How do you choose a niche?

[PenguinManiac]

If you're running a website or you're planning to, you surely know how important it is to choose a good niche. Most people make their choice because of their passions and bents, but some will also take other factors into account, such as popularity and saturation.
How about you? Do you create websites based solely on what you like, or do you value effectiveness more?

 

[fcuco]

It is simply easier to motivate yourself to produce quality content if the niche that you choose is something that you feel at least a little bit passionate about. For instance, I don't care at all about gardening so trying to come up with good content for something like that is going to be not only tedious but probably a lot of work since I don't even know where to start looking for inspirations and ideas nor do I have a clue about the profile of the average user that would search for such content and what are they expecting. Even if were to be able to identify that as the hot new niche I would probably fail trying to produce any type of content for it.

There are some niches that are definitely saturated: movie reviews, technology, fitness and fashion, but you can always find your voice within those saturated niches by being even more specific, like only doing reviews for movies of a certain genre.

 

[wallcat]

It's a question I've often struggled with, do you focus on target audience or build what you like and hope they'll come? With the latter you'll feel more passionate and so it'll be easier to keep the website updated with high quality content. I believe that whatever that might be somebody somewhere will find it interesting. Even if it's in a saturated market it's possible that we can find our own voice or combine it with other interests to be able to stand out from the crowd. I love gaming, but there are so many websites out there for this already. Out of all the things I've attempted to write about however, I've found gaming to be the easiest subject for me to keep up with. I am interested in horror games and role playing in particular, so this is where I can find my voice. A lot of people will recommend against it, but I prefer to stick to writing about what I know best.

 

[Jessica Johansson]

Thanks for sharing the valuable information, I also want to know about it.

 

[Danielle Davidson]

I agree that I think it's really something that you feel passionate about. If you kind of like movies, but really love a TV show, then you should probably end up writing about a TV show. I always choose to write about the things that I feel the most passionate about. People can always tell when you don't feel passionate about the things you write on your blog.