Creating your blog - a space on the internet where you share your ideas and thoughts with an audience can be challenging. The thought of starting a blog can be exciting however, as soon as the excitement dies down, you’re riddled with so many questions. We are starting a series to answer some of the questions you may have about starting your blog. This is a 4-part series and this blogpost covers what a niche is, why you need a niche and finally, how to decide on a niche by narrow-down your interests.

What is a niche?

As you think of starting a blog, there are so many ideas floating on your mind to write about. With many ideas of what to blog about on your mind, finding a niche is deciding to focus on an idea (or a fine blend of ideas) to write about. A niche is a central idea or overarching theme for your blog. Examples of niches are tutorial for developers, fashion, writing, career advice, etc.

Why have a niche?

The goal of writing and publishing online is to share your ideas with others, get feedback on your work and learn. To achieve this, you (well, your blog) should consistently attract an audience. Putting out a specific type of content consistently establishes your credibility in the mind of your readers.

How to decide on a niche?

With many ideas floating on your mind, it can be tasking to narrow-down and pick a niche. Here is a quick activity to help you with that:

👉 List the ideas you are interested in writing about

👉 Create a hierarchy of these interests. These interests can be ranked on a scale of your most passionate to the least passionate. This requires a great level of introspection and honesty. It is also very important as passion can be a fuel that keeps you going when you haven’t built a loyal audience.

👉 Pick the topmost interest

👉 Start blogging

Narrowing down to a particular niche can be limiting. If you’ll love to explore as many interests as possible, write and build your niche based on feedback from your readers.

A new perspective?

It is important to be specific even as you carve a niche for your blog. Your writing has to be interesting enough to keep readers hooked so, an important question to ask yourself is “what new or different perspective am I bringing to this [“this” refers to the niche you have picked]? For instance, if you write about fashion, a new perspective might be writing about style in your city and how it has evolved.

We will be writing a lot more on questions and concerns you might have about starting a blog for the first time. If you have topic ideas or suggestions or questions, you can always email or send us a message on Twitter. This is an on-going series to get you blogging. You can read the second part of the series here.

If you are in search of a blogging platform to start your blog, using Swish is an easy and quick way to get your blog started. We wrote a blog post to get you started with Swish. You can read it here.

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