How to choose a niche that never runs out of writing idea

There was once that I stood in front of a blank screen for quite some time over a few days trying to think of a writing idea. I admit that I was having this writer’s block for one of my cloud computing blog.

I never had this issue with my security blog where I can easily think of a topic without looking at the blank screen for too long. After few days, I stood down and try to figure out why the writer’s block doesn’t happen to my security blog.

I have the answer in the end and it is what I am going to talk to you today which is choosing a niche for your blog.

The reason why I started a blog about IT security is because I love IT security and I am doing it everyday because I am a software engineer in a security firm. I deal with security everyday and if I really give up on security one day, my 9-5 job will the first to go down before my security blog.

The reason I started a cloud computing blog is simply because I did some keyword research and research shows that it is quite a high paying keywords. I didn’t even ask myself whether I like this niche or not and just start a cloud computing blog and stuck there.

You see, I have two blogs here and the reason why my cloud computing blog will fail is because I choose the wrong niche to go in. So, choosing a niche for your blog is important if you do not want to have a frequent writer’s block.

Choosing your niche

I would like you to put away all these questions whether your niche is profitable or the total number of internet users that are interested to go into your niche. What I want you to do in your first step is to only focus on what you like.

Grab a pen and a piece of paper. Write down 3-5 things that you really like. If you can’t get at least 3, you are not trying hard enough. Here are some tips to help yourself out:

What do you do during your free time? I mean your hobby.
Do you like your full-time job? That could be your niche as well.
What you usually think of every night before you sleep?
When group chatting with your friends, what type of conversation that you are particularly interested with?
What is your top ten websites? The sites that you will visit every morning after you get up from the bed.

Let me walk you through with my example and I had discovered that I like to play with my Android phone, I love my 9-5 job and I wanted to start my own internet business. So I have 3 niches now and let’s proceed to the next step.

Count your potential audiences

I’m not an expert in keyword research but what you are doing here is to roughly get the idea whether how many people is searching for your niche every day. It will be useless if you are writing on something that no one is interested of.

In here, I use the Google Adwords keyword tool which is free and here are the high level results.

Note that this is not a good keyword research practice. I have to remind you again that the purpose of you doing this is just to get a rough idea whether your niche is something people search around. So, about 1,000 searches a day is a good number to start.

Tip: If you want to learn more about keyword research, you can refer to one of Copyblogger series on keyword research.

Start subscribing

Remember my strategy on how to be one of the earliest commentator in blog commenting. You should do the same again here by subscribing all the RSS of your favorite websites to your RSS reader.

By reading what other people is writing in your niche, you will get more idea on what to write for your blog. I’m not asking you to rewrite or copy the content here. What I am asking here is to write about your opinion and feedback about those news whether you agree, disagree or have additional points to add-on.

Don’t remember them

Don’t go and remember what you are going to write later. Chances of you forgetting is pretty high. Once you know what you are going to write, save them somewhere. I heard of the idea of saving it in a notepad but I don’t think it works for me because i ended up a lot of notepads due to the reason I didn’t centralize them in one location.

What I do is whenever I read news that I think I have something to write about, I will then go to my WordPress and add a new post there. I don’t write a lot there at this stage. I just put the title, paste the link of the news and save it as draft.

Whenever I run out of writing ideas, I will just go to all my drafts.

Start a few of them

Blogging expert says that you should only focus in one blog and then move to another when it has a stable income, traffic and blah blah blah. That is true and I am not neglecting that.

You can still focus in one niche by starting a few first. The reason I asked you to do so is because you will realize that as time passes, you will begin to drop those that you are not interested to blog. If you pick only one, who knows that you are not good with the rest of the niches that you had just picked?

The best way to start few of them together is by starting up with cheap web hosting. I had done that with Bakka, one of the web hosting located in my country and it is not more than $2 a month one a monthly basis.

Since your blog is new, it is not so risky hosting on a cheap web hosting first. Once you had decided on which niche to focus probably in 3-6 months time, you can then get a better hosting such as Hostgator and transfer your blog there. Usually, they will do it for free because they want you to host your blog with them and so, you don’t have to worry too much about it.

And my verdict is…

You might not totally agree with me especially on the idea of starting a few blogs at the same time but I think it helps bloggers who still can’t find themselves in blogging.

My point here is, if you are writing a niche that you have a lot of interest in, you will find it harder for your content creation to go dry.

What about you there? How you found the niche that you are writing today? Share with us below.