Picking a Niche - To Choose or Not to Choose
Chickens
In my previous post I talked about the fact that I picked a niche that I was interested in, but did not have personal experience with. I would like to own chickens and thought this would be a good opportunity to learn about best housing, picking chickens, and the care of chickens. Initially I thought I would focus on chicken coops, but as time has progressed I realized that I needed to talk about all aspects of chicken housing and care; this gives me many more topics to blog about...you can only write so much about coops!
Benefit of Personal Experience
However, since I started the site, my interest has begun to wain, for various reasons, I will not be getting chickens any time soon and so while I do alot of research to make my blog posts educational and accurate I feel that they really miss that personal touch that I would like them to have. WA training talks about brining in personal experience, opinions, and writing posts from a 1st person perspective - this is hard if you do not have personal experience within the niche. This experience has done two things, it has 1) made me try to identify another niche, one that I have more personal experience with, and 2) consider what I wanted to do with my current site. It isn't making money, so I don't think I can sell it, and in truth while my interest in the topic has flagged a bit, I still want to continue working on the blog and seeing how the site might grow. So with this in mind, I tried to think of some different ways to expand the site and considered broadening the information on the site to cover not just chickens, but homesteading topics like bees, canning, gardening, etc. I have some personal experience with some of these topics, but not all. This has lead me to another idea, which is bringing in partners.
Partnering Up
I thought that it would be nice to ask a few people who I know that have chickens if they would be interested in partnering up with me. They can bring a bit of the personal perspective in and I can continue learning and building the site to help people with chickens. So far I don't have an official partner, but I have been able to get some good stories and advice to add to the site. Hopefully, someone will take me up on my offer. I think it will make the site better, and more helpful. In the meantime I'm wracking my brain for my next niche...
Picking Another Niche
I've watched the WA training, Jay's trainings, and read other peoples blog posts about picking a niche - there is ALOT of advice out there as well as lists of niches that will supposedly be "highly lucrative." For some reason I find lists suspect. But some advice I've received, like think about something you can write about for many years to come, I think is very helpful - based on my experience with my first blog. Similarly, I think having personal experience and a desire to help others is also important, so I will keep mulling over the things I like to do and teach as well as things I think might be helpful to people.
I exercise regularly, am careful about my diet, and meditate regularly, so I have considered doing a health and wellness blog, but there seems to be 1000's of blogs of this type out there. Also, while I do this stuff it's not clear to me it is something I want to write about on a regular basis (LOL).
I'm curious of other peoples experiences with their niches, pickig their niche, and if they were ultimately happy with them. Let me know!
Recent Comments
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I picked a niche (because I needed one for the WA course) I couldn't think of a better one at the time. I have struggled with this since but I have persevered. Once I have decent traffic, and I'm monetising it reasonably well, I will likely sell it and move on to something else.
During my WA learning, I have thought of several niches that are far better suited to my current interests. So WA is a learning curve, and I wouldn't fret about which niche to work on. You can always change it or do as I am doing and see it through to the end and then 'flip' it.