Hi, everyone! I’m having my infusion today so I’m offline for the rest of the week. Enjoy this guest post from Fliss, who blogs over at sweetcleanliving.com, focusing on health and wellness, personal development and clean living. Whether you want to banish your insomnia, improve your self confidence or stop an anxiety attack, Fliss has something for you – Sweet Clean Living-style.

How to Find Your Blogging Niche

Finding your blogging niche is one of those things which sound really straightforward, but when it comes down to it, takes a little bit more work than you thought. Bloggers are ten a penny nowadays. While imagination is unlimited, it’s only a matter of time before everyone starts repeating one another, and eventually, themselves. Yet fear not – if you truly believe in your idea, and can write about it for hours and hours (and then some more hours), you’ll be generating great, readable content with a fresh, exciting viewpoint.

So how do you select your blogging niche? You do it like this:

Think about What You Know

Yes, the first step on our list is to think about what you know. The ‘knowing’ aspect is crucial – I’ve read things from bloggers who are clearly passionate about their subject – except it seems like they haven’t researched their subject very well, and their knowledge gaps are obvious.

I’m a firm believer in the magical powers of lists – in fact one actually changed my life. Step one of your blogging journey should always be writing a list of the topics you think you know well enough to blog about. Note: NOT ‘what to blog about’ – only the topics you know well.

My ‘what I know about’ starter list looked like this, for example:

• Cats
• Hi-tech
• High school teaching
• Journalism
• English grammar
• Healthy living
• Emigration

…and so on.

Once you’ve written your starter list, you’re ready to:

Choose 3 Topics To Blog About

See what I did there? The reason we started with the ‘what I know’ starter list was twofold – it’s also important to recognise that not every idea is the best one for a blog.

Now’s the time to choose 3 ideas for your possible niche. If you’re lucky, in the next step we could even merge two of them together! For now though, choose the 3 that you feel most strongly about. For me, these were:

• Healthy living
• English grammar
• Emigration

Why did I choose these? They’re the three which, for me at least, had the most blogging potential. I felt this because they’re issues I think about pretty much all day, every day.

It’s important to mention here that the quirkier your idea, the better. Anything that can and will make you stand out is great – but it has to be something you have enough material for. For example, my ‘English grammar’ topic might sound strange to you, but for me – living in a foreign country and living in a foreign language, forever answering questions and explaining about the finer points of English grammar, it was something I could generate endless material for. In the end though, I went with healthy living as my blog topic.

Write 20 Post Titles

This stage is the reason why we chose 3 ideas from your starter list. It’s because if you find you don’t have enough to say about your chosen topic, you can go back to the drawing board with your other two choices.

Take your favorite topic of the three, and write down at least 20 post ideas for it. I don’t want to give you too much guidance here because the point is that you’ll soon see a very clear theme emerge once you’ve managed to get to 20 or more posts. The post ideas can be very general, a couple of words or a sentence – whatever makes sense to you.

The way I did it was this: I took ‘Emigration’ (my first choice) and wrote down some post ideas – how it felt to be without family, learning a new language, adjusting to the new culture etc etc. I quickly realised two things:

1. My blog ‘niche’ was anything but,
2. I would run out of things to say once I was no longer ‘new’ in my new country.

And so I went back to my list, selected ‘healthy living’, and rinsed and repeated.

Find Other Bloggers in Your Niche

This last stage is where your idea will be made or…not made.

Think of this bit as market research – go to Google and type in ‘[your niche]’+ ‘blog’. You want to see what’s out there (important note – these are not your competitors. A huge part of blogging is about making friends with other bloggers and supporting one another), and you want to learn the following things:

• What topics these blogs discuss within your chosen niche
• If their ideas are similar to yours
• What’s missing from their blog? What would you do to change that?

This is where you put the ‘niche’ into ‘blogging niche’. If you can find a topic which is sustainable, enjoyable to read about and which you can write about for hours and you think has a market, then go for it.

Otherwise, start over from step one.
Good luck!

Follow Fliss’ own blogging journey with her at www.sweetcleanliving.com
Or find her on Pinterest – www.pinterest.com/FlissSCL
On Facebook: www.facebook.com/sweetcleanliving
Or Quora: www.Quora.com/profile/Fliss-Kay-1