Define Your Blog’s Main Topic
Whether you opted for a niche blog or a more general one, your site is going to have a main theme. In the case of a niche, the scope will be well defined and easy to identify. For general blogs, it can be much looser and less defined. Nevertheless, you need to have a clear, if preliminary, idea of what your blog will be about.
Identify Your Niche
You should identify the main topic for your niche based on your interests and motivations. For example, an iPhone freelancer may want to start a blog about Swift and iOS development. That’s a relatively large niche, but it provides the blog with a well-defined scope. You’ll know immediately what the boundaries for the blog are, as well as what does and doesn’t belong on your site.
After picking the main topic, jot down a list of ten articles you could write for your blog. You don’t need to write the actual articles yet, just the titles. When you’re done with this task, ask yourself whether doing this exercise left you excited or frustrated. Was it hard to come up with ten titles, or could you have kept going for ages? The main point of this exercise is to understand if you do in fact have enough to say about the topic at hand.
In most cases, you won’t have to worry about this, but if you pick a tiny niche that’s highly specific, you may quickly run out of ideas for articles and face other obvious problems, such as only being able to attract a small audience. We’ll discuss how to estimate the size of a niche in Analyze the Size of Your Niche.
Define the Main Theme for Your General Blog
If you intend to publish a blog on programming in general, web development, or a similarly broad topic in another industry, you don’t have to worry about the possibility of running out of ideas or having too small of an audience to capture.
Your pre-setup exercise will be a bit different from the niche one. Start by coming up with a main theme for your blog (e.g., web development). Follow that by listing several relevant topics that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about.
For example:
- Python
- Django
- JavaScript
- Deployment and scaling
- Relational and NoSQL databases
- Technical reviews
As you can see, these are very broad topics, each of which would roughly correspond to a different category within your blog. The argument could be made that a general blog is just a niche blog with a much larger niche. I can live with this interpretation, but the much wider latitude will definitely affect your blog in ways that warrant the niche/general distinction.
This task is not just meant to help you figure out what kind of topics you’ll be covering in your blog. The real point of this exercise is to determine if you’re willing to cover enough variety of topics to warrant creating a general blog on your main subject.
How did you feel as you jotted them down? Were you excited about the prospect of writing articles for them? Was coming up with this list easy or did you struggle to write more than two or three topics? If you find that your passion and expertise really lies with only one or two categories, you may be better off picking one and running a laser-focused niche blog that’s dedicated solely to that subject instead.