Day 2: Find Your Blog Niche + Domain Name (Start a Blog in 9 Days)
Find your sweet spot: where your skills, audience, and opportunity meet.
Welcome to Day 2 of the Start a Blog in 9 Days Challenge 🎉
Glad to have you here.
If you haven’t yet, make sure you check out Day 1 first.
Now, let’s talk about defining your niche and naming your blog (the same can apply to your Substack publication).
Why You Must Care About Your Niche
Choosing to blog about something you’re passionate about means you won’t get bored with it soon after starting a website and writing many articles on the topic. Also, it will be easier to master it as a skill and become known in your niche.
My niche was personal development because it’s what I love reading about and I’m constantly making changes to improve different aspects of my life, work with my subconscious mind, create the reality I desire, heal, manage my triggers, and so much more. So it made sense to also start writing about it. And I haven’t stopped ever since.
I’ve published a ton of articles on Let’s Reach Success and although it’s a pretty broad niche, I managed to turn this into an authoritative platform and make writing my career. And you can do the same.
However, I suggest you pick a smaller niche. That’s because there’s too much competition and it would be easier to rank for keywords related to a specific topic. Once you have an audience and search engines like your articles, you can write on anything else related to this niche too.
I cover entrepreneurship, health, travel, general lifestyle advice, finance and more. It might have been about personal growth in the beginning but nothing stopped me from starting to write about spiritual and business growth too.
After all, these are all connected and I myself began caring about the other 2 niches eventually.
The 3 Elements of The Right Niche
Things you’re good at.
It would be ideal if it’s something you’re naturally good at.
Things you enjoy doing.
Nothing can be done well if it’s not done with a desire, joy and a positive attitude.
The things you enjoy are the ones you can do forever without getting bored or losing motivation. That’s why you might as well choose one of them and start making it your main activity and a source of income.
Things you can get paid for.
People must need what you can offer them in that field, there must be a market for that if you’re planning to make money from it.
Also, put giving value before getting the money of your readers. Try to offer something unique and helpful and in return people will be glad to pay you for it.
Make sure you know something about the topic you’ll cover, but also be interested in it, care about the problem you’ll solve with your content, and make sure there are others out there wanting to read about it.
You can dominate even a crowded niche if you’re serious about it, publish content frequently, share your unique voice, establish yourself as an authority in the field, and hang around long enough to be noticed and get traffic.
Moving onto your domain name.
How to Choose Your Domain Name
Once you define your niche, you can choose a domain name connected to it. That’s how your site is called, in my case it’s Let’s Reach Success.
Here are some tips to help you out.
Make it:
Short;
Easy to type;
Easy to pronounce;
Without numbers or hyphens;
Related to the niche you chose;
Memorable;
One of a kind.
Please check if it’s available, especially the .com version, which is the most common one. You also wouldn’t want to see that there’s already a popular site like that ending in .net.
Your competition, in this case, would be blogs in the same niche and with similar names. Check them out to see what they are all about.
Does your domain name sound like a brand?
That’s an interesting question and something worth thinking about. Because the blog you’re about to set up will live forever and will soon be filled with valuable content, it will also be the foundation of your personal brand and online business.
If you gain a lot of attention in a year or a few, you might have regrets for not choosing a more professional name. Think long-term too when picking one.
If you decide to use your name, that means putting yourself out there as much as possible. That’s okay if you’re an extrovert and see yourself as the main part of your brand. But if it’s going to be about the content and products, then the name can be related to the niche.
I’m glad I didn’t use my name. Let’s Reach Success is something I switched to a year after creating a site called FollowMe2Success. You can see the initial idea is the same, but the current one is probably gonna stay forever.
What’s more, it’s what I used when registering my company in the Netherlands, and on each social media platform or other places online where I represent the brand. Consistency is important.
And finally, don’t overthink it. People email me all the time to share that they are about to start a blog but also why they haven’t done it yet. They are usually stuck in the stage of picking a niche or a blog name.
In both cases, they overthink it and want to find the perfect one, as if that itself will help them build a profitable business. But that’s not the case. It can turn into an obstacle if you let it stop you for too long.
So come up with something that will probably stick and get to setting up your website as soon as possible.
As for registering your new domain name, you will easily do that with a few clicks the moment you set up your blog. You’ll see how in the next days of the challenge.
Before you go, share your blog niche and name in the comments below 🙌🏻
See you tomorrow for Day 3,
Lidiya