How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog — Copyblogger

Will anyone read my new blog?

It’s a terrifying question, but an important one. If you’recommitted to building a popular and profitable blog, you’ll have towrite, read, and talk about your topic almost every day for the nextseveral years. You’ll invest thousands of hours, quite literallygambling with your time.

The question is, how will you approach it? Will you start writingand hope someone notices you? Or will you carefully research yourniche, looking for the precise angle that will make your blogirresistible?

I’ve tried both, and I recommend the latter.

It’s never possible to know for sure whether people will like yourblog, but keyword research sure helps. You can see how many people aresearching for your topic in the search engines, and you can use it tocompare different topics to each other and gauge their popularity.

A Real World Example—A Mixed Martial Arts Blog

A friend of mine is thinking about starting a blog on Mixed MartialArts (sometimes called ultimate fighting). He’s an expert in the niche,and while the sport is certainly growing, he was wondering whetheranyone is looking for information online.

So I decided to look it up for him using Wordtracker. Using their Keyword Researcher tool, I searched for “mixed martial arts” and here were the first few results:

I was a little surprised:

• Considering all of the mainstream news and television coverage they’re getting now, I expected more than 352 searches per day
• Out of the next most popular keywords, people were looking for “gear” and “seminars,” meaning the searchers want to participate in the sport, not just watch it
• With people searching for information about Atlanta, New York, and Australia, it shows that there’s strong interest in local training and other events

Finding Related Keywords to Target

All of that information is useful, but I know next to nothing aboutmixed martial arts, so I suspected I was missing something. I decidedto “dig” a little further with Wordtracker’s Keyword Universe tool—anifty little program that searches the web for related keywords. Aftera few minutes, it spit out the following results:

Both “MMA” and “mma” are in the search results. I’m guessing they’rean abbreviation for Mixed Martial Arts, so let’s take a look at them:

Now we’re getting somewhere! If we combine their daily searchtotals, nearly three times as many people search for “MMA” as “mixedmartial arts.” With more people using the abbreviation than the fullterm, we might also infer that this audience is already very familiarwith the niche.

Still, let’s back away from that for a moment and look at the sixth related keyword from above: UFC.

Researching Related Markets

As it turns out, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. It’sthe name of the main mixed martial arts league, kind of like NFL forfootball or NBA for basketball. Let’s take a look at the traffic itreceives, once again looking at both the uppercase and lowercasekeywords:

Wow! If we combine the predicted daily traffic, “UFC” is receiving7,098 searches per day—more than seven times the traffic of “MMA.” Evenlonger terms with “ufc” in them, such as “ufc 79,” “ufc 81,” and so onreceive significant traffic.

Having no idea what 79 and 81 mean, I searched for them both inGoogle, and it looks like the numbers represent individual UFC events,kind of like boxing matches. People are looking for more information ongreat fights from the past.

Interpreting Your Keyword Research Results

I didn’t include the full list, but some of the other popularkeywords for “UFC” are “ufc knockouts,” “ufc fighters,” and “ufcvideos.” Unlike the results for “mma,” we don’t see nearly as manysearches for different types of gear and training.

What does that mean? Well, here’s what I think:

• The people who search for “MMA” are either interested in becoming an MMA fighter, or they already are one
• The people who search for “UFC” are fans, mostly just interested in watching the events and following the fighters
• Because there are obviously more fans than fighters, a website targeting the fans and the “UFC” keywords would probably get more traffic
• Because of the searches for different types of gear with “MMA,” you might be able to make more money targeting people directly involved in the sport
• Each set of keywords represents a completely different niche with its own advantages and disadvantages

Is this useful information? You betcha.

In marketing, one of the most important steps you can take is tosegment your audience. If you can divide them by their interests, thenyou can craft a message that’s perfectly targeted at the group you wantto pursue. It makes it much, much easier to grab their attention.

In my friend’s case, he only wants to target fighters. He has nodesire whatsoever to become just another reporter on the individualevents. The purpose of starting the blog is to build his authority as amixed martial arts expert and eventually make a living from trainingfighters.

Obviously, he should focus on the “MMA” keyword set. All of thekeywords within that category are distinctly related to his audience.Not only does the data allow him to narrow his focus down to a specificniche, but it shows him which topics to write about, as well as severalways to make money.

Want to find out how? Keep reading, and I’ll show you how to turnyour keyword research into traffic and a long-term revenue stream.

Next: Use Keyword Research to Find Post Topics That Score Big