You want to start a blog but you’re asking yourself – what topic should I choose for my blog? Don’t worry you are not alone.
Selecting a topic for your blog is probably the hardest and also the most important step in creating your blog. It can feel inconvenient that it is pretty much the first decision you have to make when you set out.
But if you approach it in the right way, it need not be as daunting as it sounds.
What Topic Should I Choose For My Blog?
The best way to approach this is to ask yourself a series of questions that can help to lead you to the right area.
What Do I Find Interesting?
The first question to ask yourself is “What Excites Me?”. This is crucial but often overlooked when it comes to blogging as people try to hone in on what will make them money first. Whilst the profitability of a niche is absolutely important, what’s even more critical is making sure it excites you.
Your blog is really powered by the content you have on there. If you don’t have great content, people simply won’t visit. No visitors, no money.
In order to create quality content weekly or even daily, you need to have a topic that genuinely excites you.
To hone in on what excites you, ask yourself the following questions (grab a piece of paper and write whatever comes to mind):
- What do you find yourself talking about constantly when given half a chance?
- What gets your emotions going when you start talking about it?
- What do you wish everybody knew or cared about?
- What do you think you could write about every day without getting bored?
These questions and similar like it should help to get you to a few topics that could work well.
What Is In High Demand?
Now you have a list of a few topics that excite you, we now need to make sure that other people will get excited about them too!
It’s all well and good if you get really excited about custom-made to order golf shoes but we need to make sure a big enough group of people do so too.
There are a few ways to check our topics will generate enough of a regular buzz to give us the assurance that we will get the audience we need.
KWFinder
One of the most popular ways is to conduct some keyword research. This is a whole topic in itself but for the purposes of finding an overall blog topic we just need to know how many people are searching for a particular term. One of the best tools around for doing is is Mangool’s KWFinder. Enter your overall topics into the tool and see what kind of search volumes you get.
As long as you have a few thousand search queries a month you know you will have a pretty good level of interest.
What Will Generate Income?
Now that we have one or two topics that (i) have your interest and (ii) get lots of searches, the third part of the equation is making sure that you can monetise them and that there is potential to actually make some money.
The reality is that it’s possible to make money in pretty much any niche as long as you have the first two parts of this equation covered. If you know you can get excited and generate quality content for a popular niche then you’ll have a good chance of generating traffic which you can monetise.
But to be absolutely sure, you can start by brainstorming some potential ways you could monetise your traffic and think about:
- Are there products on a marketplace like Amazon that your readers would be interested in?
- If so, Amazon has a very popular affiliate marketing program where you get paid a commission when a reader clicks a product link on your page and buys something (our first website is an Amazon affiliate website).
- Are there products that your readers would be interested in buying directly from you?
- If there are products your potential audience might buy directly from you then this could be a great way to monetise traffic. This might be products you could drop-ship to your audience or even develop yourself.
- Are there other affiliate programs you could use that your audience would be interested in?
- For example are there magazines or subscriptions services your audience would be interested in that you could offer up on your website.
- Could you attract enough visitors to use display ads?
- Display ads from a provider like Google AdSense payout whenever users visit a page and see the ad or click through onto an advert. You get paid a small amount for every view or click so you typically need a large audience to make it worth while but it offers a predictable stream of income.
A great way to see the potential for monetisation in a given niche is to look around at what other blogs in your prospective space are doing.
Finding Profitable Low Competition Sub-Topics
As well as giving you volume, KWFinder will also give you an idea of how competitive a given topic is in terms of rankings on Google. Just because a topic is competitive does not mean you shouldn’t go for it but it will give you a clear indication of the difficulty involved in ranking on Google.
In any case, at this stage you are more concerned with high level search volumes. In any given niche or topic there are thousands of sub-topics and queries you could write articles about and rank for which won’t be as competitive as the main topic.
But it’s worth bearing in mind KWFinder as a tool for helping you to identify sub-topics that may not be as difficult to rank for on Google as the main topic.
What Now?
If you’ve decided and now need to get started on actually creating, take a look at our step by step guide on starting a blog.
What Topic Should I Choose For My Blog?: Tell us your thoughts.