How to Create a Successful Blog in a Competitive Niche

Blogging has evolved from mere online journals, to platforms for countless voices, brands, and businesses. It is the primary form of communicating thoughts and ideas online. Bloggers connect with people everywhere and through other channels as a result. Successful blogs are often found in deep and detailed niches, which is how they manage to stand out.

If you’ve chosen a competitive niche, it’s going to take hard work to stand out and make a name for yourself. Read on to see the specific steps you can take to make your blog the master of your chosen niche.

1. Delve Deep With Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of any strong blog. It also helps establish your goals for SEO and helps you better understand what topics are going to resonate with your audience. Performing this research involves using tools that can help you quickly establish options for your posts.

Here are some of my favourites:

Google Keyword Planner
Keyword.io
SEMRush

It’s important to remember that keywords are just a basis for your content. They don't necessarily define what you should be discussing and they should be used sparingly when you’re writing. Once you’ve established some options, start looking deeper.

What do I mean by deeper? The answer is long-tail keywords. These are strings of three or more keywords that target a much more specific audience. They’re also less competitive as a result. With these types of keywords, you get a larger piece of a smaller pie, as opposed to a tiny sliver of a massive one.

Ultimately, those are the kinds of keywords you should be targeting and expanding upon in your content.

2. Create Consistent and Unique Content

Consistency and uniqueness are both lofty ideas that are hard to define for anyone, let alone bloggers. Let’s start with the first one. Audience members want to depend on your for content. Consistently providing them with useful information will build trust and dependency on you and your blog.

That’s huge, but how do you make it happen? It all starts with defining a content schedule. It needs to be something you can maintain in the long-term, but it should also be organized using a calendar tool to decide when you’ll publish specific posts.

3. Build a Brand (And a Community)

The secret to building a brand lies within starting a blog. Your blog is the incubator for your brand and acts as a place to grow and nurture both your business and your community. When you want people to come check out your business, a simple website won’t do. If they find a rich and valuable collection of information and content, they’re more likely to stay.

Once your blog is up and running, you should start promoting both a brand and a community with these steps:

Focus on the customer and how your product/service benefits their lives
Provide value and information they need
Tell stories
Showcase the people behind your brand
Encourage comments and conversation
Bring people from social media to your blog to continue the conversation

4. Diversify Your Marketing

Your marketing is something that should happen across multiple channels. Social media, email, PCC campaigns, all of these things have a place in your blog’s ecosystem. By leveraging multiple types of marketing, you can gain an edge on your competition by outpacing them in various fields.

For example, let’s say that you’re working on social media marketing, and things are going pretty well, but people aren’t converting when they reach your site. At this point, you could implement email marketing by incorporating lead capture forms that help you start building an email list.

From here, you can start building landing pages so people coming from social media or people who click on ads are taken to a page where they have detailed instructions on what to do next. All of this builds an airtight sales funnel that will bring more customers into your brand and show them why you’re better than all the rest.

5. Use Your Competition to Succeed

Our final step is a simple one, but it can quickly elevate you to the heights where you want to be. It all begins with using your competition as a jumping point for your blog. Start by using tools to explore their backlinks and the success they’ve had with their topics.

Try these tools out:

Buzzsumo - a tool that will show you which posts are performing the best on your competitor’s site
Majestic - a tool that shows which people are linking to your competitors
Ahrefs - Perform keyword research, content research, link building, and web monitoring with this all-in-one tool

These tools will give you an insight into what your competitors are doing, and therefore give you strategies to meet and exceed their successes.

Final Thoughts

Building a blog in a competitive niche isn’t easy, but with these tips and tools, you’ll carve a place for yourself in whatever industry you choose. How has your blog found its place in your niche? Let us know in the comments!