How to Choose a Blog Niche That You Can Actually Build On

One of the hardest parts of starting a blog isn't getting the site set up. It's figuring out what you're actually going to write about.

What makes it hard is that you can have several different interests or hobbies that you’re passionate about and want to share with the world. But you aren't sure if anyone else will care about it.

Or maybe you've heard that you need to choose a niche or focus for your blog, and now you're wondering if that means you have to pick one tiny topic and stick with it forever.

It doesn't.

I've changed and refined the focus of my own blog several times over the years, and one thing I've learned is that your blog doesn't have to fit perfectly into one tiny box. But having a clear direction is still helpful.

How to choose a focus for your blog | A Relaxed Gal

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What is a blog niche?

A blog niche is the general area your blog focuses on and the audience you're creating content for. It gives your blog enough direction that you know who you're creating for, what kinds of content belong on your blog, and why someone would want to keep coming back.

Your niche is the bigger picture. Your topics are the individual subjects you write about within that niche. For example, beauty is a topic area, but beauty for women 35+ who want simpler, practical routines is a more specific niche.

Having a niche makes it easier to make other decisions for your blog. Your niche can help you choose:

a blog name
blog categories
content topics
your visual style
email content
potential ways to make money

The great thing about this is you don't necessarily need to choose the smallest or most specific niche possible. You just need enough focus to help your audience feel connected to your content.

Related read: 7 Tips For Starting The Blog You’ve Dreamed About

How to start figuring out your blog niche

If I were starting a blog today, here’s how I would approach choosing a niche.

What do you want your blog to do?

This is the place to start. Before choosing a niche, think about what you want your blog to accomplish. This can be a helpful filter in narrowing down your niche.

Do you want your blog to be:

a creative outlet?
a place to share your experiences?
a way to help people solve problems?
a business?
a way to build an audience or personal brand?
a source of income?
a place to support a product or service you want to sell?

Your blog can be one or more of these things. Personally, I would prioritize three of them. For me, I started a blog as a creative outlet, a place to help people solve problems, and eventually a source of income.

You don't have to know exactly where your blog will be five years from now. But having an idea of what you want from your blog can help you decide what kinds of content make sense.

What do you want to blog about?

This may sound obvious, but don't immediately try to choose one answer. Ask yourself these questions to start making a list of possibilities based on your interests and knowledge

What do you feel knowledgeable about?
What have you spent years learning?
What problems have you figured out how to solve?
What do friends or family ask you about?
What could you talk about without needing to force yourself to come up with something to say?
What do you enjoy researching?
What experiences have taught you something that could help someone else?

Don't worry yet about whether each idea is a "good niche." Just get the ideas out of your head. You can refine this list later.

Related read: How To Start A Beauty Blog That Stands Out

Who do you want to talk to?

Take your list of possibilities and think about who the other types of people are who would be interested in them.

Who are you trying to help, entertain, educate, inspire, or connect with?
What are they trying to learn or accomplish?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What questions are they asking?
What would make them want to read another post from me?

You don't need to know every detail about them. I know I didn’t. As I continue to create content and see the responses and questions I get, I’m learning more and more about them. What I did was finish this statement: "I'm creating this content for [audience] who have [problem].”

Some examples of this are:

new homeowners who are trying to navigate buying a home in the current market
women over 40 who want easier beauty routines.
people who love budget-friendly travel

There are many options, but it’s helpful to have a general understanding of the type of person you're trying to help or reach and why. It makes it easier to narrow down your niche and, in the future, decide whether an idea belongs on your blog or not.

Start to narrow down your niche

Now that you have a list of possibilities and an idea of who you want to talk to, it’s time to get clearer on what your niche could be. Look at the list of possibilities and think about the following:

Do I want to create content about this? Would I still want to write, create videos, research, or talk about this topic after the initial excitement wears off?

Are people interested in this and looking for information, solutions, ideas, recommendations, inspiration, or entertainment around it? If you have something like rare chess sets, there’s probably a really narrow group of people who would be interested in that. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. A small audience can still be valuable if they're genuinely interested in what you have to say. But it's worth understanding how large or small that potential audience might be.

Can I contribute something useful? Your contribution could come from personal experience, knowledge, research, professional experience, a particular perspective, or your ability to simplify something complicated.

I’d try to get the possibilities list down to 2–3 possible directions to explore more closely. These aren't necessarily the categories you'll have on your blog. They're potential niche directions you're considering.

If you’ve narrowed your list down to something you enjoy, that people are interested in, and you can contribute something useful, you may have found a good direction for your blog.

Related read: 14 Tools That Make Beauty Blogging So Much Easier

How specific should your niche be?

You may hear advice that your niche needs to be very specific, but there's no universal rule for how narrow your blog needs to be.

A broad niche might be something like beauty. A more focused niche could be beauty for women 35+. A very specific niche might be makeup for women 35+ with oily skin.

How narrow or broad you are depends on what you want to create and who you want to reach. The goal isn't necessarily to make your niche as small as possible. It's to make it clear enough that someone can understand what your blog is about and why your content belongs together.

You can also start somewhat broader and become more specific as you learn what your audience responds to and what you enjoy creating.

Create a simple statement for your blog

Once you've narrowed down your list of possibilities, it’s time to put your direction and audience into one sentence.

I create [type of content] for [audience] who want help with [need].

This isn’t a tagline or mission statement for your blog. It’s a way to get clearer. As an example, the statement for my blog could be “I create practical beauty content for women 35+ who want simpler ways to care for their hair and skin.”

When writing this statement, pull from everything else you’ve figured out.

The type of content is pulled from your narrowed list of possibilities
The audience is the people you decided earlier that you wanted to talk to
The need comes from the problem this audience has

Related read: How To Start Making Money With Your Blog

Your blog niche can change

If you’re concerned that having a niche will lock you down forever, don’t worry. Choosing a niche doesn't mean signing a lifetime contract. Your blog can change. Your interests can change. Your audience can change. This is something I wish more new bloggers were told.

I've changed and refined my own blog focus over the years. As you create content, you may discover that one topic performs much better than another. You may find that you enjoy creating one type of content much more than you expected. That's part of blogging.

Having a focus from the beginning can help prevent your blog from becoming a collection of completely unrelated posts, but you don't need to predict exactly what your blog will look like years from now.

Ready to figure out your blog niche?

If you're still not sure what direction you want to take your blog, I've created a printable worksheet to help you work through it.

It walks you through the questions in this post so you can brainstorm your interests and experience, think about who you want to reach, narrow down your ideas, and start putting your blog direction into words.

Download the printable and work through the questions.