Blogging can be an enjoyable hobby as well as a great way to make some money for yourself.  But one of the problems a lot of bloggers face is choosing a topic to blog about.  Here are 5 tips to help you choose a topic for your blog.

Follow Your Passion

Take it from me, if you have no passion or strong interest in a topic you will not be able to make a successful blog about it.  I’ve started dozens of blogs in the last few years and the ones that were topics I didn’t feel strongly about soon became a chore and were neglected.  Most of them I shut down but a few are still running with no new updates being posted.

Just because a topic is popular or has money making potential isn’t enough to motivate most people to write about it day after day.  Choose a topic that you love and it will shine through in your writing and make for a high quality blog that will draw an audience.

Use Your Experience

Another common mistake new bloggers make is using their blog as a journal of learning.  Although there is some value in keeping track of your progress as you learn a new topic you’ll find your audience to be very small.

Simply put, not many people really want to read about an inexperienced person as they learn a new topic.  You might find some readers out of the people who are less experienced than yourself, but if you’re just starting out in a new topic this is going to be a very low number.

Choose a topic that you’re already experienced in.  It might already be obvious to you that this will likely also be a topic you are passionate about and have been working with for several months or years already.

Focus, But Not Too Much

Most new bloggers are one man bands, producing all of the content for the blog themselves.  There are only so many hours in a day or week that you can devote to blogging, especially if you have other commitments such as a career and family.

Choosing a blog topic that is too broad will make it difficult to keep up with major blogs on that topic who have a paid staff of writers to cover all of the news and developments that are occurring every day.  For example a new gadget blog run by a single blogger would have little chance of competing with Engadget or Gizmodo.  But if you focus your blog on a specific gadget such as the iPhone you can go a lot deeper into the topic than the major sites and establish yourself as an authority.

This can be taken too far though.  Be careful not to focus your niche down so far that you’ll run out of topics to write about.

Competition Is Good, Unless There Isn’t Any, But Even Then It Might Be A Good Topic

Does that seem confusing?  Let me explain it better.

Although a lot of topics already have hundreds or thousands of blogs writing about them that doesn’t mean that you can’t start a blog on those topics.  A lot of competition in a topic can mean that there is good potential for traffic and earnings from that topic.

To stand out in a crowded topic you need to write consistent, high quality blog posts that are unique in some way.  This is where your passion and experience will shine through, allowing you to write in a more enthusiastic voice and go much deeper into the topic than other blogs.

If a topic has no existing blogs that might be a warning sign that there is no audience for that topic.  Having no audience will make it unlikely that you’ll make any money from your blog, but if you just want to blog about your passion and don’t mind that your only audience is the other 10 people in the world who share that passion then don’t let a lack of audience stop you.

But because the world is such a large and complex place there are always going to be blog topics with large potential audiences that are currently not being written about.  Being the first to blog about these topics can set you up as an authority and help you rank very well in search engines for related keywords.

Plan Before You Launch

A final step before you settle on a blog topic is to plan out your first blog posts.  I like to sit down and do a mind mapping exercise to see how many blog post ideas I can come up with for the topic.  My rule of thumb is that I need at least 30 to 50 ideas within 10 minutes before I will consider starting a blog.

That might seem like a lot but remember that a new blog needs a strong launch and a long pipeline of upcoming posts.  If you can only think of 10 post ideas you’re going to run out of posts to write in the first few months.  The exception here is if your blog will include a lot of commentary and analysis on news in that field.  For example a sports blog will have news every day or week that can be written about.

This also ties back into passion and experience.  Topics that you are already interested in and have spent months or years actively pursuing will give you an almost endless supply of topics to write about.

Want to share how you chose your blog topic?  Leave a comment below.

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Blogging