How to find the best unique niche for your blog and be authentic

To think that I’d be writing an article like this back in 2012 would be a joke. Why? Because it took me several years of trial and error and deleting over 100 articles from my site to discover what my unique blogging niche actually was. The real lesson — stay authentic and true to your heart.

I would read books that would tell me to write at least an article a day otherwise my blog would be doomed to fail. So, I did. The result — most of what I’d written was awful. The takeaway which sounds ridiculously obvious now — only do and write about what feels authentic to you.

Writing several articles a day on top of a full time job,freelance work and courses was too much to produce anything of any quality, so go easy on yourself! Your blog has to fit around your other commitments and life too.

This article is everything I’ve learnt over the last five years on blog niches. I hope at least some of it is useful for you and you get to your unique niche a lot quicker than me.

The problem with choosing your niche (or passion) by subject

In our education system, we’ve often been trained to think predominantly by categorising subjects into neat boxes, which could lead you to thinking in this way with your blog’s niche. For example, lifestyle, fitness, food, beauty, ginger and tabby cat appreciation blog (OK this one’s probably niche enough), and not delving any deeper.

While your blog can still fit within one of those categories, thinking like this can seem overwhelming because they’re so general and might lead you to wonder how you will ever stand out when there are sooooo many people also doing what you want to do. The things listed above aren’t really niches apart from the cat one — they’re just very broad ways of categorising subjects.

This is where I went wrong at the beginning. I had interests and passions in yoga, meditation, creativity, health, wellbeing, lucid dreaming, learning new things… and so loosely tied all these subjects together into the extremely broad category of self improvement.

As a result, thinking in subjects took me further away from finding out exactly what my niche was within the area of self improvement and made me create sub category after subcategory. I wasn’t delving deep enough into what it was that truly interested me within all these things, how they all linked together, and more importantly, why I wanted to share these interests and experiences with others.

There will be some niche finding exercises for you to do further on in this article, but first I want to discuss options with you, and I’m not going to tell you to just follow your passion and heart! Why? Because over a lifetime, you might discover new passions or change direction and for many of us, we don’t have just one true passion.

Fair enough if you’ve always been a talented violin player from the age of six and violins are what you know, but for a lot of us, we haven’t grown up with just one thing or one true soulmate style calling.

The purpose of the following five blog suggestions are to open you up to new ways of viewing your niche. Quite often we think we must be an expert sharing in depth subject knowledge, but as you can see, there are many other ways of blogging. Feel free to combine a few of these options or pick just the one.

5 ways of determining your blog’s unique niche

1. Find the intersection between two to three subjects

My brother Mike’s blog vandogtraveller.com, combines his interests in vans with travel and his background and expertise in electrical engineering. Suddenly, he’s opened up a very small niche for himself in the very oversaturated market of travel blogs.

How can you apply this? Think about two or three interests, skills and passions you have and see if you can fit them together to create something entirely new. How do they link?

2. Think about the process rather than subject

I am a big Tim Ferris fan who is someone who blogs, writes and makes podcasts on what might seem like every subject under and beyond the sun. He describes himself as a human guinea pig in that he tries and does a lot of different things and documents what he learns.

His podcasts are all about deconstructing world class performers in so many different areas. This is someone who seems to have an amazing skill at being able to spot patterns really easily in areas that you wouldn’t ordinarily put together.

How can you apply this? Is there something you really want to know more about and want to delve into the process and share what you discover with others?

3. Pick a theme rather than a subject

There’s a great website called A Life of Productivity, which as the name suggests, is all about productivity. You’ll find articles on everything from meditation to technology, spanning many different subjects, but all related to the theme of productivity. There’s also a blog I like called the History of Emotions. The theme is specific but within it, many different subject matters could be covered.

How can you apply this? If you have many different interests or hobbies, can you delve into what the underlying theme is that connects all of these things?

4. Document the journey

Your blog could be a way of sharing a journey such as your fitness/health journey as someone who is in the process of learning. Along the way you can then share what you’ve discovered. An example would be Sia Cooper who owns Diary of Fit Mommy and started her blog as a way of holding herself accountable for getting fitter. She is now a successful personal trainer.

How can you apply this? Is there anything you’ve been putting off, or desperate to start? Remember, you don’t need any knowledge with this one — just the enthusiasm to share the journey and learning process, then who knows where you might end up.

5. Share your expertise in an area

If you do have a lot of experience and in depth knowledge in an area, or you’re a few steps ahead of the people you’d like to share your knowledge with, then you could go with this option. Remember though, you only need to know more than the person you’re teaching. Sometimes being closer to the beginner can work in your favour as you might be able to break down the steps more easily so don’t feel you’re not ready or you don’t know enough yet.

How can you apply this? What can you help people with — this could be a specific thing or include more broader subject knowledge. Examples could be your degree or teaching subject, or any area where you’re enthusiastic and know enough to teach it.

These five options might have given you some ideas, but please read on for some exercises that will hopefully give you more insight into what it is you really want to blog about and why.

The No 1 most important thing about your blog’s niche is this word

Why?

For me, this in itself was the the best bit of blogging (and career advice) I’d ever heard. If you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’ll be motivated to continue, and you’ll love the process of what you’re do rather than seeing it as a means to an end. It will also be more motivating to create goals for yourself as you’ll have a very definite ‘why’ for doing it.

‘Why’ exercises for blogging success

You can learn all the blogging and monetising techniques you like, but I honestly think they’re kind of redundant if you don’t know why you’re writing, making videos, sharing your thoughts with the world… It doesn’t have to be a complicated why, you just need to know what it is.

You could start Googling profitable niches to blog about. However, I believe this is a waste of time to pick something based purely on how profitable it might be. Fair enough if you happen to be also deeply passionate and it’s profitable, but the enthusiasm and love for your subject must come first, otherwise months or years down the line, you’re likely to get bored or want to start again with something that touches your heart and feels more authentic to you.

If monetising your blog is important, I can show you how in this article which is relevant regardless of your niche.

How to blog about what you love and get paid to do it

In this first exercise, spend some time thinking about the following. You could give yourself a few days to a week to connect with these things if you need longer, and don’t worry if some of the things you write overlap.

This is for you if you’re very much at the start and haven’t a clue what your blog’s niche should be. Or, you want to refine your ideas and get clearer about what would be the most authentic niche for you.

• What are skills and strengths?

Write down everything you’re good at here. It could include things like, problem solving, graphic design, connecting with people. Even if you think it’s unrelated to your blog, write it down anyway.

• What are your hobbies and things you would like to do but haven’t yet?

This includes anything you do for fun whether you’re good at it or not. You could also write down things you’d like to try but haven’t yet. Think about things on your bucket list if you have one.

• What are your interests?

What do you enjoy talking about? Take some time to observe your conversations. What do you share on social media? Write down anything that interests you whether you have in depth knowledge in this area or not.

This first phase is about gathering research and something I should have been more aware about when I started Thought Brick. Once you’ve spent some time on this, you can now move on to creating your why mindmap.

Creating your ‘why’ mindmap

By now, you should have lots of research gathered on your skills, strengths, hobbies and things you’d love to do but haven’t yet. I’d now like you to go through all of your research and highlight areas that stand out to you. Are there any things you’ve written down that you’d like to potentially blog about or investigate further?

You’re now going to make your why mind map using a large sheet of paper and some coloured pens.

(Thanks Mum for introducing me to the joy of creating multicoloured mind maps in 1998)

1. In the centre of the page, write my blog
2. Next draw three branches coming off from this titled hobbies, strengths and skills, and interests.
3. You’re now going to write down everything from your research section minus anything that you know you definitely don’t want to include in your new blog for whatever reason.
4. Now comes the why! For each thing listed, write out why this is a hobby, strength or interest of yours. For example, if you’re into painting, one reason could be that it helps you get into a meditative state and meditation helps you to destress. Try to go into as much depth as possible.
5. Once you’ve determined your why’s, for each thing, write out why you’d like to share this with others. This might be slightly trickier for some of the things you’ve written down and that’s OK.

Remember, your reasons for sharing could be as simple as something such as you want other people to hold you accountable, or you want to build a community of like minded people because there aren’t many of you with this particular problem/interest/passion…

Keep going with this and delving deep by continuously asking why you love X and why you want to share it. You know you’ve reached your unique niche when you feel excited, you’re confident about your why,  and unfazed even if there are potentially others creating similar blogs.

Still confused about what your blogging niche is?

I don’t expect you to just read my article and have it all figured out, so don’t be hard on yourself if you still don’t know. Something I find useful though is to allow my unconscious to work on something for a few days by asking it a question. Your question could be How do I find the perfect unique niche for my blog?

Set your mind the task of really finding the answer. You might wake up the next day and have some insight you hadn’t consciously thought of, you could meet someone who helps to clarify a few things for you, or get an ah ha moment in a completely unrelated activity. Just be patient — you’ll get there.

Failing that, sometimes it’s also good to just start writing, making videos, creating content… What do you feel most inspired to write about and share in this moment? Then go ahead and do it. Through the act of doing and getting on with stuff and not worrying about everything being 100% perfect, you’ll often find the answer.

Finally, I’d love to hear your thoughts. After having my blog for almost six years and making it a big part of what I do for a living, I’m now passionate about sharing this knowledge with you but I also recognise that I too, am moving into a new niche of sharing what I’ve learnt and would love to know which parts of this article were useful, not useful etc, plus anything else you might want to know. Also, if you already have a blog, are there any techniques, words of wisdom, or encouragement you’d like to share with others?