Should You Have a Blogging Niche? // ft. pros, cons + my thoughts!

To have a blogging niche or to not have a blogging niche, that is the question.

From my time in the blogging community, I’ve noticed one piece of advice that gets repeated, reused, and shows up in nearly every “tips for new bloggers” post. Even my own. That piece of advice is to find your blogging niche.

However, I’ve also read posts (both the advice type and the normal type) that talk about how finding a niche doesn’t always work and that it’s sometimes better to just blog about whatever you want. Reading both sides of the story got me interested in this topic, and I’m excited to discuss it with you all today!

In this post, I’ll be talking about the pros of sticking with one particular niche as well as the cons of it. At the end, I’ll be giving my thoughts (I’m going to try to make the pros vs. cons as unbiased as possible 😉 ) and insights on the great blogging niche debate.

Also, I want to apologize for if you already read this post or saw it in your Reader?? I messed up some of the publication settings for this post and I don’t think it was showing up (I accidentally posted it four days in the past, which shouldn’t be possible but is). So this is a repost, in case you saw it the first time!

All right, let’s get into the post!

To start off, what is a niche? Besides being a vocabulary word you might learn in biology why do I have school on the mind, a niche also applies to blogging.

niche

/niCH,nēSH/

noun:

a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted

This is the definition that best fits my purposes for this blog post. Essentially, find your blogging niche is finding the topic that interests you and that you want to blog about. It can be broad, like:

• books
• lifestyle
• health/fitness

Or it can be specific, such as:

• YA book reviews
• movie reviews
• bread recipes

As for the debate on whether or not you should have a blogging niche, a person with a niche would, for instance, solely blog about books, while someone without a niche would blog about books, lifestyle, health/fitness, and whatever else they felt like.

Now for the pros and cons of having a blogging niche!

For no reason other than the sake of trying to keep a positive mindset, let’s start off with the pros of having a blogging niche. There are quite a few that I want to talk about in this post!

-One reason that so many bloggers choose to have a blogging niche is because it narrows the focus of your content. Us bloggers write multiple posts per month (sometimes even multiple posts per week), and when you’re at a loss for what to write next, a niche can help narrow down what to write about next.

-In addition, a niche can help you solidify your content in order to grow your audience. For instance, as a book blogger, I mainly follow other book blogs. That’s not to say I won’t follow a lifestyle blog every once in a while, but for the most part, I read book blogs. If you have a focused topic that you blog about, you might start to accumulate more of an audience.

-Having a niche can help you create reliable content for your readers. From my experience, someone is definitely going to read and enjoy your blog more if they know what content they’re getting and know that the posts you write are tailored to the topics they’re interested in.

-Especially for new bloggers, niches help you find a place in the community. The blogging community is an amazing place, but it can take a little bit to find blogs and bloggers that you want to get to know better! If you have a niche, then it will be easier to find and connect to blogs that have similar themes as yours.

Despite the pros of niches, this wouldn’t be a discussion post if I didn’t acknowledge that there are also cons to having a blogging niche. Many people don’t have a niche, and they have reasons for it!

-Although this is stating the obvious, having a niche can limit your creativity. Once you have an established topic that you always blog about, it can feel strange or even “wrong” to blog about something else. Like if you saw a post in your Reader from my blog about fashion, you would likely be really confused. Some people want to be free to post about any topic under the sun at any moment, and that’s not always possible with a niche.

-Additionally, blogging niches can close off opportunities. If you’re living in the mindset of only reading certain posts about certain things, it’s possible that you’ll miss out on discovering so many great blogs and bloggers.

-Without a blogging niche, there can be less pressure. It’s not easy to review every book you read, think of discussion topics, or come up with recommendation lists constantly. If you’re not tied down to a single topic, you’ll have so much more to potentially blog about, and this can lessen the blogging pressure.

-Finally, people change and want their blogs to change with them. The posts I write today (and love writing) wouldn’t have interested me as much even just two or three years ago. If you already have a specific niche and have branded your blog to that niche, it’s hard to change everything when you also have a change of heart.

There you have it, the pros and cons of having a blogging niche. Writing this post really got me thinking about this topic and what I think about blogging niches.

What I ultimately decided is that I’m glad I chose a niche when I started blogging, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. However, I can also see why someday would choose to go niche-less?? I sound indecisive but I just mean I can see two sides of the story.

As humans, we’re layered people.

A niche can sometimes limit us from expressing all our layers on a single blog, but for me personally, that’s okay. Yes, I’m a reader and a bookworm and a Hufflepuff- but I’m also so much more. A dancer, a Christian, and other things, too.

Just because I don’t talk about my faith often on my blog doesn’t mean it isn’t a central part of my day-to-day life. Just because I only mention dance in my monthly wrap-up doesn’t mean I don’t spend hours at the studio every day. It’s easy to get worried that if you don’t mention it on your blog, it isn’t real or you don’t really love it- but that’s not the case at all.

You are you, with all your layers and interests and hobbies, no matter if you ever write a post about it or not.

That’s why I decided to have a blogging niche. In addition to all the positive aspects I listed in this post, I realized that it was okay to not talk about everything I love because it doesn’t mean I love it less if I don’t talk about it.

However, if you want to blog about whatever you want, blog about whatever you want! You do you, because this is your blog, your choice, and you should do what’s going to make you a happy and inspired blogger.

This debate (however unimportant in the grand scheme of things) has been on my mind for quite a while now, and I’m so happy I finally got around to writing this post. Discussions are my favorite because I love getting to hear all of y’all’s perspectives!

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and maybe even got something from it? Here’s to wishing you all have a lovely day, week, and month. ✨

Do you have a blogging niche? Why or why not? What made you make your decision one way or another? I’d love to chat with you all in the comments.