Your blogging niche is something that we tend to overthink.
We question what it is that we are talking about.
We question if we are being too specific or not specific enough.
I want to break down a way to visualize your blogging niche in a way that is easy to understand and in a way that you can feel like you finally get control of your niche.
WHY IS YOUR NICHE IMPORTANT?
Unlike others out there, I believe that you can have multiple niches if they fit together. That said, I also think that you can be all over the map and be too confusing to your readers. So how do you find what works and what doesn’t?
Niche is crafted over the years of blogging. My niche has evolved through the years. I started as a mental health blogger. I went then to be a blogging blogger and now I am a combination of both of them. This is what I mean when I say that you can have multiple niches if they fit together.
My niches fit together because it is the purpose behind my blogging. I started blogging to heal. I started blogging to share my story. As I continued to show up and do my thing, I have learned how to blog and I can now help women start their blogs to share their stories.
Niches like the lifestyle niche mean that you can cover multiple topics under one umbrella topic. This gives you a little bit more freedom but it also means that you need to be super organized in the categories and topics that you talk about so you don’t overwhelm your readers.
Knowing what your niche means that you can give your readers relevant content that they are coming to you about. For example, if I were to suddenly start talking about recipes and food on my blog, it wouldn’t work. It just doesn’t fit into my niche and so my readers would be confused and some of them may never come back.
You want to speak to your audience and give them the knowledge that only you can give. There is nothing wrong with starting without a niche and narrowing it down as you go but hopefully what I talk about in the next section will help you.
Let’s dig in and discover how you can think about your niche in a new way to help you narrow and build up what you already know.
WHAT DOES A JELLYFISH HAVE TO DO WITH YOUR BLOGGING NICHE?
As I was doing a live video in my group a few months ago, I was drawing out how to narrow down your niche. I always drew out an umbrella to visualize how to break down and discover your niche but this time as I was drawing, I realized that it resembled a jellyfish more.
The main body of the jellyfish is going to be your comprehensive blogging topic.
Questions to ask yourself when coming up with your comprehensive blogging topic.
What do all of the topics you talk about have in common?
Is there a theme to what you talk about?
What is the end goal that your readers will experience when they read your blog post?
What are you an expert in?
I know that sometimes the term expert can throw us off. We don’t see ourselves as an expert in anything but I believe that we all are. Whether we are using our experiences or we are using our schooling or even a combination of both, we are experts in something. You are sharing your knowledge with your audience so where does that knowledge fall in terms of content?
The tentacles are going to be the specific topics that branch off of your comprehensive blogging topic.
Now that you have the body of your blog filled out, you get to figure out what the tentacles are of your blogging niche.
The tentacles are going to cover topics that you can talk about that are related to your main blogging topic.
So for example, with my blog, my main blogging topic is content or blogging. That means the tentacles that I have coming off of my jellyfish are going to be…
Blogging Basics
Blogging Resources
Small Business Blogging
Creative Content
Storytelling
It helps to think about your blogging content pillars when you are creating your tentacles. These can help you to narrow in and focus on what your supporting topics are in your niche. When it comes to creating these, you want to stick to no more than 10 categories or you are going to confuse your reader.
Before you fill in the tentacles, brainstorm all of the topic ideas that fall under your main topic. This will then help you to see what can be combined and what has to be on its own.
Jellyfish travel as groups so you can use the other jellyfish to break down your shoulder niches.
You always see groups of jellyfish so now you can take these other jellyfish and do the same thing with your shoulder niches. This will help you break down who is in your shoulder niches and what audiences you want to get in front of.
Use these smaller jellyfish to help you build your audience, create collaborations with those in those fields, and to even learn more to help you build upon your expertise.
Your niche doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You just need to brainstorm, build a list, and start breaking down the knowledge that you already have. It comes down to organizing your thoughts, your knowledge, and your experiences and figuring out where everything falls.
If you are ready to take the summer months and grow that blog that you have, Splash Into Blogging begins July 1. Well, it officially opens. Our first workshop will happen on July 6 and then every other Wednesday evening after that. To see what else is happening, grab the link and view the calendar of everything that is going on in the Splash Into Blogging Incubator.
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