How to Find Your Blogging Niche & What to Do With it
With so many travel blogs out there, it can be a bit overwhelming deciding what exactly you should blog about. While starting a travel blog might seem like a fun thing to do, if you want it to actually reach anyone beyond your friends and family, you’ve got to make it stand out from the crowd. This basically means choosing a niche, says Sam Wood who blogs at Indefinite Adventure…
Finding your niche
There are plenty of niches in travel blogging, some with a lot of competition like solo female travel, couples travel, adventure travel or luxury travel, and others with less competition like bicycle travel, voluntourism or eco travel. To determine which niche your travels and blog shall fit in, try asking yourself a few questions.
Who are you?
I myself am a gay, vegan, digital nomad. These aspects of who I am are all things that influence the destinations I choose, the way I travel and to some extent how I interact with people on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, these aspects of my blog rose to the surface quite naturally.
Do you travel by yourself, with a partner, with children or friends? Do you have any dietary restrictions? Does the way you look influence how people treat you? Are you a spiritual person? Have you made any unconventional life decisions, or had any unusual past experiences that inform who you are today? These things are all potentially interesting for your future readers.
What do you like?
Or put another way: what is your passion? Do you have a hobby that you take with you when you travel, or is there a specific activity that you look for and try to find others who also do it on your trips? Yoga, live music, stamp collecting or working with rescue dogs to give a few examples.
Is there any particular kind of food you enjoy or a certain kind of experience you always try to have in a new place? These things can serve as fascinating central parts of your blog’s niche if they are things you’re also going to be writing about.
Are other people writing about it?
Have you had the frustrating experience of not being able to find the kind of blogs online that you can really identify with? If you don’t feel represented among the travel blogs that already exist, it may be because there isn’t anyone already out there travelling and blogging about it in the way that you’d like to see.
If this is the case, congratulations – you have found your niche! Writing the content you want to see on the internet but haven’t already found is a great way to start.
Reaching your audience
It’s all very well having found your niche and started blogging, but if no one who’s interested in your content is reading it, that can be a little disheartening. At first, finding the people who are interested in reading your blog and getting it out in front of them can be a slow process, but as it starts paying off and you begin to get engaged, loyal readers visiting your blog and connecting with you, it is definitely worth it.
A good first step in to reaching out to your potential new audience is to do guest posts for bloggers in your same niche or at least where there is crossover with your niche. Connecting on a personal level with bloggers who write about things that attract a similar kind of audience to the one you are trying to reach and asking if you can guest post on their site is a great way to start.
Of course, social media is an essential component to blogging so getting out there early on various platforms is extremely important. On Twitter and Instagram, using hashtags that speak to your niche and appeal to the kind of people you want reading your blog both on your profile and in your tweets and pictures is of course an easy way to put yourself out there.
Joining Facebook groups and reddit threads is another excellent way to connect with people who are interested in your niche and getting more traffic to your site. Just make sure to be careful not to spam such platforms with your own content all the time as this will likely get you kicked off.
What’s next?
The direction you choose to take once you have a steady stream of readers coming to your blog depends on what you want to get out of it. Creating loyalty among readers by offering special content or free incentives to subscribers to a newsletter can be a great way to foster engagement and a two way conversation with your audience, for example.
Other possibilities may be monetizing your site by contacting advertisers that fit with your niche asking if they want to pay for ad space on your site or marketing yourself as an authority in your niche so that you can eventually apply for or receive offers of press. It all depends on what your aim is with your blog!
Author Biog
Sam Wood is a freelance writer and travel blogger, who blogs with his husband, Zab, at Indefinite Adventure. Originally from London, but now based in Berlin, he travels often and takes his work with him wherever he goes. You can also get in touch with him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,Foursquare, Pinterest and Google+.
