To start a blog is a great calling, but one which should be studied. We discuss the top seven blogging niches that are too competitive and bloggers should stay away from.
Seven Super Competitive Blogging Niches You Should Stay Away From.
If you think you are the only one taking too much time in finding a blogging niche, you would be wrong.
The decision to choose a blogging niche is something bloggers mull over for a long time.
We all start our first blogs and write content on topics we feel passionate about. However, once we realize how things like organic traffic, SEO, and keywords work, our outlook towards blogging shifts. We grow conscious of belonging to the right niche.
As a beginner, the niche which can get you traffic sooner is the right niche. Any topic that is not being competed for by many websites and gets a reasonable volume of searches on a search engine like Google is bound to make for a great niche.
The Journey of Discovering The Right Blogging Niche
What is the right blogging niche?
This question is not new.
For some, the right blogging niche is one for which the blogger has a passion. It is no secret that the quality of content a blogger creates is proportional to his/her interest in the field. Asking a sports enthusiast to write a blog on quantum physics would not improve the quality of the blog. If you’re looking to blog for a long time, then choosing a niche you’re passionate about is important.
For others, the right blogging niche is one where competition is low. Low competition means getting a higher rank on SERPs is naturally easier. This means getting traffic organically from search engines becomes simpler.
In order for a blog to be truly successful, a blogger has to combine these two competing thoughts. In other words, bloggers have to discover blogging niches which they feel passionate about and which also have low competition on search engines like Google.
Let’s take an example. Say you’re a cricket enthusiast and start a blog on cricket. If the main focus of your blog is to update the score of cricket matches, you’re likely to get no traffic as Google displays match scores on the SERPs itself. Thus, even if you do get ranked high, people will know the score anyway and won’t come to your website.
This is a typical beginner’s case example. As a cricket enthusiast, you are free to start a blog on cricket, but remember to find a small niche in the sport that is less competitive and can drive more traffic to your website.
The balance between finding a true calling and isolating a part of it which can be really optimized is the true essence of discovering the right blogging niche.
Why Don’t Broad Niche Websites Work?
There are many reasons.
And they all boil down to one thing – competition.
For a blogger, competing for traffic on broad traffic is difficult because the demands to create a large volume of content continuously to keep up with the competition is too much.
In a broad niche, the challenge is two-forked. First, a blogger has to break into the broad niche through sheer power of content and other SEO-optimality. Second, the blogger has to maintain a presence in the broad niche with consistent content development.
For a blogger working alone, doing all these things is really difficult.
That is why bloggers are always advised to target specific niches and not broad topics that are too difficult to optimize.
Broad niches are mountains too high for a single blogger to climb.
Seven Blogging Niches You Should Avoid (In No Particular Order)
We have already covered how the right blogging niche can be discovered and why broad topic blogs don’t tend to do well.
We now move to the main topic of our blog post – the seven blogging niches you should not enter.
From the off-set, we’d like to state that you’re free to create a blog on any of the below-mentioned niches. Your blog is your decision. With enough hard-work and ambition, you could probably make it work.
However, the better thing to do is to first build a solid base of knowledge with a more narrow niche.
Again, you’re free to choose any blogging niche. All we ask is for you to consider the points being made here.
Given below are some of the most competitive niches you should avoid creating a new blog in.
1. Fitness and Health
Fitness is a niche which has caught on amongst bloggers like wildfire.
The desire to have a healthy lifestyle is a very noble and laudable drive. The interest people have in a field like fitness should be appreciated and seen as one of the boons of the digital age.
Fitness blogs are immensely popular. They became a rage back when blogging was new. Young men and women going to the gym followed blog posts from their favourite fitness bloggers.
This trend has grown leaps and bounds. Bloggers who started off with a simple blog have now become major influencers and entrepreneurs.
Making it big as a fitness blogger is thus extremely difficult. Besides, people have many more options when it comes to dealing with fitness-related queries. The popularity of Instagram and YouTube when it comes to fitness-related content is an indication of the same.
Thus, choosing fitness as the niche of your new blog would naturally be a dangerous choice.
Health as a niche is the superset of fitness, covering the entire healthcare sector within it. Like fitness, health is also extremely competitive.
Choosing health as a niche also becomes complicated due to reasons besides the competition. Google’s policy regarding YMYL pages has been dicey, to say the least. When it comes to topics like health, Google is very careful not to rank unreliable content high.
Whenever a new Google search update drops, it is health websites which suffer the most turbulence in traffic.
Thus, bloggers can rid themselves of all these problems by simply steering ahead to other waters.
2. Recipe/Food-related Blogs
Think you can do well by creating content on food recipes? Think again.
Food-related content is notoriously challenging to rank on Google. You might think there are enough dishes and delicacies you can optimize for, but the field has simply saturated.
Video content on recipes and cooking is also highly competitive. It is a field content creators have already flooded as they have seen the demand for instantly available recipes rise on search engines, social media, and other digital platforms.
This is also a field where finding a unique niche is difficult. Most of what could be covered has probably already been covered when it comes to food as a niche.
Thus, you should think twice before starting a blog on cooking.
3. Travel
The trifecta of health, food, and travel represent the three radioactive niches all bloggers should stay away from.
Travel is a highly lucrative niche. It promises a lot of variety and can be optimized to create many types of monetization models, even with a simple blog.
There is only one problem – competition.
Travel as a blogging niche is extremely competitive. The top blogs in the travel niche are known to create many hundreds and thousands of written content on a daily basis.
Think about it. A top website is publishing at the very least a hundred long-form articles and blog posts every day. It is nearly impossible for a single blogger to tackle such a large machine.
Again, a blogger smart enough to identify a niche in the field of travel which touches upon an unexplored topic is highly likely to do well. However, the chances of such a ‘eureka’ moment are usually low.
This is why bloggers, especially beginners, should avoid highly competitive fields like travel.
4. News
News is a very broad term in today’s world. Almost anything that manages to create a buzz becomes a news headline within a few minutes.
As a blogging niche, the requirements to run a news blog are simply too high.
Think about it. News content is never evergreen. You will always have to write new content all the time according to the most recent events that have taken place. Even if you choose to write a blog on a particular niche in the news like sports or entertainment, the pressure is always too high to keep writing new content that satisfies the audience.
A news blog is a good idea if you have an entire team of writers and reporters who can track news and create content in real-time. Since these are the kind of luxuries a typical blogger may not have, news is a niche most bloggers should ideally stay away from.
5. Sports
Sports, like news, has to be constantly updated. Sports fans are notorious for being voracious consumers of content. While a successful sports blog can be a very lucrative option, it is a very lofty endeavour and something bloggers should not take lightly.
The plus side of choosing sports as a niche is that there are many unique narrow niches that can be found by a given smart blogger. Take fantasy sports as an example. Over the past few years, bloggers have managed to use fantasy sports in different fields as a unique and highly lucrative niche.
One can expect talented bloggers to find other unique areas in the coming areas. While bloggers shouldn’t ideally be writing a blog on sports in the first place, they should only do it if they manage to find a niche.
6. Fashion
Fashion is too broad a niche and too competitive for obvious reasons.
Like a field like health, fashion has many layers and cannot be understood by one interpretation alone. There is consumer fashion which relates to retail products. Then there is a more eclectic kind of fashion one is likely to find in a fashion show. Besides these, there is also the boilerplate -type content that covers some of the new trends in fashion.
Again fashion is also not restricted to clothes alone. Other tenets like footwear, accessories, make-up, and so on also become a part of fashion as a niche. Each of these subsets has top bloggers who command their presence.
The great thing about choosing fashion as a niche is that it offers very good monetization opportunities. The competition, however, can be too much if you’re not the type of blogger that is willing to fight and battle with rivals at every turn.
So, the wise thing to do for a blogger is to either find something unique in the world of fashion that is not adequately covered or move over it and find some other unique topic to build a blog on.
7. Technology
Technology is amongst the most competitive niches in digital media. Whether it’s stuff about phones or new technologies and laptops and all things tech, you would find a poor tech blogger trying to do it all under the flag of a small blog.
The problem with technology as a niche is similar to the problem with news. There is simply too much constant updating required with content. This is not even counting the massive competition there is in the field of technology.
To create a tech blog is to invite a lot of criticism as well. Readers in tech are harsh on bloggers who don’t know their stuff. Thus, a tech blogger should be good at whatever he/she is writing about.
Given the size of technology as a niche, it is safe to say that there are still unique niches that can still be games. However, mainstream tech is something almost every new blogger should stay away from. There is little point in creating yet another website about mobile phones and cheap tablets. Try finding something new in tech or move on.
Final Words
In this post, some of the most popular and competitive blogging niches were covered. Readers are free to pursue any of these niches, but they should consider the high competition in each of these sectors.
About the Author -Kapil Heera is an SEO expert by profession and a blogger at heart. His journey in blogging began back when he was 17 and discovered the power of words being transmitted through blogging. This led to him discovering his passion for writing and blogging. For more than a decade, he has worked as a digital marketing trainer and overseen the education of more than ten thousand students.