Newbie Blogstep Two: Choosing a topic or niche

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Photo by: myuibe

 

Following on from yesterday’s post – Choosing whether to blog or not – I’d like to get your mind thinking about what topic you could blog in as a newbie blogger.  You should have taken a trip over to the blogs I suggested to get an understanding of the style an established blogger takes and what you could achieve with about 3 years of work.

Today we’re going to look at choosing a topic and niche for your new blog.  This topic can be about something you know well, such as a large sporting club being in your home-town, or you live in an area where there’s so much wildlife and it’s a haven that you could post so much information about it – providing you like wildlife that is.  You may be a single parent and want to pass on your knowledge to other parents that are starting out, or you may have just sold your 2^nd house that you developed and are looking at ‘property developer stardom’.  These are all topics and niches that you can choose to blog about, some main topic areas are:

Make money online

Computer news

Pets

Movies

Books

Travel

Cars

Personal Development

Finance

Education

 

You’ll probably think that the above topics are really quite broad, and they are, they don’t look into a specific area or ‘niche’, and this is what you want to concentrate on.  If you were to choose the pets niche, then you would need to break this down to what type of pet, a dog, a cat, fish etc.  Then you would need to break that down further, to focus upon what you’re exactly going to write for the blog, what you are going to be and what your readers will read your blog – similar to the notes I wanted you to take on the other blogs in the previous newbie step.

 

If we look at the example below, you can see that I have broken the topic of pets into a niche:

 

Pets > fish > coldwater fish > goldfish > fancy goldfish > Shubunkin

 

Now, the above has been broken down into a manageable niche, some may say too much, but it emphases my point.  

So, I bet you’re thinking what could you actually write about on the blog if you chose the above niche?  Well, here are a few examples:

 

10 top tips for keeping Shubunkin goldfish looking their best

how to keep fancy goldfish together

Why comet goldfish and Shubunkin goldfish can inter-breed

How to keep your fish tank at optimum temperature for your Shubunkin goldfish

 

There are lots and lots of other titles that I have thought of in just a matter of minutes, plus, as soon as you start reading the web or reading a book or two you will start to think what could be beneficial to search engines and readers and what you could right about.  Now, it isn’t everyone’s dream to have a blog about goldfish, or even to keep them for that matter, but it illustrates my point that deciding on a niche really isn’t that hard.

 

Is there Traffic, Is it popular?

Now, if the topic(s) you’re thinking about haven’t got any traffic at the moment and nobody is searching for it, then you could go ahead and purchase a domain, setup the blog and start posting, right?  WRONG, there’s no point setting up a blog and paying for hosting fees if you’re not going to get any traffic from search engines and have nobody reading your blog – unless your blog is only for your family and friends to read, but wouldn’t you use a my space or facebook for that?   Having an indication that there is traffic in your topic is key, and you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to learn about differentiating yourself and earning a little from your blog now would you?

So, back to the example above.  I bet you’re thinking that the term “goldfish” doesn’t have that much activity on the web and people searching for terms relating to this on a daily basis would be wrong, well nope, you are actually wrong there.  This term out-ranks the daily search term for make money online and make money blog (according to Wordtracker’s keyword tool anyway) and both have a similar amount of pages when you do a google search;, so if you were thinking there wouldn’t be any traffic from a blog about fish of the goldie variety then think again – near to 5,000 searches (although you should air on the side of caution with Wordtrackers results) per day. 

 

 

Are there other blogs on the same topic?

Having other blogs on the same topic can be good for you, having lots of other blogs in the same niche is leading towards negative thoughts; why? because you want to drive traffic to your niche blog without lots and lots of other blogs talking about the same things as you are.  If other blogs are in the same sub-niche (so goldfish and care of them in the above topic) then this will help you understand there is traffic in this area and there is a need for your niche.  However, you MUST do some analysis in google and wordtracker to see if there are any searches on your topic, as if there aren’t then you could be talking to lots and lots of white space.

 

Can I make money?

This is the one question that you are probably thinking of right now – could I monetise a niche similar to the one I read about above, well yes you can.  Most probably with good off-site SEO optimisation to help steer those searchers to you, with great on-site SEO optimisation and the addition of adsense on your site – but this can’t be achieved without a lot of effort and testing.  I’m a long way from testing out all of my ideas about niches, and so too are many other bloggers that are in both mine and your position.  Testing and driving traffic to your site will be your two main focuses over the coming weeks, and you won’t be able to get there without lots of hard work.  You need to choose a topic that does have some search traffic, because these visitors will read your article and click on your adsense (or other) ads, or become subscribers to your blog and will (hopefully) become loyal readers that you can sell affiliate or other products to at a later stage.

 

 

What to do now

Choose two of the topics listed above and breakdown what you want to write about on your blog.  Now if you want to talk about Ford second hand cars, or brand-new SUV’s for you, then that’s the type of way that I would look forward.  After you’ve written down your two topics (like my example earlier) you will want to break your two topics into a manageable niche, which is specific and can attract long tail keyword terms to your blog.  Make sure these topics are something you are interested in; you can have an extensive amount of experience of these areas, but air on the side of caution with this as you may then become bored of writing on a certain topic that you already know plenty about.  You may be best to look into a topic that you know little about, or is a hobby that you have recently taken up – you will want to think about if you could write on a continual basis on this topic at least 3 or 4 times a week.  A long tail keyword is for example: how to make money with adsense, which will be linked into the broad topic of make money blogging.  If you’re a little confused on this topic then I’d suggest checking out DoshDosh, who explains a little more about long tail keywords and attracting traffic from them.

 

 

Now on step two of choosing a topic and niche, we will be moving forward next week and be looking into different types of blogging software and how to get setup on a free blog account.  If you liked this post, then don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for newbie bloggers. 

 

 

 

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