Bloggin Ads

A blog is unlike any other type of media like a static website or magazine. It has only one main topic and that’s all it talks about. The potential for profits is inherently dependent on the topic and how much you can write about it in a sustainable level of interest. That goes to say that you have to be passionate about the topic and have the energy level to support a prolonged content creation process before your blog can become popular. But, having all these pre-requisites does not guarantee success because there are topics that are not commercially viable. The process of selecting a profitable niche that you are genuinely interested in - as opposed to the myriad of popular topics other people are interested in – is a difficult and arduous task.

Since this blog is about making money, I’m just going to concentrate on giving you the simplest and the bare minimal steps in figuring out how to choose a profitable niche.

Step1 – Analyze Your Interests

Caligraphy - Anyone ?

Take a close look at your interests and what you are all about. What drives you and gives you the utmost satisfaction in doing? It all boils down to one thing – passion. What is the energy level and passion you have for a particular interest? These are important questions to ask yourself because building a successful blog takes considerable time, and blogging will fast become a chore if you are not enjoying what you are doing. In time to come, your readers will be able to detect that you are a fake, and they will leave in droves. There are many blogs on the internet that are in the same niche as yours, why should they spend time on your blog that is so dry and passionless.

Another litmus test you can apply to test your interest level in a topic is to ask yourself this question: Would I still be happily blogging about this topic a year from now? If you can’t picture yourself doing this a year from now, don’t even contemplate on starting a blog on it.

Whatever that you do, do not blog on a topic that other people find popular, and the only reason why you are interested in it is because of its commercial possibilities.

While having a heightened interest in a topic is a pre-requisite for a blog topic, it alone is not enough to build a successful blog. Here is a list of litmus tests that you need to apply to each of your candidate topic of interests, and see which ones come out ahead:

	Popularity – How popular is your topic? If there is no demand for your topic then no matter how interested you are in it, nobody is going to visit you. The quickest way to find out is to do a Google search and see how many results you get back. You can also try Google Insight and plot all your topic interests into one graph, giving you a pictorial view of how each topic fares against one another.
	Growth – You want to go with a niche that is growing not one that is shrinking. Predicting the next big thing people will be searching for seems like a surefire winner, but it’s not an easy thing to do. Be on the lookout everywhere – on the Internet, newspapers, magazines, TV, Radio, conversations with friends. Check out Google Trends for Hot trends.
	Competition – The worst thing you could do to yourself is to get into a topic that is so popular and competitive that it will take you a long time to become a successful blog. Do you have the staying power to withstand the long and arduous journey? I use the WordTracker tool to compare the KEI (Keyword Effective Index) of various keywords for a topic. A KEI is logarithmic scale that ranges from 0 to 10, and is used to weigh and quantify the effectiveness of a keyword. Its usage and interpretation is quite similar in principle to the Richter Scale, commonly used to measure earthquakes. So, the higher the KEI associated with a keyword, the more effective the keyword. The main topic is usually competitive with many web pages competing for it. The more popular topic has over millions of web pages competing for it. While your SEO campaign does not have to target the main keyword, you can probably get a pretty good ranking by targeting the long-tailed ones. With the phenomenal growth of the web over the last decade, the web has become more and more cluttered; it’s uncommon to find any singular keyword that has a very high KEI. But there are still many topics with moderately good KEI that can be monetized. If you are resolved to compete in a niche with a moderate level of competition, check out what your competitors are not doing or not doing it well enough. It is often easier for a new blog to position itself quickly to capture a captive audience for a niche that is not well served by their competition, in doing so they created a blog on a sub-niche of the main topic.
	Content – Do you have sufficient unique content as an author to sustain your blog over a long period of time before you can become a popular blog? The answer to this question lies in whether you have the staying power which is driven by your passion, energy and interest level for the topic. In today’s cluttered Web, you are bound to find other blogs in your niche that can offer you inspiration and content ideas. Analyze the posts that you and your competitors do well in, extend on it, and provide an in-depth coverage of it with new refreshing viewpoints and ideas

By applying the process of elimination, you have probably narrowed down to just a handful of candidate topics that you are interested to blog about. The next step is to take each of these topics and put them through a series of web based tools.

There are a number of free keyword discovery tools on the internet: Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool; WordTracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool.

If you want to narrow down your field in a particular niche, you can use Wikipedia which does a very good job of providing informative articles on a topic that is well interlinked with others. I particularly find the subsections very useful in deciding what categories to go with my blog topics.

At the end of this step, you should arrive at a stage where you have gathered enough background information about a short listed number of topics that you want to concentrate on targeting for your blog which leads you to the next step.

In the second part of the series, I’ll talk about Step 2 – Analyze the Traffic Potential of your Niche.
Then, I’ll conclude the series with Step 3 - Analyze the Profit Potential of your Niche.

If you would like to receive free updates on future posts about niche blogging, please subscribe to Bloggin-Ads’s blog feed.