When I first started blogging, I had a vision.
I was going to be the person who wrote about everything.
- On Mondays, I would post vegan recipes.
- On Wednesdays, I would review the latest iPhone.
- On Fridays, I would share travel tips for South Korea.
I called it a “Lifestyle Blog.” In reality, it was a “Chaos Blog.”
For six months, I ran around like a headless chicken. I cooked food I didn’t want to eat just to take a picture. I bought gadgets I didn’t need just to write a review. My brain felt like a browser with 100 tabs open and music was playing in three of them.
I was exhausted. And the worst part? Nobody was reading it.
The foodies didn’t care about my iPhone reviews. The tech geeks didn’t care about my lasagna. I was trying to be everyone’s best friend, so I ended up being nobody’s go-to person.
I almost quit. I sat on my kitchen floor, surrounded by half-cooked pasta and charging cables and thought,
“I can’t keep this up.”
That’s when I learned the golden rule of blogging: You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
In the blogging world, people throw the word “Niche” around a lot. It sounds fancy. It sounds restrictive. It sounds like a cage.
But a niche isn’t a cage. It’s a Spotlight.
Imagine a dark stage. If you try to light up the whole stage with one small flashlight, everything looks dim and blurry. But if you point that flashlight at one specific spot, it shines bright. That is your niche.
How to Find Your “Sweet Spot”
You don’t have to blog about “Left-handed knitting for underwater divers” to be successful. You just need to find the intersection of three things.
Grab a paper and draw three circles:
- What You Love: (Topics you can talk about for 30 minutes without stopping).
- What You Know: (Skills you have or things you are learning right now).
- What Helps People: (Problems you can solve).
Your Niche lives in the middle.
- Example: You love gardening (Love). You kill a lot of plants but are learning (Know/Learning). People want to know how to keep plants alive in small apartments (Help).
- Niche: “Gardening for City People with Brown Thumbs.”
I hear you. You are a multi-passionate person. Choosing one topic feels like picking a favourite child.
Here is the secret: You don’t have to pick just one topic forever. You just have to pick one perspective.
If you want to write about travel, food AND books, you can! But you need a thread that ties them together.
- The Wrong Way: Random posts about random things.
- The Right Way: “I write about living cheaply. So, I share cheap travel tips, cheap recipes and how to get books for free.”
See the difference? The topic changes, but the audience (people who want to save money) stays the same.
The “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” Rule
When you start, try to go an inch wide and a mile deep.
Don’t start a blog about “Sports.” That is too wide. The internet is full of ESPN and big news sites. You can’t beat them.
- Instead of “Sports,” try “Marathon Training for Beginners.”
- Instead of “Food,” try “30-Minute Dinners for Busy Parents.”
Be the expert in your small pond before you try to swim in the ocean.
The fear of picking the “wrong” niche keeps so many people from starting. They wait for the perfect idea.
But here is the truth: Action creates clarity.
You won’t know if you love writing about finance until you try writing about finance. You might hate it! And that is okay. You can change your mind. You can pivot.
I stopped writing about tech gadgets. I stopped pretending to be a chef. I focused on what I actually loved: writing personal stories and helping people get unstuck.
Once I did that, the words came back. The readers came back. And most importantly, my sanity came back.
So, pick something. Pick the thing that excites you today.
The rest will follow.
