What Are You About?
In order to choose what your blog is about, you first need to think about what you are about. Spend some time thinking about what you value, what your interests are, your goals and aspirations, your passion and drive. If you can identify what keeps you going day in and day out, you can blog about it, and I bet it will be pretty easy for you as well.
When the topic is about something you care about, it no longer becomes work. You are blogging because you want to blog and not because you are being paid to do so. This is the ideal situation to be in.
Is Your Niche On The Rise?
You will need to do a little homework here. Blogging about your passion is not enough to make your blog a hit. Like any other business, you will have to do a market analysis on the area you are interested in. You might be interested in your topic but unless others are too, you will be fighting to build a highly read blog the whole time. The easiest way to find out if your niche will work is to find out its monthly search volume using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
The above shows keyword search volume related to Callaway Golf. With over 600,000 searches per month, a blog about Callaway golf would get a ton of traffic if you can rank on Google for the keyword.
How Is The Competition?
The more searches there are for a keyword, the higher the competition there will be. While the odds of a new blog appearing on page one on Google for “Callaway Golf†is very slim, there is a much higher chance for it to show up on a search for “Callaway Golf Putter†because there is less competition for that term.
This is where you will want to drill down into your niche until you get to a level where there is enough volume to send you good search engine traffic but no so much volume that you cannot compete.
If you are going write about a popular topic, think about what the competition is leaving out. If you are just writing the same stuff they are writing, your chance of success is very slim. Your content needs to stand out from competition. You need to offer something that no one else is offering.
Will You Have Enough To Write About?
Nothing kills a blog faster than one that is not updated. The topic you choose should be a niche topic but it should also be broad enough so you can write something about it everyday.
I have seen many bloggers pick a topic that is so narrow, they run out of stuff to blog about after two dozen posts. This is all the more reason to stick with a topic that you are passionate about. You would have a much better idea on whether you will be able to maintain a constant flow of content on a topic that you are passionate about than a topic that you have no interest in.
I recommend you start with a very narrow topic and then expand out. For example, if you were doing a blog about iPod and find you are having trouble finding new content to blog about, you can expand the niche to include iPod accessories and then other MP3 players. Just keep expanding until you have enough content to always keep the blog updated.
Can You Make Money From it?
Once you have found the topics that you are passionate about, the next step is to find out if you can make money from it. One way to find out if your niche will be profitable is with the Google Traffic Estimator.
Enter the main keywords of your blogging topic and the Traffic Estimator will give you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for those keywords.
Generally, the higher the Cost Per Click amount, the more an advertiser has to pay and that means it is possible that you will earn more by creating content which reflects that specific keyword.
Keep in mind that the traffic estimator shows CPC prices for the Google search engine and not the Google AdSense network. If you are running AdSense ads on your iPhone blog, do not expect to make $1.67 for a click. However, the tool will give you idea on the profitability of your blog topic.