Introduction

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to episode 59 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today I want to talk about starting out with your blog, particularly what should your blog be about.  I want to give you 15 quick questions that you can ask yourself to help you to define what your blog’s focus or niche might be. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/59.

Defining what your blog is about is something that is well worth doing particularly when you’re starting out with your blog. It’s probably a question that you will want to revisit every now and again as well as your blog develops. It’s okay to change direction and to change the topic of your blog at times.

Most successful blogs do have a niche or a topic. Some also have a variety of topics that they cover but they usually have some way of focusing on what they do. In many cases, it’s more about the reader and their particular demographic rather than a specific topic. You might have a blog for moms and talk about parenting, fashion, and other interests that moms might have. Or you might have a blog for retirees and talk about travel, finance, and being a grandparent, or a variety of topics that are relevant for that particular audience. Generally, you either have a niche, a topic, or a demographic as the focus of your blog.

Today I want to give you 15 quick questions that will help you to define what your blog’s niche or focus should be. What I would encourage you to do is to jot down these questions and I will share them over on the show notes to work through them one by one and just simply answer them with a few keywords for each question. Hopefully, by the time you get to the end of the 15 questions, you will see some themes emerging which might give you some hints as to where to focus your attention in terms of a niche or a topic.

So, let us get into them. They are relatively quick. Some of them are pretty obvious and some of them are a little bit different. Hopefully, we’ll give you some fresh insights.

Question number 1 is one of the more obvious ones. What interests do you have? What is it that you find yourself thinking about when you have got the spare time? What magazines do you read? What hobbies do you have? These types of interests, whether they be work-related, life-related, or relational interests, might give you some hints as to what type of blog you might have.

Question number 2, what experiences have you had? Experiences (of course) can be work experiences. They could be your professional experiences. They might be personal experiences, relationships, hobbies, or experiences of travel. Also, think about the good experiences that you’ve had but also some of those tough experiences that you’ve had. What challenges have you overcome? Sometimes, the hardest times in our life are actually the times that are most formative for us. They actually give us insight into life that can be really useful for other people as well.

I talked to one blogger recently who had gone through a divorce, and the experience of that really was something that she wanted to talk about in her blog. Her blog is for people going through that particular experience. Don’t just pay attention to the good experiences, the fun, the things that you’ve achieved. Also think about the tough times, the values, the mistakes, and some of those sorts of experiences as well. 

Question number 3 is what expertise and skills have you developed? I’m not just talking here about professional skills and expertise; although that’s certainly something that you want to think about. I’m not just talking about the qualifications that you might have educationally. I’m also talking about life experiences, life expertise, and life skills that you have developed.

One of my friends, Nicole Avery from Planning Queen (a great blog), Planning with Kids, one of her skill sets is that she is a mom of five kids, that’s an experience that she’s got but she is particularly good at organizing that family and you’d want to be if you’ve got five kids. She’s very productive and that’s an experience that she’s had, but she has also built up some expertise in that. She brings that to her blog. The expertise and skills that you might have might be work-related, but they might also be to do with your family, the relationships that you have, might be a supporting type of thing. These can all shape your blog.

Question number 4 is what are your passions? What keeps you awake at night? What could you talk for hour after hour after hour about with friends?

Number 5 is what are your dreams? What do you one day hope to become? This was why I started ProBlogger. ProBlogger was a blog I started in 2004. I was already making some money from my blogs. I was on the way to being a professional blogger but I wasn’t yet a full-time blogger. It was a dream that I had, so the blog became a journal of me chasing that dream and sharing what I was learning along the way to achieving that dream in the long run. So, what are your dreams?

Question number 6, what gives you energy? What wakes you up? What lights you up? When you see something that’s related to it, makes you pay attention to it, makes your eyes widen. It’s probably connected to some of the passions that you have.

Question number 7 is kind of the flip side of some of these. What is your pet peeve? What is the thing that gets on your nerve the most? Now, while I would encourage you probably not to define your blog by what you hate or what you don’t like, sometimes the pet peeve that you have or the thing that gets on your nerves can actually be flipped around in a more positive way. I guess it’s about trying to find where your itch is, where you need to scratch. Maybe that will give you some sort of an indication about what you could be wanting to fix or solve in terms of a problem or a challenge that you face or you see other people facing. 

Question number 8 is what do you find yourself talking about to your friends, colleagues, customers, or even strangers? It’s funny how some topics just keep coming up for us. Whether that’s because we are interested in those things and we bring up those things in conversation, or whether that’s because other people bring up those conversations with us because they perceive us to be interested in those things or they perceive us to have some expertise in those areas.

One of the things that come up in conversations for me quite regularly is productivity, which I find quite odd because I’m not the most productive or disciplined person. At least that’s not the way I have seen myself from my whole life, but it keeps coming up in conversation. I’ve paid attention to that because other people seem to think that I am a productive person and I guess I am in some ways. That’s something to pay attention to. It’s how other people perceive me. What topics come up in conversation?

Question number 9 is related to this. What are your most frequently asked questions? What questions do people ask you? This again indicates how other people perceive you, how other people see you. It’s in effect your personal brand. The brand that you portray is often indicated by the questions that people ask you. Pay attention to those types of things.

I was sharing this morning on Periscope, my wife, for many years, has always been asked questions around “What dress should I buy?” or, “What shaped dress should I wear?” or, “What colors might suit me?” or, “Could you help me to design or start my laundry room?” She used to get all these questions about style, about fashion, about design; these types of questions. I guess that was a good indication that maybe that should be the topic of her blog. It is today what she blogs about. What questions are you asked?

Question number 10 is again similar in some ways. It taps into how other people perceive you. The question is how do people introduce you or how do people talk about you or describe you to other people? Sometimes when you get introduced to a new person by a mutual friend, they will talk about you to each other. Say, “This is Darren, I met him when we were doing this. You should talk to him because he’s really good at this.” Those types of introductions or those types of descriptions about who we are, again, tap into how we are perceived by other people. Sometimes they can surprise us the way other people perceive us. That can be really useful to tap into because it might actually unlock something that we can talk about.  We can actually help people in those particular areas.

Question 11, what is your superpower? What is the thing that you can do almost effortlessly that sometimes other people struggle with? Again, I think of Nicole Avery. She manages that house of five kids really, at least from my perception, quite seamlessly. She puts together lunches every week, she batch cooks and does certain things that seem to make the rest of her week easy whereas I find just getting three kids ready for school a real chore. She’s got a superpower in that area I would say. Each of us has those sorts of things that just seem to come naturally for us. So, what’s your superpower?

Question number 12, what do you wish people around you did differently? What do you wish that they knew? What do you wish they understood that they seem to not understand? We each have these things that we kind of wish everyone was like us in. Again, probably just tapping into that pet peeve sometimes or the thing that you wished other people were more like you in. That might indicate something that you could talk about.

Question number 13, if you could write about anything for a whole day, what would it be? If you could just sit down and brain dump something that you know down onto paper, or you could brain dump it into a podcast, or you could brain dump it into a video, what would it be? Perhaps related to this is what do you want your kids to know that you know? That might actually indicate something that you could write a whole heap of content on over time. 

Question number 14, what are you learning at the moment? And what are you most interested in learning more about? I don’t know if you’re like me, but I go through patches where I really tap into a whole heap of books on a particular topic or I’ll listen to a whole heap of podcasts on a particular topic. What are you tapping into at the moment? What are those big themes that seem to make you interested in learning more?

And the last question, question 15 is what is your mission in life? What is the thing that you are trying to achieve the most? What is the cause that you’re most interested in? What is your fight? These types of bigger picture missions can be really helpful to tap into.

These are 15 questions that I think will help you (hopefully) to begin to see some things and some of the things that you might be able to blog about. I want to leave you, though, with another bonus question. This is not so much about the topic or the niche; it’s more about the reader. What type of person do you feel most passionate about? What type of person do you feel you have a heart for?

I was talking to a blogger the other day and she was saying that her heart goes out to single moms. She was a single mom herself, so every time she meets a single mom, she just really feels for them and she just really wants to support them, encourage them, and help them in any practical way that she can. Once she tapped into who she was most passionate about, that unlocked what her blog should be about the most.

I talked to another blogger a month or so ago and they said a very similar thing, that their heart was for retirees, people who had just finished working full-time for the first time and were in that in-between phase of trying to work out what life was like at that stage, how to fill their time, and how to enter into this next exciting phase of their life. A time that can be really exciting but can also be a bit unsettling. That’s the kind of person that she felt most drawn to.

Perhaps if you’re struggling to come up with a topic, ask yourself some questions around the type of person that you feel most strongly towards and it may actually be that that’s what your blog should be about. In that case, it may be that you can cover a whole heap of topics that might be relevant for that type of person.

I hope these questions have helped you. If you’re just in the beginning phases of thinking about a new blog to unlock what your blog might be about. I do think it is useful to have a focus on your blog even if you do want to touch on different topics. It probably is important to have some kind of focus. Some sort of boundaries around the things that you will and want to talk about on your blog. Again, what I would encourage you to do is to go through these 15, actually 16 questions and just make some notes on each one of them.

At the end of that, look for the themes that you note them. It might actually be that there’s a number of things there that you could potentially create a blog on. You can find all of these 16 questions over at problogger.com/podcast/59 where I got today’s show notes. Once you’ve done the exercise, I’d love to hear what you’ve found. What did you come up with for your blog’s topic, niche or focus?

While you’re over at the podcast site do head over to problogger.com/podcast/subscribe to subscribe to the ProBlogger PLUS newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.com/problogger and at Twitter at @problogger, where I’m also @problogger on Periscope. 

That’s a lot to remember but I would love to connect with you on social media and via our newsletter so that I can keep you up to date with new episodes of this podcast.  Lastly, if you found this podcast useful I would love it if you would give us a review on iTunes where you can find us by searching for ProBlogger or on Stitcher if you use that service as well. Thanks for listening and I hope you have a great week of blogging. I’ll talk with you in episode 60 of the ProBlogger Podcast.