Categories
Starting a Niche Blog

Why choose WordPress for your Niche Blog

Millions of niche bloggers, and most successful companies including some Fortune 100 companies use WordPress daily. But why choose WordPress for YOUR blog?

Why choose WordPress for your Niche Blog?


Earth ball with wordpress
If you search for a blogging platform, many options will come up, as we discussed in Choosing the Best Blogging Platform. It doesn’t take very long, however, before you see one being very popular: WordPress. But why choose WordPress for your Niche Blog? Why is it so popular? In this article we will discuss the many advantages of building your niche blog using WordPress.

Easy to Setup


One very important factor when creating a niche blog is how easy the initial setup is. The good news with WordPress is that most web hosts offer a very simple installation wizard for WordPress which asks a few questions such as the name of your Niche Blog, let you choose a username and password, and in general get you started within 5 minutes, most of which is spent watching a status bar on your screen. If you want customize your look and feel with one of millions of themes available, you can get started in as little as 15-30 minutes and already have a very respectable niche blog to begin with. All that being done with absolutely no coding and no programming.

Easy to Write your Posts


Setting up your niche blog is one thing, but one of the most important things about your Content Management System (CMS) is how easy it is to create posts. With WordPress, as soon as I have an idea, I just log on to my blog, click new post, and start writing. Using a very simple interface, you can format your text quickly and easily so you can focus on creating great content and let WordPress take care of the complicated technical stuff. And more importantly, it means that I can save a draft with my ideas before I forget about them. Back in the olde days when I had to manually code everything, I needed pages and pages of written notes because my programming skills could not keep up with my ideas.

Optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)


A great advantage with WordPress is how it was designed from the ground up with Search Engine Optimization in mind. Good SEO will help your niche blog rank higher in search engines so viewers can find your niche blog easier. It’s definitely not the only way to get traffic to your niche blog, but it certainly is one of the best and cheapest. If you add a SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, it can take you 5-15 minutes per post to do some Search Optimization and help viewers find your post. Yoast SEO is such an important component that it’ll deserve it’s own post down the road. But back to WordPress for now.

Millions of Themes and Plugins


WordPress themes allow you to customize the way your website look in minutes. Because of the way it is built, your posts are kept from one theme to the next, so you can try out as many themes as you like without having to rewrite your content. There are also a myriad of Plugins available to help you manage your website. Interested in having statistics for your website? With a few clicks, you can have a statistics plugin up and ready. Want to add an event calendar with the option of selling tickets online? Again with a few clicks you can get everything ready. It is truly amazing how many things you can do with plugins without having to learn programming. A few you have to pay for, but there’s quite a cornucopia of free plugins available also.

Responsive Websites


Responsive Website_55551172
In this day and age where Mobile devices are gaining an impressive market share of the browsing experience, having a website which looks great on a computer, tablet, and cell phone is very important. Luckily WordPress offers many themes which are built to be responsive, so you are good to go out of the box. Not all themes are responsive, so I do recommend you check for responsive ones to give the best experience to all your users, no matter which device they use.

Security


Security is another important aspect. It’s important to keep your content secure so only you and those you allow to can make changes or post new content to your niche blog. It’s also important to keep spammers and bots off your site so everyone can enjoy the comments section without having to read thousands of spams. The good news once again is that WordPress has you covered in terms of security. No server is ever 100% secure, but WordPress strives to be as close to possible to that mark. It is used by most of the Fortune 100 companies, and has kept their data safe.

So Who Uses WordPress?


WordPress is such a flexible tool that it is being used by various types of niche blogs and websites. From Universities and Colleges to Fortune 100 companies, without forgetting millions of niche blogs. WordPress has a very strong following and one of the best communities in existence. If you stumble upon an issue, there are a plethora of websites available to help you out. There are millions of people devoting their spare time in helping others achieve success with their Niche Blog.

It’s Free!!!


Notice how I put this header last? That’s because while WordPress is free, even if it weren’t, it would still be my favourite CMS because of the many reasons listed before. The fact that it’s free is a great bonus, a bonus which makes it easily accessible to anyone and everyone, and lets you have a great no-compromise solution for your niche blogging needs.

Categories
Starting a Niche Blog

Finding a Niche for your Blog

Finding a niche for your blog is something which will most likely define your blog for years to come. Thankfully, there are ways to make it easier to find the best niche for you. In the next post, we will discuss how to name your blog post, but for now, it’s just a question of finding what subject your blog will be about. Ideally, a good niche should have enough viewers interested in it, and not be over-saturated. It has to be something you love and are passionate about, because you will be putting countless hours reading and researching on that subject every week. Then as your notoriety increases and you become more and more recognized for the expertise you are developing, you will be making lots of friends and fans in your field, which brings more conversations and more questions, which of course means more researching and more writing.

If you have any hobbies which have kept your interest for years, chances are they are a great place to start with when trying to find your niche. For my first blog, it was photography and videography under the name of Studio JPIC. I always loved photography and videography. Ever since I was a child, I was fascinated by photos, and as my passion grew, I wanted to learn how to take better photos, both in terms of equipment and technique. I knew it would be a lifelong journey, and that there will always be something new to learn. I also knew that I would spend many hours per week researching and experimenting, and I wanted a way to remember what I learned. I figured that many others probably had the same questions that I did, so the idea of a blog and YouTube channel sounded like a great two birds one stone story. When it was clear that blogging would occupy a big part of my life, I then created this one, the Niche Blog Mentor.

Rule #1: your blog should feel liberating; it should be relaxing

One warning I can give, though, is don’t start a blog only because you believe it will be popular, or only for the money you believe it will bring you. Your blog should feel liberating; it should be relaxing. While you may be able to put up with a subject for which you have no interest in for a short while, you will most likely never develop the expertise to really set yourself apart and become the leading reference in that field. On top of that, you will very quickly become very miserable every moment along the way. On the other hand, if you love your subject, you can research and blog about it for many hours each day, and never get tired of it. That’s when you know you chose the right niche for yourself. In 99% of the cases, your blog shouldn’t feel like work, it should feel like a hobby, something you do for fun. You just happen to be able to get some extra income from that hobby!