So, Today is the day you decided to start your own blog. Firstly, CONGRATULATIONS! As, this is the first and the most important step to achieving your future goals.
You want to achieve financial freedom? Or you want to work from home full time? Then this is the way to begin. But by all means be prepared to work diligently for years, before you expect a return on your invested time.
I have seen some bloggers grow exponentially in their first few months even. But that is not the case for most bloggers. The ones who do succeed in their first few months are either those who are starting their second or third blogs or the ones who have detailed knowledge, experience, and know all the right people.
Have I scared you already?
Or are you ready to read on?
For the brave ones who decided to jump head first into the blogging journey, we are going to talk about ideas and brainstorming in the first section of this post.
Brainstorming Ideas:
Do you know what you want to write about? You may have an inkling. An idea at the back of your head about what exactly you want to write about. This is called a Niche. According to Oxford dictionary, a Niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.
In easy terms, a niche is your targetted content for your target market. You simply need a Niche. You cannot have a website called everythingonthefaceofthisearth.com and literally write about EVERYTHING on the face of this earth!! Because you have to write for a certain group of people, or you will not be able to write targetted content.
This group of audience will probably be same in atleast one way to you. Because how else are you going to write for a audience if you cannot relate to them. If you decide to have a parenting niche blog for example, you may write about SAHM, if you are one of those, or working moms if you are one of them! But choosing a broad niche is not enough anymore! I will explain more on it in the next section Narrowing down your Niche.
For now, I want you to make a list of atleast 5 things that you feel you can write about. For me these were:
- Kids Activities
- Party themes
- DIY and crafts
- Museums around the world
- Thoughts and reflections about certain life experiences
I have a group of friends all with similar aged children. We attend social and religious gatherings together and are pretty tight. All of us love celebrating birthdays and occasions. So I plan and attend and help decorate for birthday parties all year round.
We even plan baby showers and Surprise birthdays. So when I was going through the list of things that I could write about, this also came into consideration. I thought I could write all about decorations and party planning for baby showers and bridal showers too but then I decided to make my blog all about kids, so I just write a few posts about Kids Birthday party themes now.
As for the last one, I browsed around and I discovered that people only read your content if your content HELPS them! Your life experiences, however traumatic or pleasant or adventurous are just not enough to make this a profitable niche. I decided that I could incorporate my own story in my regular articles. I don’t need a journal like blog for that matter.
So, I was rambling on for four paragraphs to give you some food for thought and decide how to dive into the process of brainstorming. Now comes the more difficult part however. This part is about narrowing down your niche.
Narrowing down your Niche:
Once, you have a general idea about what you are going to write, then you need to narrow down your niche. Lets just say you decided to start a mom blog. You begin by writing anything and everything that comes to mind.
Then after a while, you realize that what you enjoy writing most is Pregnancy stages, things to do before a baby comes and how to get yourself ready.
So now you focus only on one group of audience. That would be your first time mommies, and mostly first time pregnancies. Because, usually first time moms are scared about what to expect and how to get ready and get into the mindset of becoming a mom. These are the people who would love an all things pregnancy blog and become a part of your loyal tribe!
Or let’s say you decide to become a health and fitness blogger. But you focus only on eating healthy meals during pregnancy, then the chances of having a dedicated set of readers will be much higher.
But, it is important to mention here that its okay if you don’t want to narrow down your niche when you are just starting out. You can test new waters. You can see what your audience loves. And you are definitely allowed to try out what exactly you love to write about.
So here is how I narrowed down my niche:
Mom blog>>Kids Activities>>Educational Kids activities
I started a mom blog all about crafts, DIY and things to do with kids, then I narrowed it down to kids activities and then I narrowed it down to only educational kids activities because that is what I am all about! I am a mom, who has been a teacher/tutor her whole life and so this is me finding what I love most!
Now this doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally write about other things too. But my main focus is Kids’ Education.
FYI, I did find a way to write about parties by writing about kids birthday party themes and I also found a way to write about my thoughts by starting a small section called Blogging Journal.
So, you see, as long as you have one focal topic, you can also have other smaller sections on your blog to write about whatever else you may like.
Or in future, you could decide to start another blog dedicated solely to another Niche.
I would however suggest starting only one blog at the beginning. Because blogging is too much work. Infact its a complete package!
You are a writer, a designer, a photographer, a marketing and sales person all squeezed into one! And having more that one blog when you start out, will simply overwhelm you!
Blogging is not a product or result. It is a journey. And you can and you will make mistakes and even fail miserably! But it will all be worth it in the end!
Choosing a Domain:
Okay, I hope by now you have decided what you want to write about. If not, then its okay too. No judgements here! When I first started I also didn’t have a definitive idea about the exact things I wanted to write about, but the journey led me forward and here I am now!!
So there are two approaches to choosing a domain:
1. When you know your niche and topics exactly:
Okay, so if you know exactly what it is that you what to write about, you should incorporate that in your domain name. Now, if I knew that I wanted to write about educational content for kids, or preschool education, or learning activities, I could have called my blog learningwithalifya.com or learnandhavefun.com or educationalactivities.com
These are just some names literally from the top of my head. I really don’t know if these domain names are available or not, I am just using them as an example!!
But, you get the idea, right??
So, if you know what exactly your blog is going to be, it is good practice to incorporate that into your domain name as it instantly makes things clearer.
2. When you don't know your Niche completely and/or want to write about multiple topics:
However, when you donot understand your niche completely and definitively, just Go with your own name or a variation of your name. I started my blog after reading a life and style blog by the name Mostly morgan.
There are tonnes of brands that are actually people’s own names!!
Take LV or VB for instance. Both top class brands and both people’s names!!
Having your own name as a domain name gives you the flexibility to write about anything and niche down later. I decided to go with Alifya’s Inspirations for this very reason!
It also provides you with the opportunity to write about multiple things.
And also helps to bring your name in the limelight.
For example: One of my favourite bloggers is Elna Cain. She actually has many blogs. I follow two of them. One of these blogs is elnacain.com and it is all about freelancing and freelance writing. I think she decided on the name elnacain.com because she wanted people and clients to recognize her and know her by her name. This is just my personal opinion, and she may as well have other reasons for choosing her name as the domain name.
Another one of her blog is twinsmommy.com which, as the name suggests is a mom blog. Its all about mom bloggers. Elna even has a term for it. She calls us mom-pre-neurs (as in moms who are also entrepreneurs)
So, What's best??
Decide whats best on the basis of what you think. If you are totally decided on your niche then go for a niche based name. But if you want to be flexible and write about multiple things then go for your own name!
So decide whats best for you on the basis of your own mindset, but go with something that you know you love. Cause changing domain names later is a real headache, as you will have to change all the links from all your promotional websites or set up redirects. I don’t want to go into these details and get off topic here. The important thing right now is to choose a domain that you love, and are willing to have yourself associated with!!
In this post we talked about brainstorming for blog topics, Choosing a niche and narrowing it down and also How to choose your Domain name.
If your head is in the clear, and you are all decided on your Niche and Domain name, then you are now ready to:
Hi, I’m Alifya. I love doing fun activities with my daughter, Hussaina and write all about it here! My crazy hobbies include:
A. Binge watching Friends upto a point of memorizing it!
B. Watching Air Crash Investigations and Mega Structures on
NatGeo and
C. Reading Harry Potter for the thousandth time!!