How to Choose a Niche and Goals For Your Business Blog

To be an effective marketing tool, a business blog can’t jump all over the place from topic to topic. Building a loyal readership that will share your content and inspire others to jump on your bandwagon is, in part, the result of choosing a focus for your blog.

The goal should be to become an authority in your niche, and doing that requires fairly tight consistency of topic.

Why It’s So Important to Pick a Niche For Your Blog

People who read blogs like to know what they’re getting before they visit your site. That doesn’t mean you have to write about the same things all the time, day in and day out, but you should return to the meat of your niche regularly to keep your loyal readers coming back.

For example, a credit union might blog about personal finance—specifically personal finance tips related to banking and individual investing. Sometimes a post about frugality in the home or the value of the dollar worldwide might be appropriate, but generally posts stay within the niche.

Your readers should know that when they need information about x, you’re the go-to source, and they are confident they won’t be bombarded with pictures of y and rants about z.

Yes, it’s okay to bring some of your personal life into your blog if you’re a business owner, but your business blog isn’t a diary and shouldn’t come off like one. Your goal must be to provide content that adds value to the lives of those reading what you are publishing.

How to Choose a Niche For Your Blog

Depending on your industry, choosing a niche for your blog may be pretty easy or extremely difficult. If the focus of your business is already niche-y, then it’s likely that an overarching theme along with micro-topics will present themselves without your having to do any major brainstorming.

But if your company’s focus is broad, then narrowing down your blog’s niche can take some time. The niche you choose may change over time, too, so don’t worry about it too much for now.

The Key to Success is Finding the Balance Between Too Small and Too Broad

Let’s say you run a business that installs residential windows and patios. When it comes to your blog, writing just about windows and just about patios might be a bit too narrow.

So instead, your blog topics might cover a wider range of home renovation project—ranging from painting to room additions, plumbing, and electrical.

This is a great way to drive organic traffic for people who might need a new patio or new windows, and it’s all still within the home renovation niche.

Now if you begin expanding that blog into things like at-home car repair tips, then you’re starting to get a bit too broad and that’s not the best approach. There are still thousands of potential topics that you can write about within your niche without having to expand to something that’s a bit more of a stretch.

Use Multiple Authors For Different Perspectives and Areas of Expertise

Having multiple authors can also be a great benefit any blog.

If your blog is about widgets, perhaps you have a group of different writers, each with their own Google+ Authorship markup—one who writes about red widgets, one who covers green widgets, and another who’s an expert on blue widgets.

By having multiple authors around the various sub-themes, you’ll end up with different styles of writing, which makes it more likely that you will satisfy the varied personas who visit your site. But if your only writer is an engineer, for example, the content might come off as dry to some readers.

Keep in mind that the writing itself can be outsourced, but the writer personas must be owned by you. That way, someone else or multiple paid authors can “ghostwrite” your content and you get the Author Rank credit.

Niche Blogging and SEO

It’s impossible to discuss this topic without factoring in SEO. Choosing the right niche will ultimately determine how much traffic (if any) you get from organic searches.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Find niche topics with a lower search volume, but higher click rates: Rather than competing with thousands of other blogs, you can dominate the results for highly topical searches
• Write for niche keywords with a lower keyword difficulty: It’s easier to rank for something like “women’s water shoes for hiking and swimming” than something broad like “shoes”
• Focus on niche topics where you’re actually an expert: Google is really focusing on E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), which means you’ll have a tough time ranking your travel blog content if you’re writing about a country or hotel that you’ve never actually visited.

Goal-Setting For Business Blogs

What kind of goals do businesses set for blogging? Here are a few examples:

• Write 100 new posts
• Sign up 100+ subscribers
• Get 1,000 organic blog visitors
• Add a podcast or video to your blog every week
• Attract 10 potential leads from your blog traffic
• Create a post series (example: “Questions from Customers”)
• Link the blog to your social media profiles
• Run monthly contests via your blog
• Get featured regularly on Reddit, Forbes (or any popular site)
• Turn a collection of posts into an ebook
• Turn a set of 50 or more posts into a printed book

Final Thoughts

Accomplishing some blog-related goals takes no time at all, while reaching others can take quite a lot of time and effort.

But don’t let the work or time involved stop you from exploring even the most ambitious blog goals, like eventually turning your blog into a book. Aim high with your blog, but expect to put in the necessary work, too. Blogs are not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tool.