One of the first pieces of advice you’ll hear from almost every blogger is “Find a niche.” It’s fantastic advice, but if you don’t have any experience blogging, then choosing a niche blind can be incredibly difficult. Never mind picking one that has real monetization potential.
Ideally, you’ll have some experience as a blogger before you try to make any money from it. The easiest way to get to that point is to start a blog and get to writing about anything that comes to mind while trying to build an audience.
In this article, we’ll talk about why niches are so important and how to blog if you don’t have one. Then we’ll go over some fun ideas for a personal blog so you can get to work on yours right away. Let’s jump right in!
Why Niches Are So Important
Almost every successful blog you run into will have a niche. That is to say, a narrow field of topics they focus on. For Leaving Work Behind, that niche covers freelancing, blogging, and working from home.
The point of a niche is to give your blog focus and help it find an audience. If you want to blog about whatever you want, that’s perfectly fine, but that approach doesn’t lend itself well to monetization. Instead, you’d be blogging more as a hobby.
It takes a staggering amount of work to build a successful blog from the ground up. To succeed, you’ll have to become proficient with the following skills:
- Writing and editing interesting content
- Maintaining a regular publishing schedule
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social media and email marketing
- Connecting with your audience
- Figuring out a way to monetize your blog
That’s a lot of effort to put into any project, so you need to make sure you choose a niche that has potential. Make your niche too narrow and you might never find a sizable audience. Cast too wide a net and you’ll be competing with a hundred other blogs. It’s a tricky decision, particularly if you’re 100% new to blogging.
How to Blog Without a Niche (And Why You Should Consider It)
Often, we become so concerned with maximizing our blog’s profit that we forget writing is supposed to be fun. Writing without a niche, in particular, is a wonderful way to flex your creative muscles.
You may already have some experience blogging. Maybe it was a personal blog or you had the chance to write for another publication. That’s excellent, because the more experience you have, the easier it becomes to pick up all the skills I laid out in the previous section.
If you want to start a blog but are having problems choosing a niche, I recommend you try your hand at just writing about whatever you want for a while. Blogging without a niche, even just for fun, can help you develop key skills, such as:
- Getting you into the habit of writing regularly
- Developing a personal writing style
- Getting acquainted with blogging platforms, such as WordPress
- Helping you build a social media presence
The idea of picking a profitable niche and starting blogging without any experience whatsoever is seductive. However, it’s also unrealistic. In my experience, the most successful bloggers have at least one or two failed projects under their belt before they strike gold. Those failures might not be fun to look back on, but they help develop the experience you need to grow a successful blog from scratch.
Starting a blog isn’t difficult, from a technical perspective, and we can guide you through the entire process. Then, it’s only a matter of choosing what to write about.
3 Topics You Can Blog About That Always Get Good Results
These five topics are so popular that breaking into them is an uphill battle. However, I always recommend them to people that are new to blogging so you can get your ‘training wheels’ off.
As you grow your blog, you can always narrow down its focus or just keep it around for fun while you develop other projects.
1. Parenting
Around 43% of moms turn to the internet for parenting advice. That means if you’re a mom or a dad and you want to share your experiences, you are guaranteed to find an audience.
Moreover, blogging about parenting lends itself to really opening up to your readers. It’s the kind of topic where if you find a blogger you trust, you’re likely to stick around for a long time.
2. Cooking
If I only had to write about one thing for the rest of my life, it’d be cooking. Before getting into freelancing, I used to work in kitchens and I spent way too much time looking up recipes online.
I’m far from the only one, though – cooking blogs are incredibly popular. The best part is, you can focus on any type of cooking you want and there will always be an audience since everyone likes to eat.
3. Personal Finances
Most people aren’t great with money. To be more accurate, most people are terrible at managing their finances. If you have a decent amount of savings and you don’t spend your entire paycheck every month, you’re already way ahead of the curve.
Blogging about finances might sound boring, but it can be a very engaging topic. There are a lot of online communities focused around helping their members to better manage their finances. If you can write engaging and informative content, you’re bound to be a hit with them.
Conclusion
One of the primary reasons that people give up on blogging is it’s hard to see quick results. Building a blog takes time and if you choose a niche without any potential, then you might be wasting yours. On the other hand, running a personal blog for a while might not earn you any money, but it’ll prepare you for doing it as a job.
Blogging without a niche isn’t that hard. It comes down to writing about what you know and your interests. That might be cooking, parenting, managing your finances, or anything else you can imagine. There’s probably an audience for your favorite topic out there and you’ll pick up some invaluable experience along the way.
Do you have any questions about blogging without a niche? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.