Saturday, January 24, 2009

Selecting the Right Topic For Your Blog

By Caroline Middlebrook

So you've decided to start a blog, you're doing it as a source of revenue so your first job is to pick a topic. Most people focus immediately on the profitability of the topic - how much do people pay for keywords in AdWords, how much are affiliate programs in that area paying out and so on? I want to discuss how your passion for the topic affects your ability to make money.

Your Ability to Make Money is Limited By Your Passion

If you want you can just skip the rest of the article and focus on this advice instead - pick a topic that you are super-interested in and ignore the profitability factor! If there are several subjects that interest you then by all means go for the one with the highest profitability but your passion for the topic should be your number 1 consideration.

If you want to create a profitable blog then it may seem counter-intuitive to go for passion first but I want to explain why I say this. In the simplest terms, if you want to make money blogging then you'll need to build a popular blog that attracts lots of traffic and you're only going to do this with hard work! That is a lot easier to do in a topic that you're passionate about!

Blogs tend to build slowly, especially at the beginning. It can take months for a blog to really get off the ground and for the traffic to start rolling in. If you've picked a topic that you're not really passionate about then you are likely to run out of steam before you get your blog off the ground.

Coming back to the money side of things. There are lots of ways to make money from a blog but they can broadly be split into two groups - 'on-page' methods like AdSense and other advertising systems. These kinds of ads typically do well in high-paying niches but they still don't have anywhere near the potential of the other group of monetization methods.

The second group contains more complex techniques such as creating your own products and to do this kind of thing you need to really be able to sell your work and this is another area where your passion needs to come through. If you are blogging about payday loans or mp3 players because you've determined that those topics are highly profitable but you're not passionate about them you will really struggle with any of the advanced monetization strategies.

You might be in a niche that doesn't sound very profitable, such as Rose Gardening for example but if you are really enthusiastic about that niche you'll attract other enthusiasts to your blog, it will be easy to build a genuine relationship with those people and your products will sell much more easily than an affiliate program for example.

To conclude, there are lots of ways to make money from your blog but without having passion for your topic you'll never be able to build the blog to the point where it gets enough traffic to make money and you'll either be limited to low-paying strategies such as AdSense or you'll be struggling to sell products that you are not interested in.

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