What should I blog about?

What should I blog about? This should be the first question you ask yourself immediately after you decide to start a money making blog.  In my introductory article, earn an income blogging, I mentioned the importance of finding your niche in order to successfully grow your blog and begin making money blogging.  Niche blogging is a proven strategy for developing a successful blog that will grow and earn an income.  Finding the right niche is key to answering the question: What should I blog about?

What is a niche blog?

So just what is a niche blog anyway? A niche is a specific topic of a more popular and general topic.   For example, blogging is a popular topic.  Niche blogging is a niche topic within blogging.   Cars are also a popular topic.  Mustang GT or Electric Cars would be a niche topics.

At this point you might be wondering why finding a niche is import.  I know I did when I first started.  Let’s look at the blogging example I used.  Using the Adwords Keyword tool, the term blogging is searched for approximately 1,000,000 times per month.   That’s a boat load of searches.  Logic would tell you that if you want lots of search traffic, than you should target a keyword phrase like “blogging” right?  Wrong. The problem is Google has more than 50 million pages indexed for the term blogging.  That’s a very large number of pages.  In order to get your site ranking on the first or second SERP (Search Engine Results Page) would be near impossible, especially when you’re first starting out.

A far better approach is to pick a sub-topic or sub-category of blogging and focus on it instead.  Even if we ignore the search engine information above, blogging on a topic such as “blogging” is tough, I mean there is a great deal of ground to cover under the term blogging and it would be hard to cover such a wide topic.  Blogging on a more targeted topic within blogging would allow you to rank higher, have less competition and provide your readers with a more targeted and focused blog.

To look at a good example, I’ll refer back to my first blog, Gather Little by Little or GLBL.  GLBL is a personal finance blog.  There are tons of personal finance blogs on the internet and any number of them have been around for a long time.  I knew early on, before I even learned about niche blogging, that I needed to capture my own section of that market.  Since my Christian faith influences everything I do, I knew I wanted to include my faith as part of my writing.  My niche on GLBL become: Christian Personal Finance.

Finding the perfect niche for you

I was fortunate to find the right niche for me early on when I really knew nothing about how to blog.  Finding the right niche can be tricky if you don’t know what your doing.  Fortunately, I’ve learned the right things to do, or at least one approach to it anyway, and I’ll share it with you:

1. What are your interests? If you’re going to be writing frequently on your blog (the more frequently you write, the faster you grow) you better pick a topic that you like writing about.  There is nothing worse than picking a topic you hate and having to spend 1-3 hours a day writing articles on that topic.  Not only will you hate it, but so will your readers.  They’ll pick up real quick on the fact that you aren’t enjoying what you’re writing on.
2. Do you have knowledge or expertise? While not critical to finding your niche, I do recommend picking a niche topic for your blog that you have expertise or knowledge in.  I say it’s not critical as you can certainly start a blog and share what you’re learning.  I did that on GLBL, but it’s far easier to write about something you already know.  Remember too the expertise is relevant.  In many cases the people visiting your blog will know very little about the topic, so in order to write with authority and be an expert, you just have to know more than they do.
3. Competition – Competition isn’t a bad thing, but I personally think the perfect niche is one that gets a decent amount of search engine traffic and has little to no competition.  These niches are hard to find, especially when you factor in you should have an interest and knowledge about the topic.  Great niches are still out there though, you just have to spend a little time looking for them.  Remember too, that the number of sites ranking on Google for a topic doesn’t mean necessarily mean competition.  There could be lots of sites focusing on the same niche, but they may be horrible or not well optimized for search engines.  To compete, all you have to do is create a high quality site.  You do that by providing high quality and useful content.  Quality content is the silver bullet to being successful with your blog, don’t ever forget that.  In real estate, it’s: Location, Location, Location.  In blogging, it’s Content, Content, Content.
4. Search Volume – Let me just say this right now and you’ll hear it many many times again from me: Don’t write for search engines, write for your readers.  We do want to attract search visitors to our site.  Why? Because search engine visitors are the visitors that click on your ads.  The more search engine traffic you have, the more you make money blogging.

Finding your blogging niche using Google

At this point you should have a topic in mind.  The topic should be something you enjoy and that interests you.  The topic should also be something you’re familiar with, knowledgeable about, or perhaps may even be an expert in.  With that topic in mind, let’s explore how to find the exact right niche within that topic.

Adwords Keyword Tool

First, you’ll need to create a Google Adwords account.  Adwords is the website Google Adsense publishers use to build, publish and track their Adsense ads.  We won’t be using it for publishing adsense ads, at least not yet.  Within Adwords, Google has a number of tools that are really slick.  The primary one for this article that we’re interested in is the Keyword tool.  Once you’ve signed up for Adwords, login.  From the main screen, click on Opportunities, then Keyword Tool which is located in the left hand menu.

The Adwords keyword tool allows you to type in keywords.  Keywords are the word combinations that searchers enter into Google when trying to find something.  The tool will in turn show you the approximate search volume for those keywords per month.  Nice huh? Here’s how we’re going to use this tool:

In the Word or Phrases field, enter the topic you’ve come up with.  My wife loves gardening, so let’s use gardening as the topic.  You would enter your topic and press Search.

Find candidate blog topics or niches

The tool then displays a list of searched keywords based on the topic (keywords) you entered.  By default, the searches are ranked by relevancy.  We’ll use these results to find possible niches.  Read through the list.  For gardening, I see a few options:

• Organic Gardening
• Vegetable Gardening
• Container Gardening
• Gardening Tips
• Indoor Gardening
• Landscape Gardening
• Gardening Advice

There are of course many, many others.  Now, what you need to do is write the list of ideas down, and pick the ones that you are interested in and have knowledge about.  Those are our candidates to answer the question: What should I blog about?

Refine the candidate list

Now, we’ll need to refine the list some more so that we’re in a less competitive niche.  You do this by looking at the Global Monthly Searches.  For each search, this field shows you the number of times people search on those terms.  You want to look for something in the 1000 – 10,000 range.  1000 is big enough to where you can get a good amount of search traffic, but not too small to where your blog growth isn’t limited.  Staying at less than 10,000 will allow you to compete but avoid niches that would require a great deal of work to be successful.  Personally, I shoot for 5,000 which I’ve found to work very very well.

Ensuring it’s not too competetive

Now that we have a good number of searches, we need to do one more step to see how much competition there is.  Remember, we want to try and avoid niches that have too much competition.  Open up a browser to http://google.com and type in your candidate keywords.  At the top of the search results, Google will tell you how many results there are.  You want your niche to be less than 50,000.  Frankly the lower the better.  The higher you go above 50,000, the harder you’ll need to work to rank well.

With our candidates defined and competition determined, you now have two options: 1) Pick a niche from the current list of candidates or 2) See if there are niches within the niches like: Vegetable Gardening.  Since Gardening is pretty broad, even the niches listed above within Gardening are pretty broad (based on the fact most of them are 80,000+ searches per month), for gardening, I’m going to look for some even more narrow niches.

To do this, enter one of the niches you found into the Word or Phrase field of the Adwords Keyword tool and press Search again.  For this example, I entered “Vegetable Gardening”.  I see a few that are great candidates:

• Vegetable container gardening – 8,100 searches per month
• Organic vegetable gardening – 8,100 searches per month
• Vegetable gardening tips – 4,400 searches per month
• Indoor vegetable gardening – 1,600 searches per month
• Raised bed vegetable gardening – 1,900 searches per month
• Home vegetable gardening – 5,100 searches per month

With these results, I would again check to see how competitive they are until I find something that has between 1 and 10,000 searches per month and Google search results are less than 50,000.  Remember, this may take some time.  I’ve spent a few hours trying to fine the right niche.  Also consider using a thesaurus to come up with different words.

Even though I’m using Gardening as an example (which you may know nothing about), I hope the process I’m using is clear enough that it could be followed for any topic you’re interested in blogging about.  Even if at this point, if the search volumes are too large or you don’t feel like you’ve found the right niche, continue narrowing down the topics by placing the keyword results into the search.  Again, use a thesaurus to come up with different words.  Put on your “searcher hat” and think like someone trying to find information on your topic.  Ask yourself, what would I type into Google?  Be persistent, you’ll find the right combination.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve decided to start a money making blog and answered the question: What should I blog about?, it’s time to choose a name for your blog.

Photo by: Unhindered by Talent