
- Second place: 12% will visit your page
- Third place: 9% will visit your page
- Fourth or fifth place: around 5% will visit your site
- Sixth to tenth place: between 1% and 4%
These numbers come from an eye-tracking study discussed here and an article at Red Cardinal.
So if there are 4,400 monthly global searches for “hermit life” and you are in third position in Google, you will only have about 396 visitors per month. You haven’t turned them in regular readers yet and certainly not into buyers. Of course, you probably won’t be targeting just one keyword. Another keyword might have 2,000 monthly global searches and bring in 180 visitors, and so on.
In Rowse’s case, 900 daily visitors to one general blog produced a few dollars per day, while 25,000 daily visitors to multiple niche blogs produced a few hundred dollars per day. If “a few” means two, that’s around 0,002$ per visitor for a general blog and 0,008$ per visitor for multiple niche blogs. I know these numbers may be depressing, but let’s not despair! They will vary based on a number of things. As Barry Wheeler explains here, he has a site with 3,500 monthly visitors that brings as much revenue as another site with 100,000 monthly visitors. Why?
The long-tail keywords (more specific keyword phrases not individual keywords) I have optimized the site for in the second example pay at a much higher rate with each conversion. The number of people searching for those keyword phrases is limited so advertisers are willing to pay more for each click.
In other words, he gets paid more per click for the ads he runs on the less popular website because the advertiser competition is higher. We will talk more about advertiser competition below.
Last but not least, you should also check out Google Trends and Google Insights to find out if the popularity of your topic is increasing or decreasing.
Most popular in Australia. Hmm, maybe because Ajahn Brahm recently gave a talk about "A Happy Hermit".
Competition
Checking out the competition is also important. The first reason to do this is to find out the amount of competition.
Amount of Advertiser Competition
Advertiser competition is the number of advertisers bidding to show their ads for the same keyword as you. To give you a general idea, you can look at the advertiser competition in the Google Keyword Tool.
Advertiser Competition
That green bar is not very precise, but it’s interesting. High advertiser competition may seem like a bad thing, because it means you might have to pay a lot per click to show your ads on Google and its network. But the goal is to offer good content and naturally attract people with it. So high advertiser competition also means there is interest and that other companies will pay a lot per click to show their ads on your website. You can use both Google Keyword Tool and the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to have an idea of the average cost per click for a keyword. If you don’t see the CPC column in the Keyword Tool, go select it under “Choose columns to display”.
Amount of Keyword Competition
Keyword competition is the amount of websites targeting the same keyword as you for high search engine ranking. The Keyword Tool shows you related keywords you may not have thought of. It shows you that while “hermit” has high advertiser competition, “hermit life” doesn’t. But why not check out “hermit life”‘s keyword competition instead? To do this, we will use advanced search operators. First, let’s do a search for “hermit life” in Google (with quotes). Google will tell you that about 91,000 sites feature those keywords. But to find out who’s the real competition, we will go further. We will do search for intitle:”hermit life”, and we’ll find out that only 1,540 sites bothered to put “hermit life” in the title tag of their page. We can go even further by doing a search for intitle:”hermit life” inanchor:”hermit life”. This will tell us how many sites have these keywords in their title tag and in the anchor text of an internal or external link. Only 297 real competitors are left. Finally, doing a search for intitle:”hermit life” inanchor:”hermit life” inurl:”hermit life” will show sites that have the keywords in the title tag, in anchor text and in the URL. Only 274 real competitors are left! That’s not so bad, is it? We went from 91,000 keyword competitors to 274 keyword competitors.
Strength of Competition
Another reason to check out competition is to find out the strength of your competition. What is it doing right? What is it doing wrong? Is the site user-friendly? Does it look good? Was it updated recently? What topics have been covered? Does it include a variety of content? Do they do interviews? Do they have videos? Are there a lot of spelling mistakes? What is it not doing that you could do?
Potential for revenue
Not everyone wants to make a revenue from their blog, and that’s OK. But if you do, you will need to verify your niche’s potential. This is probably where the hermit idea will end, because hermits aren’t suppose to deal with money. But who knows, maybe numerous people are willing to pay a lot of money to transition to a hermit life. Some types of retreats do cost a lot of money.
One way to verify the potential is to do a simple search in Google for your topic and take a look at the advertisers in the right column. What do they do to make money? In the hermit case, although Google says there is high advertiser competition, there are no ads showing, at any time of the day.
But if we take the example of indoor cats, we might find Iams or another food company. Could one of them want to advertise directly on your site and become a sponsor? You might also find informative sites about indoor cats. Are they using Google Adsense or some other advertising program? Are they reviewing products and selling them using affiliate programs like Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction or PayDotCoe.com? Are they offering their own products, like an e-books?
As mentioned before, we can also use the Google Keyword Tool and the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to have an idea of the average cost per click for a keyword. Remember, we want this number to be high because it means advertisers are willing to pay this much per click to have their ad shown on a site like yours. If they are only willing to pay 8 cents per click, you will need a lot of visitors to make money from your site. One dollar per click, as is the case for indoor cats, is already much better!
Conclusion
So we learned that choosing a niche is not done in a few hours. It can be a long process. If you are just blogging for family and friends, you should at least make sure you are passionate about your niche and have enough ideas to post articles regularly. Even your mom won’t visit your site very often if you only post six times a year.
If you hope to attract readers and make money, we saw that you should check the popularity of your niche and its related keywords as well as the advertiser and keyword competition. You should also take a look at the strength of the competition and the potential for revenue. To make an income, the ideal is to find a niche with high search engine traffic, low keyword competition and high advertiser competition.
Last but not least, I want to mention a little software called Market Samurai. When I first visited their site, I was quite suspicious. It looks a bit like a scam. But I downloaded their trial version and I’m still only using the trial version, so no need to buy anything! I am in no way affiliated with them. What Market Samurai does is help you evaluate the elements mentioned above quicker: total searches per day, number of visits you can expect to have if you are ranked #1 for a keyword, number of sites featuring your keyword in their title tag, monthly traffic trends, Adwords Cost Per Click, the chances people searching for this keyword are browsing to buy as opposed to browsing for information, the total value of traffic for a website ranked #1 in search engine result pages. The last one is an indicator of the value of the keyword market, so it is quite interesting.
That’s all for now, so I will wish you all some happy blog planning!
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