Niche Archives - This Week in Blogging

100+ Topic Ideas for a Local Blog with Traffic Potential

January 6, 2025August 8, 2022

Since founding my Pittsburgh blog in 2015, my overall strategy was a very broad “do everything and write about it“.

For the first seven years, we put in a pretty solid effort and visited over 1,100 unique attractions/events/restaurants/etc. in the region. But after a while, it felt like our strategy was having less and less of a return for annual growth.

Part of this was simply because we had visited most of the big ticket attractions in the city, such that most of the places we were visiting were small and obscure spots with limited traffic potential. The other part was that I simply stopped putting effort into writing cornerstone pieces that are much bigger hitters with regards to keyword volumes and/or viral potential on social media.

So I took a break for a little bit and brainstormed all the ideas I could think of where we could repurpose existing content and create killer, themed articles with higher traffic potential. These, coupled with existing cornerstone/skyscraper articles on our site that we've published in the past, ended up totaling well over 100 ideas, and many were new for us to publish moving forward.

So in this one, I thought I'd share some of the best ones to help inspire some ideas for your own local blog!

Note: For purposes of this discussion, “[destination]” will be used as a generic placeholder for you to replace with your city, region, state, country, or other geographical areas. These are not intended to be exact keyword matches (research the best ones on Keysearch!), but more to inspire ideas outright. Other uses of brackets imply flexibility on specific items and examples will be provided for clairty.

Finding Blog Content Ideas with Jeremy Jones

September 14, 2020

If there's one thing we don't want to become here at This Week in Blogging, it's predictable. And that's why this week, our expert interview will be conducted by me (Chris), and will actually feature none other than the other half of TWIB, Jeremy Jones.

The two of us were chatting about who we'd like to come on the site and newsletter as it related to talking about finding new blog content ideas, and we realized that Jeremy is uniquely suited to talk about this as he runs five blogs in several niches.

So we went with it, and I'd like to think that this will end up being a very useful article for our readers and subscribers.

Slowly but surely, we're building out our base of content with interviews on everything from brand partnerships for bloggers to self-publishing a book. But today, as I alluded to, we're going to dive into ways to brainstorm new content ideas that can take your blogging game to the next level – and we'll also touch a bit upon content strategy to boot.

As always, we hope this will be helpful for you!

Talking Niche Blogging with Casey Palmer

July 13, 2020

Niche blogger Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

When I hear the words “Canadian dad,” I immediately think of Casey Palmer, and that's an attestation to the brand building that Casey has done over the years. I reached out to Casey to talk about niche blogging because his journey towards finding clarity with his site hasn't been a straight path. In my humble opinion, it's much better to interview those who has learned and overcome than it is to talk to those who struck gold with the first swing.

Besides that, Casey is one of the foremost voices of the Toronto Bloggers Collective, a community that I cofounded in 2018 along with three other incredible content creators. He's a thoughtful voice in the blogging space, and a voice that I'm honoured to feature because I know that his ambition in blogging comes from the right place, and that he goes about things the right way.

Jeremy wrote an in-depth guide on what it means to start a niche blog in today's day and age, and I think this interview serves as the perfect compliment to that article.

Without further adieu, my good friend and respected colleague, Casey Palmer.

What Does it Mean to Start a Niche Blog in 2023?

January 9, 2023June 2, 2020

For many years, blogging experts have been screaming “niche down, niche down” to encourage those looking to launch a new site to claim ownership of topics where they can shine as experts.

This was done for many reasons, with the biggest simply being that the internet is running out of space. I'm serious. Gone are the days where you can start a general blog, put a little effort in, and succeed. Today blogging is an organized industry, with established best practices, and successful blogs covering nearly every topic there is- often multiple times over.

To translate, this means that competition is fierce. Niching down is a way to stand out amongst the sea of bloggers and allows you to have a clear topical advantage right from the start.

If you're looking to start a niche site in 2023 (or even overhaul your existing site), this guide highlights the important points you must consider.