4 Steps to Find the Perfect Topic For Your Blog
October 17, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
Blogging for money… We all seem to run towards it like the gold rush these days, trying to build up profitable blogs that will give us financial freedom for the rest of our lives. Is it possible? Absolutely. There are thousands of bloggers who make a good income online and it could easily happen to you. But what you may not realize is that it all starts with the niche you pick for your blog. Choose the wrong one and you’ll be spinning your wheels without getting anywhere. Pick the right topic and you’ll see thousands of subscribers and thousands in income.
So how do you do it? How do you pick the perfect niche for your blog that will enable you to thrive and become a pro blogger? It’s not easy but I’ve developed a step-by-step system that will put you on the right track. This is the exact process that I use for myself in selecting the niches I work in. It’s what has helped me establish my portfolio of sites including Winning the Web, which brings in decent income and which I enjoy immensely.
There’s a perfect niche out there for YOU. Here’s how to find it…
1. First, look inside yourself for your interests
Alright, I know it sounds cliche, but the first step in the process is to look inside yourself. What are your passions, goals, and interests? What do you enjoy and know a lot about? Too many times I see bloggers going after big money niches like finance, technology, and weight loss just because they think it will make them the most money. Not only is this not necessarily true, but bloggers will often burn out unless they truly have a passion for what they are writing about. Don’t let this be you. Blogging is a big commitment in terms of time, resources, and attention and naturally you want your site to be about something you actually enjoy. It could mean the difference between success and failure.
Take a look at yourself: background, job, interests, hobbies, connections, etc. There are blogs about virtually every topic imaginable, but only a small handful are relevant to you. Look at your experiences, your lifestyle, your favorite possessions, your friendships, and your preferences. What are some topics that come to mind? You need to identify these niches and write them down in a nice long list.
As an example, here’s a list of some of my interests from the top of my head: condominiums in chicago, asian restaurants, internet marketing, seo, business books, ipods and iphones, google, tennis, fantasy basketball, drum sets, fitness and bodybuilding, cruise vacations, college admissions, copy writing, blogging, import cars, vitamins, and standardized tests.
Whew! That’s a long random list that I came up with in just a couple minutes. Everything mentioned is something that I’m somewhat interested in and could potentially create a new blog on.
Get the idea? Create a list for yourself by looking at your life and the things around you. You shouldn’t have any trouble performing this task.
2. Select your blogging style
In the previous step, you looked at your interests and your passions and you should have created a long list of potential blog topics. Now that you’ve done that, the next step is to decide on the type of blog you’d like to create. What do I mean? There are 5 different types of bloggers you could be: expert, rambler, journalist, journeyman, and celebrity. Depending on the approach that you want to take with your blog, the topics that are most appropriate for you will likely change.
For example, if you want to create an expert authority blog where people will come to respect you, you need to know a lot about the topic you are writing about. You could have a big interest in import cars, but if you’ve never even touched one in your life, it’s probably a bad blog topic for you to pursue.
Similarly, if you want to be a journalist and report news on your blog, your topic has to be at least somewhat newsworthy. You could be interested in carpet cleaning for example, but it’s probably not best for the structure and style you’re aiming for in this case.
Decide on the style of blogger you want to be, then cut down your original topic list based on that new information. What are you left with?
3. Find a unique angle – beat the competition
Next, look at the blog topics that made the cut from step 2 and write down any unique angles that you can leverage to gain an advantage. For example, if you work as an SEO at a marketing agency (like me) and have connections in the industry, it could definitely help you to establish a blog about SEO. Similarly, if you’re a professional basketball player, writing a blog about life in the NBA could definitely gain a wide audience of interested readers. This is the strategy Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards uses on his blog,
Also, be sure to scope out the competition in the fields you’re looking at. Use Google Blog Search, Alltop, and other blog aggregators and top lists to analyze what the biggest blogs in the niche are doing. Do you have what it takes to compete with them? Can you offer something unique that will fulfill a market need? These are important considerations in selecting a blog topic you can be successful in.
4. Look at opportunities for blog monetization
In the final step of the process, it’s time for the money. You’re going to be investing a lot of time into your new blog, so you might as well find an optimal niche that will compensate you well. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not always the obvious big money niches that will pay out the most. Depending on your own unique set of skills, experiences, and style, your most profitable niche will differ wildly. For example, someone who puts in just as much effort as Problogger Darren Rowse in the blogging niche could easily fall flat on his face and make no income. Be sure to follow the previous 3 steps before working on this one. Money is last for a reason.
Ready to make some money? Now that you’ve come this far, I’m going to show you a quick method that will enable you to compare the monetization opportunities for your potential blog topics.
For this method, you’re going to utilize data from Google Adwords, a search marketing platform that advertisers use to bid for keywords in the search results. If there is significant search volume for keywords related to your niche and advertisers are bidding high, it’s a good sign that there is money to be made in that industry. Let’s go through the process.
Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter your main keywords for the blog topics you are considering. Be sure to check the box for “Don’t show ideas for new keywords” so that you only get data for the keywords you need.
Here’s an example for 4 different keywords.
Look at Estimated Avg CPC. This is the average cost-per-click advertisers are willing to pay for the top ad spot. The higher this number is, the more profitable the niche. Now look at Approx Avg Search Volume. This is the average number of searches for that keyword per month. Multiply the average CPC by the search volume to get a relative profitability score for the keywords you are considering.
What’s your most profitable keyword? In our example, digital photography beats out internet marketing for the top spot.
Take your final list of blog topics and narrow it down to just one based on the above 4 phases. Don’t worry about monetization too much from the start because if you have an engaging blog with good traffic and a loyal audience, the money will come naturally.
Be sure to participate in this process. What blog topic do you come up with? Is there anything you would do differently now that you know about this system? Leave a comment!
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Very insightful and informative. The truth is I never really pay much attention to choosing the right keywords until only recently. So my question is if a certain keyword has a high search volume, wouldn’t it be too much of a competition? I’m sure you are not advocating to choose keywords with the least search volume, are you not?
Yan
Hey Yan,
You bring up a good point. Certain blog topics are more competitive than others and it’ll be harder to gain traction in those niches. However, if you follow the process I laid out, then why not? If you’re passionate about the topic, it matches your blogging style, and you have some sort of competitive advantage or unique selling point, why not?
I don’t like the idea of shying away from a niche or keyword just because it has more competition. Sure, there’s a steeper hill to climb, but if you’re setting out to create an authority blog, then there’s space for you, regardless of the competition. As I mentioned in the post, competition and monetization should be considered last when thinking of a new blogging topic.
Hey Gyutae
You have made an excellent point here on the importance of being passionate in what we do. So I presume I’m in the right track as I’m in the midst of creating a highly-competitive niche site away from what I’m doing right now. I know it’s tough to stand out in the financial niche but I’ll make damned sure I keep the passion alive.
Thanks for your awesome response. It certainly clears the air for me.
Yan
I think that it is pretty easy to rank for high competition keywords with a blog, great content that leads to lots of links, an aggressive direct backlink strategy, good internal on-site SEO and internal linking structure and of course all the commenters that help add content to the blog brings great results even with competition in the millions. With a static site it is not as easy, so there the picking lower competition keywords is a better strategy. Thanks for the great post Guytae!
Great post!
I have already got past this step, but will send it to my friend to is thinking about starting a blog.
Thanks Joel, I’d appreciate it if you could spread the word.
What topic did you end up picking for your blog? Did the article bring up any new ideas that would have made you pick your topic differently?
Not really. I chose the topic of SEO, Link Building, Traffic, etc. It is kind of a personal blog, so I will just write about things that I am interested in. Might do more about web design, development, etc. and also some tips for young entrepreneurs.
This has some excellent and very infomative information for future reference, bookmarked now!
I have not yet started a blog myself but it is something I will look at doing in the near future, I think it would be real interesting and beneficial writing about the things I love and already spend huge amounts of time on I.E. SEO & Internet Marketing. I realy don’t feel that I have the expertise to write GREAT articles yet, not because of lack of knowledge more the copywriting skills. I must say that reading lot’s of the best blogs, including this one, and comenting, is making me feel more confident every day though. So hopefully I will get started soon.
Awesome, thanks Stuart! As long as you’re passionate about the topic, I have no doubt that you’ll be able to gain the confidence and expertise to start an authority blog. You can always learn new things if you’re motivated, but you can’t force yourself to be interested in something. Keep at it, you’ll get there in no time.
And Gyutae, you could be a “high profile” reader for me, if I get things right.
Haha yeah, let me know when the blog is up. I’d love to take a look and read some of your articles.
The most important thing is to feel comfortable with the selected niche. It’s typical to see people creating MMO’s blogs everyday, imagining that they will start earning plenty of money instantaneously. Then, after a month, they end closing the blog because they don’t feel passionate about, and they were expecting instant results…
That’s definitely an important factor. The danger of the ‘make money online’ niche is that bloggers may think they’re passionate about the topic, when in fact they’re only interested in making easy money without putting in the work. My advice to everyone would be to build an interesting blog based our your own real interests – the money will come as a result.
That’s definitively a truth!
Couldn’t agree more with you and it’s easy to spot the difference between the two.
Yan
It amazes me sometimes how things differ between sites. If you were building a physical product site for instance, #1 is more often then not BAD advice, even though many give it.
Excellent list though, it make you think much differently then normal.
I’m not too sure what you mean by #1 being bad advice. You should always be passionate about what you’re doing, not only for blogs but for other sites as well.
If things go bad, you could easily lose it all..including the original passion.
Lets say you make quilts as a hobby, which you’ve been doing for 20yrs and LOVE it.
Someone suggests you try to make some money at it. You pour your heart and soul into it for however long, you give it everything you got and then some.
It fails and now your lost. More often then not you just lost your one passion as well.
This is why some of us (in the direct sales field) say it’s actually bad advice 9 x outa 10 to only pick something because it is a hobby or passion of yours.
The most important part of the message presented in this article is to dig deep within yourself in order to find something that you really like and something you really know about. It is not enough with copy-paste only….
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Hey Torni, you definitely hit the nail on the head here. A blog needs to be unique and interesting in order to succeed. That can’t really be done unless you’re truly interested in the topic and are willing to learn more about it over time.
Oh good one, I didn’t know the Estimated EPC could be pulled from Google Keyword tool.
Well you can’t really calculate the exact earnings per click, but you can infer the money potential of a niche by looking at the cost-per-click and search frequency of related keywords. The higher the better.
The content is the most important thing in website.
Yes, content is the most important thing but if you can’t make a good title, you will lose a lot of free web traffic you could’ve had from search engines like Google.
Hmmmm. I like this. I guess my style would be a blend of Rambler and Journeyman on my personal blog, and Journeyman/Journalist on my professional blog. Thanks for the categories.
Thanks for commenting, Jill. I think the journeyman aspect of blogs is what makes them truly intriguing. People identify with other people and connect with them through their experiences. Blogs are the perfect platform for that. Keep blogging!
I think that number 3, finding your own unique angle has to be the most difficult. It is very easy to derive ‘inspiration’ from others and end up regurgitating the same thing, but how to be different, unique and interesting at the same time is the challenge.
It’s a difficult task indeed.. sometimes I find myself using others’ ideas but force myself to add my own unique twist and opinion to make it more interesting, both to myself and my readers.
In case you are blogging the best thing you can do is write about something you actually care or know something about. Goin for this without a marketing budget and not knowing if you will succeed is a draw back, but if you are writing about something you enjoy youz will at least have fun!
On the other hand if you have a few hundred or thousand bucks to push your blog to the next level you might pick any niche you want, you might succeed with some people writing content for you about stuff you have no clue about
Good points… It’s hard to imagine that people used to blog because it was fun right? I think we need to go back to that. Too many people are in it just for the money these days.
Even if you hire freelancers to write your content, I still prefer to have an interest in the topic – especially since I like to take ownership of my sites. In fact, almost all of the sites that I own represent a part of me that I can be proud of.
Aha, very interesting post. I think the difficult part of all of that is how to beat all your competitor.
Zak, competition is a very important factor when choosing a niche, but it isn’t everything. You’re way better off writing about a super competitive topic that you love than about a topic that has optimal levels of competition but that you don’t really care for. Everything needs to be well-balanced of course, but I think your own interests and personality are most important.
Very informative and thorough article indeed. Just a quick question, I’ve been struggling for years, but just can’t seem to identify what’s of my interests. What do I do if one’s having such difficulties?
Chris, how can you not know your own interests? Identify them by looking at what you spend time doing and enjoying, what you like reading about, watching tv – what subjects do you like to watch, what do you dream about, do you collect anything, participate in anything… etc ect.
I’m sure if you wrote these things down you would see a pattern emerging. 
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