For anyone who wants to run a blog today, there’s ample opportunity to find the information that you need. Most of the time, though, it’s best to start with looking at the entire market that your blog could potentially target. Not to mention, trying to come up with a full-on topic from the first minute is hard. Instead, we recommend that you take some time to make a conscious decision on a wider, broader blog niche: Food, Tech, Pets etc.
Once you have that, you can begin to diversify a touch. How?
Choosing the blog topics: Igniting your passion
The best thing that you can do for yourself is to start looking at what you are passionate about. What do you like doing? What activities do you take part in on a daily basis? What can you talk about for a long time without feeling bored?
At the base level, what blogs do you read that you feel inspired by?
Always choosing something you care about and feel passionate over is very important. If you intend on this being a long-term project, you need that fire to keep you burning bright!
Now that you know that you should target something you feel passionate about, how can you harness that?
Finding your strengths
This is a very important part of the process of self-discovery and working out what you have to offer the world. Try and ask yourself if there are any parts of your life whereby people come to you for advice. Where do people come to you for help with in life?
Is there anything in life that you can feel quite creative over? Where do you think that you could help to set a trend, rather than merely follow along?
It’s always about the kind of things that you want to spend time doing. If you are someone who wants to write a food blog, but you’re too impatient to let that chicken marinade overnight, then you might not be the food expert that you think yourself to be!
However, if you like to make up healthy meals and shakes quickly that could be your avenue instead. Always remember to try and blend in the look of your site with the strength that you imbue. Get a simple, functional and stylish blog WordPress theme and you can leave design issues to other people to worry about!
What does your mind say?
Before you even think about starting a blog, you would expect that the desire to start one came from somewhere or other. Try writing down ten topic headlines and sub-topics – if you cannot do that without looking around online, this might not be the avenue that you want to head down in the first place.
Look at market gaps, too. Market gaps are where you can find some truly awesome ideas. Look around for ideas in your market that others have not covered, and then you can step in here and make a major difference. Choose some more complex topic ideas, and you should be able to build upon them in the long-term. Basically, spending a bit of time looking around for gaps in the market in terms of what people are talking about can be a great way to build a meaningful blog.
At the same time, you should spend as much time as you can, looking at why you read some of the blogs that you already read. What draws you to them? What makes you return? Use that to help build a plan of action for your own blog.
What’s the point of starting a blog, though, if the blog itself is lacking in publicity? Is there a market?
Is the blog niche competitive?
The next part of the agenda that we want to look at stems from the competitive nature of the niche. Naturally, some niches (like dog training) are so diverse and saturated that offering anything new to it would require a very unique perspective indeed. By the same token, some niches are simply too specific to be capable of producing enough hits for you.
The best way to see if a market is competitive is to simply head over to the Google Keyword Planner. Then, type in a search term and you can see how many searches per month certain terms get. Also, check it out on Google just with a simple search; this will quickly help you to see how much competition there is out there, and the quality of the competition.
If you feel like you could fit in and do a good job, then you should. That being said, you need to find out there is the potential to profit by doing this. Are you likely to make a living if you happen to tap into this?
What about profits?
This is very important – think about the resources that you have at present. Look at what you have learned about the industry, and then look at if others are making a living from this. While you don’t expect to see everyone who is trying to make a living in this blog niche succeeding, you should be able to find some genuine examples of people who are doing well.
You should look to see if, in the future, you could either sell your own goods or someone else’ goods through affiliate marketing. A good way to work this out is simply to type in some of those keywords we mentioned in the last section, and then see how much you could earn from ads by looking at the Top of Page bid column on Google Keyword Planner.
If you do this, you can see that an advertiser might be happy to give you investment later on down the line due to being a page that ranks well in a high keyword industry.
Keeping this in mind, you should be able to first understand how to find your blog niche, and then how to know if that niche is going to be right for you. Keep trying: you will be sure to hit the sweet spot eventually!
