Some people think that blogging is dead – but those people just don’t know what they’re doing when they blog.
A micro-niche blog is a fancy name for a blog that has an ultra-specific focus on a certain topic. For example, think of a food blog focused on egg omelet recipes only: it’s a micro-niche of cooking that sparks interest with people who love an egg omelet, or those looking for creative new takes on seemingly simple subjects.
Choosing the Right Micro Niche
Choosing a niche is important. It can be complex to discover, but well worth it. After all, this niche sets the tone for your blog and determines how much you will be able to get out of it.
First, you need to understand that a micro-niche is very much a thing of its own.
However, micro niches are all tied to a wider niche. For example, we mentioned egg omelet recipe ideas earlier. It’s a part of cooking, but still only focused on breakfast food. Think of a subset of an interesting topic you think could use a unique new twist.
If you like technology, then you need to find where your interest belongs in a micro niche. The technology market is a wide arena, so you need a small sub-topic you’re interested in. You can focus on only the best processors for computers, for example.
When you come up with several micro niche ideas, you need to analyze how well they perform. Research and find out:
- The search volumes for the niche
- If there’s a lot of competition
- The sites that perform the best in this niche
- If there are potential affiliate products
Studying the Audience
No matter what kind of blog niche we are talking about, you need to know your audience. It’s especially important when choosing a micro niche that has a smaller number of highly engaged followers. It’s essential to figure out whether there is enough of an audience for the niche you choose.
If you are writing about CPU processors, you can’t write for everyone who’s into computers. You need to write just for an audience who is particularly curious about your micro-niche.
Learn about that audience and what their needs, preferences, likes, and dislikes are. This will help you brainstorm relevant topics and keep readers engaged. Without an engaged audience, your micro-niche may go ignored.
Understanding the Ranking Advantages of Micro-niche Blogs
Niche blogs are already really competitive. For example, smartphones are a popular niche, and there are tons of blogs already covering it. For someone starting a blog for the first time, it can be difficult to rank high in these satura
(The beauty of micro-niche blogs is that there isn’t as much competition. There are also a variety of specific topics to focus on that nobody is writing about.
If you publish blogs that offer value and contain the proper keywords, you will be able to rank your micro-niche articles in a couple of months. When you do your keyword research, it’s best to look for long-tail keywords that have a monthly search number under 1000 and not much competition.
It makes the whole ranking process a lot easier and quicker.
Web Design Factors
Like with any blog, web design is something to consider. Yes, the contents of your blog need to offer value; however, if your blog isn’t designed to look appealing and doesn’t function well, nobody will want to read anything on it!
Here are a few web design factors to consider:
Domain
Ideally, you want to find a domain name that matches your keyword exactly to rank quickly on search engines. With micro-niche blogs, this is easier to achieve, as there is far less search competition.
At the same time, these domain names are cheaper because not many people want them. If not, look for a partial match or some other keywords you plan on using as well. It’s important to optimize your site from the start. When you add more content structured with the same keywords, ranking higher in the SERPs will be a breeze.
Hosting
Hosting determines the speed, security, and the level of control you have over your blog. Depending on the platform you use, there are different ways to go about hosting. For example, most blogging platforms usually have their own hosting.
However, when you are looking for a new domain of your own, you’ll need a third-party hosting provider. When doing your research, look for these factors:
- Fast speed
- Reliability (no servers crashing)
- Back-ups by the host
- Ability to peform your own back-ups
Themes
Since you’re probably not a designer, you won’t design your blog’s site on your own. Luckily, depending on the blogging platform you use, there are lots of theme plugins to choose from. Themes are pre-made designs that you can instantly apply to your blog. Once you’ve installed a theme, you can further customize it to give it a personal look and branding.
The most popular blogging platform is WordPress, and we suggest going with them as well. One of the reasons for its popularity is the large number of free plugins you can choose from, like themes.
UX elements
What is UX (user experience)? It’s the way someone will feel on your blog and how easy it will be for them to find their way around it. Yes, your blog needs to look good, but it also needs to be functional and logical.
Adding a lot of buttons, functionalities, and visuals might look nice to you, but people will have a hard time navigating your blog with all the crowding. Consider the layout, clarity, and structure when setting up your blog. Here are some UX tips:
- Space things out on the page
- Increase page margins
- Add large fonts that are easy to read
- Organize content logically
Logo and other branding elements
Branding your blog is a must. It’s how you stand out from the rest and make yourself memorable. First, come up with a memorable name as a blogger. Something that’s easy to digest and remember. Your domain and URL should also fall in line with your brand, and be easy to spell.
Take the time to create a logo that fits in and unifies all the visual elements. At the same time, it should be easy to remember and mirror your brand voice.
The color palette should be uniform and look cohesive. Use two types of fonts that pair well together and emphasize the context or importance of your posts.
Content plan and calendar
Yes, blogging is creative, fun, and interesting, but it also should be disciplined and organized. A content plan outlines all the relevant information about what you are writing, who you are writing for, why, and in what way.
Your editorial calendar will feed on your content plan. An editorial calendar is where you add the time and date new blog posts launch. Here are some important things to consider in regards to your content plan:
Content quality
Quality content is about two things: readers and search results. You need to honor them both if you want your blog to grow. First, you need a good topic. Always be brainstorming for new content ideas. Organize ideas in a list or in your content plan for future use.
Do proper research on the topic. Always try to bring value to readers and tell them something they didn’t know, at least partially. Work on your writing style. Make sure to fix your grammar and proofread.
Your content
When it comes to content types, there are many options, like blogs, how-to posts, guides, and so on. All this has a role of its own. However, when we say the word types, we mean two important things:
- Longer (expert) articles that offer in-depth information on a certain subject with a minimum of 1500 words.
- Shorter posts that give quick essential information on a subject (up to 700 words).
Shorter posts let you publish more often, which helps you make the most out of your keywords and rank. Additionally, Google loves regular activity and will reward you for this.
However, a few long articles a month help you give thorough information to people who need it, and those reading micro-niche blogs often do. It all depends on what your readers like and the depth of information they’re looking for.
Publishing consistency
Short posts can be published on a daily basis, but you don’t have to be that frequent with your posts.
To start, a good number of blog posts is three short ones per week and an expert article every two weeks.
See how it goes and pick it up from there. Establish a calendar and stick to it. Your readers will get used to you publishing regularly, so it’s important to be active and keep the momentum going.
Content promotion
Publishing your micro-niche blog post on its own isn’t enough. You need to promote your work regularly. The more people that see your posts, the better, even if they aren’t interested so much in them.
Here are some of the best ways to promote your content:
- Optimize your blogs for SEO for more organic traffic
- Reach out for guest posts
- Share content widely on social media
- Used paid promotions on social media
- Add your blog links to your online profiles
- Repurpose content to increase shareability
Monetization
Naturally, the goal of your micro-niche is to make money. Still, you can’t expect to start doing this within the first year. It’ll take hard work to get your blog to a place where you can begin monetizing your content.
Once you’ve created a base of readers, you can use this readerbase in different ways to monetize your blog. Here are some of the most popular monetization options:
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the most popular method of monetization for blogs and websites. At the moment, this industry is worth over $12 billion. It’s simple: as a blogger, you advertise other people’s products on your blog. 
The affiliate links track the number of successful sales, and you receive an agreed commission for each sale that comes from your blog. It’s a very popular model because it doesn’t involve stocking products, taking orders, doing customer service, and so on.
AdWords
AdWords are paid search results that rank according to keywords used in searches and relevance. AdWords can help you drive tons of traffic to your blog and boost your overall results.
This can be especially effective if you sell products directly on your blog. With more traffic, you can increase conversions and boost your sales.
On the other hand, if you are doing affiliate marketing, you can increase your ROI through AdWords while also gaining potential readers in the long term.
Guest posting
Essentially, there are two ways you can make money by guest posting:
- You can post on someone else’s site for a fee. If you are good at blogging, larger blogs will want to hire you as a guest writer, which means that you can share your experience with a new audience.
- Let others post on your blog and pay you for the spot. When you grow a large enough blog that generates lots of traffic, people will reach out to you. They will want to guest post and get their name recognized from your blog.
Tools to help your micro-niche blog succeed
Every blogger needs tools to grow. These tools will help you do your job better and easier. This is especially important if you are doing everything on your own. Here are some of the tools that can be extremely helpful to grow your blog:
Grammarly is a plug-in spelling and grammar tool. It can be used if you are writing in Google Docs, Word, and many other writing tools. It checks your writing for clarity and correctness and automatically suggests changes.
This WordPress plugin is very easy to use. It helps you look at your blog posts from an SEO angle. You can learn what you need to pay attention to when optimizing blog posts, keywords, and structure to see better SEO results.
Sumo is probably one of the most popular blogging tools. With Sumo, you can run different analytics, add email forms, sharing buttons, and even test out blogging templates. It can help you optimize your content to see better results.
Pixels is an online stock photo gallery. It offers royalty-free images that you can download for free or a small price. It’s essential to spice up your blog posts with quality images and unique visuals to offer a better experience and to help you rank with meta tags on your images.
Naturally, these are just some of the initial resources that we suggest. But there are many more tools you need for blogging, so make sure to choose those that work the best for your micro-niche blog.
Bottom Line
This is just the beginning of your blogging efforts. As time goes on, you will naturally keep learning and developing your skills. As a blogger, you need to do more than just write: you need to understand analytics, use blogging tools, do your own marketing, and write engaging posts. Be prepared to become the jack of all trades.
Need more? Feel free to check the Nichehacks blog for additional content on how to find a micro-niche for your blog and grow it.
