Writing about what you know is great advice for starting a blog, but’s not enough. The key to building a successful blog is finding a profitable niche.
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Pick A Topic You Enjoy Talking About
Starting a blog is an exciting experience, but most people give up after a couple of months because they lose interest in it. It’s important that you choose a topic for your blog that you also like to learn and talk about.
It could be your hobby, your work, or anything else, whether you are interested in personal finance, you’re a parent and want to share your experiences, or you work in recycling and have tips for businesses like which cable stripper to buy. You don’t need to be an expert, but it does need to be a topic that excites you to talk about.
Take a pen and paper and write down ten blog post ideas off the top of your head that you can write about. This should help you to ensure you are passionate about the topic you’ve chosen.
Do Market Research
The next step is to make sure there’s a profitable market for your topic. This can be done with market research.
Let’s say that you’re really interested in skincare and want to start a blog about it. You want to see if this topic has a big enough audience and see how much competition it has.
Start the search with Google Trends. Type ‘skincare’ to see if this topic has any interest and how many people are searching for it. Google Trends will show you whether interest in your topic is stable, rising, or declining over time. Avoid topics that are declining in interest to build a blog that lasts for a long time.
You want to make sure that you have a big enough potential audience to drive traffic to your blog for many years to come.
Pick A Smaller Niche
Next, you want to see what kind of competition you have for your topic. Search for your chosen topic on Google and see how many search results appear for this topic. Obviously, the topic of skincare seems to be too broad of a term to target, and there are way too many websites that are already competing for it. To avoid having to compete with high authority webites, you should choose a smaller niche.
If you scroll all the way down on your Google search results pages, you will notice some of the related search terms. Choose a search term and test to see how many people are searching for this specific term each month. For skincare, you could aim for something like natural skincare, or skincare for older skin, for example.
Head to Adwords Keyword Planner to analyze the search term you’ve chosen. If you explore more keyword ideas, you will notice that there are plenty of other low competition keywords that you can target on your topic of choice, which means you will have plenty of great keywords to target through your blog posts.
