How to Choose the Best Niche for your Blog

Finding the best niche for your blog is the MOST important part of the whole process. If you get it wrong, you could end up spending up to 2 years working on it, to get very poor results. so take your time. Do Not Skip this step.

When you have completed your Niche Research you should have a Niche that: 

  • you are interested in or can research
  • has lots of subtopics to write about
  • has lots of products or services to sell
  • is in demand – high number of Google searches each month 

If you have no ideas yet, carry out the following brainstorming session. 

BrainStorming Ideas

Ideally use a Google sheet or Excel spreadsheet and Write down at least 20  subjects. Although paper or a fag packet will do to jot down ideas, you will need a spreadsheet later to do the sorting and ranking, so do take this really seriously! 

To come up with an idea list, think of books or magazines you have read or would choose to read on a long train or plane journey.

It will help you maintain your effort over months of blogging ahead if your ideas are INTERESTING TO YOU.

Have you solved a problem in your life, recently? Would others be interested in your solution?

Have you bought something recently that is so amazing that others might be interested in it? A boat, caravan, campervan, tent, lawnmower….

Go to Amazon, type in things that you have searched for recently. Is there a demand for that item?  Is it perhaps on the top-seller list on Amazon?

On Amazon, search the department list – which has some interest for you?

On Wikipedia, look through the list of hobbies, again search out your interests.

The pandemic rendered many office jobs obsolete. Can you think of anything that helped people in that situation, or what might be needed?

Many people took up new hobbies and games during the Covid lockdown. Do any of these appeal to you, could you teach them or provide the equipment to carry these out?

First Filtering Session: 

1  Check for Communities:

Are there communities of people already interested in your subject?

2  Check for Competition

Are there any competitor websites?

3  Check for Products

Are there products within your niche you could promote or sell?

Community Research

Are there sub-reddits on the subject

Search for Forums on the subject using FindaForum and Google

Competitor research

Are there blogs in the niche. Do ads appear in the SERPs . If  not then no-one is spending to show ads. If there are Ads, what products are being sold – all ideas for future Affiliate sales. Filter out any niches  with no Ads.

On Facebook, are there groups on your subject? 

Do FB ads show up when you’re searching? If you scroll down the RHSide to Page Transparency, you’ll see a complete run-down of Ads for this page, which is great for research, check how long Ads have been running,  for a sure-fire way of ensuring sales can be made. Clicking through to the Ad  landing page will reveal more about products.

Product Research

Which of the niche ideas have obvious physical products eg Garden – Spade, fork, mower…  

Look through Clickbank.com, to see if there are any Information products to sell, similarly check other affiliate networks like Shareasale, Odigger, and Offervault.

Second Filtering Session: Measurement.

Our goal is a topic that is searched frequently but does not have massive competition. Thus making it very likely that our site will come up in the SERPS and get traffic when we build it.

Note: Eliminate ideas that rely totally on one product. You will need a variety of products within your niche.  Also eliminate anything within the Dating, Weightloss, Health, Recipes and Make Money Niches as these are too big and would take even an expert a long time to rank a new site.

Initial Research Using Google Search

 You can use Google search initially – auto-complete will suggest, as you type your query in the search bar, things that have some search volume.

Also, related Searches (bottom of SERPs pages ) will suggest related or subtopics.

Research with a  Keyword Tool

Most keyword tools will give enough data to complete this step, so you can use Ubersuggest or Google Keyword Planner for instance.

It is good to see lots of sub-topics having good search volume.

Check the Trend

Google Trends will enable you to see the pattern of searches and compare different keyword trends against each other.

If there is any distinct downward trend showing when you expand out the 5 year graph, its probably not a Niche to go into.

Use the SERPs to Check the Quality of Answer

To assess this manually, type the keyword into Google, note the top 10 sites that come up, and visit each site noting the article length, depth, and overall quality. It is usually obvious if you can write a better, longer, and more detailed answer to the query in the keyword. Although this is a longer process, it does show whether there is a space for you in this Niche for you. 

If a Forum comes up in the SERPs, bingo!  You have proof people are searching for that topic AND there are no authority sites available to answer the question posed.

If you want a very reasonably priced tool to assess your chances within a niche, check out Ken Evoy’s SBI keyword tool. See the  video below and my review of SBI

Example “campervan accessories” 

enter in Amazon – gives this result https://www.amazon.co.uk/campervan-accessories/s?k=campervan+accessories

So you have proof that the Niche has demand – all the products displayed on Amazon.

Now enter in Google keyword planner – 205 results with search volume over 50/month and enormous volume of sub-topics to keep you busy for months. Some high competition but looking at the SERPs results, some low Domain authority sites were ranking well. 

enter in Ubersuggest: 

The Ubersuggest result shows that many of the keywords towards the bottom had SEO difficultly low enough for us to write a good article and score a good ranking position.

The  Google Trends result for “Campervan Accessories” is shown below, Covid probably affected the last year, but nonetheless, interest is fairly constant. Note language variants – Americans would perhaps search for RV accessories

If the terms in this article are new to you have a look at my guide to SEO terms

More detail on SEO can be found in this explanatory article

SBI – Solo Build It

If you want a brilliant tool that takes care of your Niche selection and Keywords – You can join SBI with its very reasonable monthly fee, the BrainStorm It tool ( and many other tools) are included

check out Ken Evoy’s SBI keyword tool. See the  video below and my review of SBI

This is an affiliate link. I may receive a commission if you buy, which helps me run this site… thanks

Key Point –  A wide enough Niche

You will be building your blog for many months perhaps years. In that time things can change. For instance, a diet can fall out of fashion.

Technology is a prime example of things changing all the time- cars with diesel and petrol engines obsolete within a few years due to electric vehicles. VHS and DVD recording devices were rendered obsolete due to the simplicity of recording on a USB device.

So choose a wide niche, ‘cookers’ rather than ‘gas cookers’ or ‘halogen ovens’. ‘Media recording’ rather than ‘DVD recorders’ and ‘Dieting’ rather than ‘the XYZ Diet’

The next step is to pick a domain name. Make sure you don’t limit your niche by choosing too narrow a domain name, I am guilty of this in the past and regret all that wasted effort writing, finally giving up with that blog.

So you have now started the first step of building your blog. Choose wisely don’t jump in before you’re sure the Niche is right – something you can dedicate a LOT of time to, writing articles.

Preferably choose one that is monetizable – where there are physical products to sell or info products And looking further into the future, one that you could devise a course to offer your students.

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