How to Blog For Income – Lesson 2 Learn How to Pick Your Niche

Hi Friends!

Welcome back to another lesson on How to Blog for Income.

Before we start, I advise you to visit lesson 1 if you haven’t so. In lesson 1, I explained what a blog is and share a little bit of information on how bloggers make an income from blogging. Today, I will teach you what a niche is and help you to pick your very own niche!

What is a Niche?

Let us start our lesson for today by defining what a “niche” is?

Niche is the theme of your website

Simply put, a niche is the theme of your website. Every article that you will post should be relevant to the niche that you have chosen at the beginning!

For example, Wealth Builder Tips’ niche is personal finance, so every article that I write is about personal finance. I cannot just post an article about cooking one day even if I have a really good article in mind because my readers who are looking for personal finance tip does not necessarily want to read an article about cooking.

Please do not begin writing an article in one niche then sporadically post articles that are not relevant to your niche!

Your goal is to keep your readers interested in your blog, so you want to give them articles that they are interested in. This would be impossible if your articles are not related to each other. Chances are, your readers will read one of your posts because it is a topic that they are interested in but as soon as they browse the next article and found out that it is not relevant to them, then they would simply leave. You don’t want them to leave! You want them to keep reading your posts!

Remember you want to increase traffic on every single article that you post because more traffic means more potential buyer!

How to chose a niche?

Two sides of the niche: Passion vs Profit

Choosing a niche for your blog can become really tricky. Some people would focus on a topic that they are really passionate about while others would focus on creating a blog for the sole purpose of selling. There are pros and cons for each side which I will explain below.

 

Passion-Driven Niche

The rule of thumb is to pursue a niche that you are passionate about.

It makes sense since you will have to consistently write articles about that topic, so if you are not passionate then you will have a harder time writing articles. Also, passion inspires others. If you are passionate about what you write, then your readers will sense it and it would make them want to join you in your mission.

The problem of this side of the coin is if there are no marketable products or services (unless you make your own) that you can advertise or sell, then your efforts of writing articles will be a waste of time because you will not generate any income.

Remember in order for us to make money then we have to advertise and sell products or services to our potential customers who are our readers.

Profit Driven Niche

The flip side of the coin is pursuing a “low-hanging fruit” niche that can be really profitable. This niche focuses on product or services reviews; the more expensive the product or services you are reviewing, then the higher the commission, therefore, the higher the profit you create.

The downside of this approach is people will sense your lack of genuineness if you are simply writing a review of a product or a service that you never know or never used. Unless you are willing to buy and test them or thoroughly research them, then I recommend that you should avoid writing “false” review page.

At the end of the day, I don’t want us to be an online salesperson who doesn’t believe in the product they are selling! I want us to be a person of influence in the niche we have chosen.

Find the Goldilocks Zone for Your Niche: A Niche that is profitable and “you can be” be passionate about.

What do I mean by Goldilocks Zone? Goldilocks zone is the sweet zone where your passion meets profits.

In order for us to determine our Goldilocks Zone, we need to do two things: First, it is important to know what or where you are passionate at. It would be nice if you can come up with 3 topics that you are passionate about. The next step is to see if your passion is profitable or not!

I firmly believe that it is better to determine what is your passion first before looking for a profitable niche because if you start looking for a profitable niche first, then there is a possibility that the “potential income” will blind your judgment. It may lead you to believe that you know the topic well or you are passionate about it only to run out of something to write later on in your career because you are truly not.

How to Determine Where or What I am Passionate About?

If you do not know what are your passions then the questions below may hopefully help you get a clearer picture of what you are passionate about!

Determine what activities or hobbies that take most of your time?

Aside from work, we tend to spend our time on the things we like to do the most! If you spend hours after hours behind your pc, PS4 or Xbox, then will you deny that your hobby is playing video games?

If you like playing video games then why not make a blog about it? Chances are, you know a lot about video games after spending too much time playing it. You can use your knowledge and experience to write walkthroughs, game reviews, etc.

The point I am trying to come across is if your blog niche is in line with your hobby then chances are, you will not run out of things to say, and you will love what you are blogging about.

Do you know a lot about your hobby? Are you okay learning more about your hobby?

The more you know about your hobby the better because you will be able to share more information on your blog!

But what if you are just new to this hobby and you don’t know a lot about it yet?

As long as you are willing to learn more about your new hobby then that is fine. It is actually good to learn and teach at the same time because you are able to understand your hobby more. In addition to, if you have readers that are more experience than you, then they will most likely give you a feedback that would help you become better.

I’ll share you a secret: I am just learning to blog as well. Wealthy Affiliate helps me to get used to the in and outs of blogging. Trust me, do not need to know everything to become an expert of something. Sometimes you just need to take the plunge even if you are not yet ready.

What do you talk about when you are with your friends?

Think of the times when you have conversations with your friends, family, or churchmates. Is there a particular topic that you like to talk about the most? Do you consider an expert on that topic? Do your friends seek your advice on that topic? If yes, then consider making it your niche.

When you and your friends regularly talk about a topic, then chances are that you already know how and where to gather information about the topic.

Maybe you and your friends are gym rats. You and your friends gather new information, discuss it and apply it to your daily health and fitness routine. If this is the case then why not talk about it with other people as well? Share what you have discovered over the years, your routing, review products that you have used, and recommend products that worked for you!

Where does your money go?

Finally, discover where your money goes because chances are you are spending it on things or events that you like! For example, when you do your budget you realize that most of your income goes to eating out.

In this case then why not write blogs about food? Instead of writing your reviews on Yelp or Yellow Page, create your own review blog. If you know how to cook, and you know the recipes of the food you are eating, then write those recipes and use Amazon or Walmart Affiliate to link the ingredients so your readers can buy it and try it themselves!

How do I Know What Niche is Profitable?

Hopefully, by now you have discovered a few things or activities that you are passionate about. The next thing that I will help you on is determining whether your passion can be turned into a profitable niche. There are two simple ways to do this. The first method is simply browsing in Amazon.com and the second is finding an affiliate program related to your niche.

The Amazon Method

Amazon sells everything and they have this neat program called Amazon Affiliates. Amazon Affiliates lets you generate a personal link that you can put into your website. When you reader buys that product then you get a commission! So the idea is to find a category in Amazon that is both in line with your passion and at the same time profitable

Note: This method works with eBay as well. 

Step 1: Search Amazon.com

Source: Google


Step 2: Click Shop by Department


Source: Amazon.ca


Step 3: Find the category that is related to your passion

Source: Amazon


That’s it. Just following those three simple steps would help you determine if your passion and your niche is profitable or not.

Putting the Method Into Action

So let us say your passion is on gaming and building gaming PCs.

Using the Amazon Method, you determined that Amazon sells different computer hardware by going to “Electronics, Computers & Office” then “PC Gaming”. Once in the “PC Gaming” department, you saw that Amazon further categorize the hardware according to its use and function.

At this point, you can decide whether your niche will be on general PC gaming or if you want your niche to be more targeted. If you choose PC gaming as your niche then you can talk about anything from writing a review about the best laptop to most expensive graphics cards, etc.

Source: Amazon

If you choose to be more targeted then you will have to choose one of the PC gaming categories and focus on writing articles about that category. For example, if you decide to focus on the Laptops, then all of your articles will be just about laptops.

                    
Remember to sign up with Amazon Affiliate so you can link the items to your blog for a commission!


The Affiliate Partner Method

The affiliate partner method follows the same idea as the Amazon method. First, you will identify what niche you want to be in, then sign up with affiliate program curators such as Clickbank and Rakuten. After creating an account, search for affiliate programs related to your niche, apply to those programs and create review articles or advertise those.

Conclusion

That concludes our lesson for today. I hope I was able to give you a nice definition of what a niche is and how to choose the perfect niche for your blog.

If you miss anything then let me quickly summarize it for you!

A niche is the theme or the topic of your blog. Once you chose your theme, then make sure that all the articles that you will write follow your niche.

Generally, bloggers face a dilemma when choosing a niche.  Although most expert will advise beginners to choose a niche where they are passionate about, this is not necessarily good. If for example, a new blogger’s passion is “planting trees” and decides to make it as their niche for their blog, then it is likely that they will not make as much money as they hope for.

My advice is to further discover your passion and list 2 to 3 of them so if you learned that your first passion is not profitable then you can decide to pursue the next one.

I also shared how to know if your niche is profitable or not. The first method is by browsing on Amazon.com. Check if there are products to sell on your chosen niche and determine the average price to see if you can make a profit.

The other method is to check for affiliate partners by signing up to Clickbank and Rakuten; websites that curate affiliate partners.

What do you think?

There you go friends, I hope I am able to teach you a lot for today’s lesson.

What do you think? What is the best part of the lesson and which one you have questions with? Let me know in the comment section below!

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