How to Choose a Blog Niche and Your New Branded Domain

We often talk about finding a niche for your project – to avoid going too wide trying to appeal to everyone, and not appealing to anybody.

Blog niche

But when choosing a blog niche, how niche is too niche?

Years ago I wrote a series on Blog Branding. It still gets a bunch of readers today, it’s one of my flagship series here.

The “problem” with that series is it locks me into walking my talk, it’s a lot easier to take the “do as I say not as I do” route!

Recently I started a brand new blog as an offshoot of my Maker site. It’s my first serious new project in quite a while. So far, as well as setting up social media accounts and a Facebook group, I have soft-launched it with content I created on my other site, the theme (Mai Reach by the lovely team at BizBudding), and a list using my dormant ConvertKit account.

Niching Down When Choosing a Blog Niche

Retro computer programming is already a small niche, and the project was imagined as a spin-off of my already niche, but not niche enough maker community.

I said Your Audience + Benefit = Targeted and Attractive Name

As an over-thinking analysis-paralysis type of person, it was tough coming up with a name, especially one where the main social site accounts and a good domain were not taken.

For this new project, the audience is people who want to learn about and discuss programming games for old 1980s-1990s computers and game consoles.

Could it be too niche?

I don’t think so.

Being very very niche for sure restricts the potential size of the audience, but my experience is focus increases the enthusiasm of that audience.

That said, I did do some research (as well as being a part of the community myself).

One of the ways you can tell if a niche is worth your effort is to look around for commercial activity targeting that community:

  • Are there ads?
  • Can you find products or services for the community (bonus if they have affiliate programs)?
  • Do books get published about the niche?
  • How often do you see YouTubers sponsored or uploading reviews/unboxings?
  • Is there a trade show, conference, or event in the space?

I saw there are even print magazines (for computers that are no longer manufactured!), products on Amazon, hobbyists, and companies.

Plenty of people before me have invested in servicing the community so that gives me confidence.

I went through the checklist that I came up with all those years ago:

  • Who your blog is for
  • What the reader benefit will be
  • The personality you want to evoke
  • Where and how do you want to use the name
  • Possible future directions
  • How you can position against the established names

Choosing a Domain Name for Your Blog Brand

Over the years I have found there are a couple of elements that work well in coming up with brandable but still immediately relevant niche domain names:

  1. The key goal, feature, or benefit
  2. How the community self-identifies, or would like to identify as

So therefore

You can see there are different approaches by looking at the tools and services we use. Ahrefs is descriptive of the technology whereas SEMRush implies search engine marketing quickly. WordTracker is the most “does what it says” of the lot!

Long story short, the name I chose was Retro Game Coders.

It is by no means perfect, and at first glance, it doesn’t really speak to any benefit, though the name is a good description of the target audience and what they want to achieve. They are people like me who always had a burning ambition to see their game, their creation, running on the machines they admired back in the day. I want to be a Retro Game Coder (and I have now published a game so yay me).

I felt that attracting a community was the priority for this project – especially as I am not an expert in the subject matter but rather the community was benefitting as I learned and made mistakes.

Perhaps it could have been something like “learn retro game programming” or even “learn to program games for your Commodore 64” but I wanted above all to keep the name from being too much of a mouthful (while also being able to claim the name even in 2021), and not restrict myself too much.

I could put a more compelling promise as a tagline too, but I want it to be a bit casual for now, and there are no immediate plans to monetize.

Will it turn out a huge failure? Maybe, but regardless I will learn something useful!

How to Find Your Blogging Niche and a Branded Domain You Can Actually Buy

In conclusion, how to find your blogging niche, choosing a domain name, and finding a brand that you are happy with, comes down to doing a lot of research in the niche and where you find your excitement, interest, or desire to help. Or where you find the richest profit potential!

For me, I feel like I have a winner when the domain itself speaks to “If you are someone like this I can help you achieve that”, or “Want to be a person like this? Welcome!”.

So who are the people you want to attract and what do they most want from you?

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