Are you struggling to find your niche?  When it comes to blogging finding your niche can be really hard to do!

Finding your Niche.

Niche?  You want me to “find my niche“?  Three simple little words, but so frustratingly difficult for most of us.  So you have decided to start a blog, but you don’t know what to blog about.  No problem, just find your niche.  Easier said than done.

What is a niche? 

A niche is something that every blogger has, it may be broad or it may be narrow.  A niche (pronounced nitch or kneesh) is your area of expertise, it’s what you blog about. Pick a niche that you won’t get tired of talking about.

If you pick a niche that isn’t your passion, you will tire of writing about the subject and blogging will become a chore instead of a joy.  We have enough chores that we have to do, blogging shouldn’t be one of them!

When choosing your niche, choose something that excites you day after day, something that you love to talk about.

Do you need to narrow your niche?

There is a lot of talk in the blogshpere about narrowing your niche, which has been quite successful.  But if you are like me, and tend to gush about several subjects all the time don’t be afraid to have a more broad niche if it means that you won’t give up.

Sure, a super tight niche is often a top performer, but what good is that if you quit because you don’t enjoy only writing about one topic?  Time is money, and that time is best spent creating quality content for your readers to enjoy and not worrying about being perfect.

Perform a brain dump.

Write down all of your top interests.  All those ideas you have rolling around in your head, now is the time take a dump and get them onto paper.  Throw caution to the wind, don’t even think about what you are writing, just get it out of your head.  You can put things together more intelligently later.

Look at your books. 

What type of book do you constantly buy?  Your library can tell a lot about you.  What we constantly read and surround ourselves with we become.  Maybe your books are really magazines, that’s OK too.  Maybe you have nothing but fashion magazines and you are obsessed with fashion, there’s your niche.  You don’t get tired of reading about it, so you more than likely won’t get tired of writing about it either.

When you have a library FULL of a certain type of book and you’ve read them all (sometimes over and over) you have become an expert.  You have been studying and didn’t even know it.  You learned from people who are experts on the subject.

I knew what I wanted to blog about, I knew what I never got tired of, but it didn’t really hit me like a ton of bricks until I looked at my library and then I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what my niche was.

Sometimes in school, we study a subject but we forget all about it after the class is over.  But when we study on our own with a subject that really interests us, boy do we learn. 

What are you obsessed with? 

Your obsession is a key to your niche.  If you have been obsessed with something for years I highly doubt you will tire of it. 

What have you mastered?

Have you mastered something that you are now really good at.  Is that something you love?  Do people approach you to teach them something you have mastered?  There is your niche.

The question then becomes not “What am I good at?”  But “What am I best at?”.

Scroll your Facebook feed and see what you are always posting about. 

You can learn a lot about yourself from Facebook.  You might say, “It’s just pictures of me traveling with my kids!” Well Momma, there’s your niche right there!  It’s something you love to do.

Once you have decided on your niche, the next important step is to find out how profitable it is.  But honestly, I don’t even think the next question is necessarily “How profitable is it?”  I think the question is “How can I make this profitable?”

You are a genius when it comes to your niche. 

You really are.  If Jennifer Lopez had decided to try to be a comedian on In Living Color and not a dancer, she may have never gotten the gig.  Jennie from the block is now a superstar actor, dancer, and singer.  That is her niche, but I don’t believe she is known for her comedic skills.  Had she not focused on her passion, we probably wouldn’t know who she is today.

What are you always trying to figure how to do better?

Have you found a better way?  That’s what you will share about your audience.  A blog is a two-way street, you share what you are good at to solve a problem for other people.  It’s all about pouring out your talent or area of expertise to help others.  Once you solve a problem for people, you become valuable and that equates to profitability.

Amazon knows you better than you know yourself.

If you don’t have a library of books, go to Amazon, they are really good with making suggestions. They have been studying and analyzing you for years.  They know you and what you like.  That’s pretty creepy if you think about it, but why not leverage the millions they spend on this type of marketing and find out who you are.  Whoa, mind blown right?!?

Who will be your target audience? 

You can get really specific here.  Your audience is who needs you.  It’s who you have a desire to serve.

Who is your demographic?

Here is another gem you can mine from Amazon, take a look at who reviewed those books that you bought from Amazon.  There is your demographic. 

You go to a shoe store to buy shoes, but you also go to Macy’s shoe department to buy shoes.  I really feel like spending too much time finding a niche is a waste of time.  It could paralyze you with fear and you won’t even start your blog at all.

Start where you are.

Start imperfectly.  That is really hard to do if you are a Type A like me, but if we don’t, we will spend too much time on a niche and no time helping people. 

So go ahead, start where you are right now and you can always find your niche as you find your voice.  Be yourself, don’t try and be anyone else and the rest will become history.  You may be like me, multi-passionate and be more of a Macy’s than a DSW and that is OK.

Take the pressure off of yourself.

Hey, if you fail, so what.  You try again.  Henry Ford the inventor of the automobile said “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” He should know, he failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. 

Your niche is your calling in life and if you let it, you may not have to find it all, it might just find you. Do you have a niche?  What is it?  Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.