There are a couple of different things that go into choosing a topic to write about on your blog, especially when you’re trying to turn a blog into a viable money maker – as you’re trying to do:
- Choose Something That You’re Passionate/Knowledgeable About – To me this is one of, if not THE most important thing to consider when choosing a blog topic. At the end of the day, you need to be writing about something that you’re passionate about, or at least something that you have comprehensive knowledge of. The likelihood is that there’s going to be other blogs out there writing about the same topic as you, and therefore you need to be able to offer something extra special that they can’t offer. This is especially true if you want to make money from your writing, as people aren’t going to pay for something when you’re clearly going over the same generic information everyone knows. An example of this is cryptocurrency, which is big news at the moment and there are a lot of people looking for information about it, but that doesn’t mean that I should jump on the bandwagon and try to make money from writing about it, as I simply don’t know enough to make the blog posts worth reading. I know marketing, so that’s what I write about, and you should only choose something that you care about or have good knowledge of.
- Determining A Market – Once you’ve identified a topic that you feel comfortable writing about, it’s time to find out just how popular that topic is. Enter your topic into a tool like Google Trends to get a good idea of how interest in that topic is developing over time. See below for an example using, again, cryptocurrency as the topic, and you can clearly see that there is huge interest in this topic at the moment.
If something is on the way up and has growing interest then that’s a great topic to start with, but even if it’s not then don’t worry to much – some incredibly niche topics still have a solid following online.
3. Competitor Analysis – Now it’s time to see just who you’re up against in the “blogosphere” for your niche. Search for some ideas surrounding your topic to see what other blogs are coming up, and take some time to see how others are doing it. See what others are writing about, look at the sort of content that performs well, and then identify ways that you can make it better on your own website.
4. Find Keyword Ideas – One of the key fundamentals of getting your blog to perform well online is to ensure that it can be found through search engines, and to do that you need to find keyword ideas that you can write about. There are countless keyword research tools out there that you can use, but two of my favourites are Answer The Public and Semrush.
Answer the Public is a free visual research tool that gives you an example of the sort of questions that people are generally asking about a topic. This is a great tool for bloggers, as answering questions that people frequently ask is a great way to get your content seen. Example below.
Semrush is all in one, comprehensive marketing software that I’d recommend to anyone serious about growing their website. Amongst plenty of other features, Semrush has a “keyword Magic” tool, whereby you can enter a keyword idea and get fed back with tens, hundreds of even thousands of keywords related to what you’ve put in. This can be a real gold mine when looking for ideas of something to write about. What’s even better is that you can arrange these keywords by difficulty, so you can pick out the ones which will be easiest for you to rank for. Grab this low hanging fruit and you’re in a great position to start ranking in search and getting traffic
5. Find a Way To Monetise – Once you’ve got your niche and content ideas planned out, you simply need to find a way to monetise your website. This all depends on the topic you choose, but there are all sorts of ways that you can do this, from affiliate marketing (using your content to promote someone elses products and taking a commission), selling your own products, selling advertising, or even funnelling your traffic toward your business.
There really are plenty of ways to make money from your blog, you just need to have the three P’s.
Planning – Do everything I’ve said above plus more, don’t just jump in blind.
Persistence – Keep writing, keep reaching out, keep creating quality content.
Patience – Don’t expect to be making thousands from day 1, it takes time, don’t give up.
Best of luck!
This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through these links I will receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). I personally hand-test everything that I promote, and I only link to services and products that I know are of high-quality and good use for marketers.