Writing for Your Wealth

When it comes to choosing a niche to blog about, there seem to be two camps: the folks who tell you to write about something you love and the folks who tell you to choose based on profit potential. And never the twain shall meet, eh?

It is true that certain topics are much more profitable than others, and some are unlikely to make you more than a few pennies a day, but chances are something you enjoy can make you decent money if you turn the topic into a blog. It’s just a matter of winnowing things down to find a winner.

There are plenty of tools that let you research exactly what merchants are bidding to have their ads placed next to certain types of words, but for the sake of this post, let’s just take a common sense approach to picking a niche.

What Are You Passionate About?

Blogging (successful blogging anyway) is a long-term endeavor. The people who “make it” so to speak are generally the ones who can stick with it not only for a few months but for years. This is why it’s so important to choose a topic you will enjoy and that’s broad enough to give you plenty of subtopics to explore.

The first step is to figure out what subjects you would enjoy covering in a blog.

Open up Word, or Notepad, or iPages (or get old-fashioned on me and take out a pen and paper) and start brainstorming ideas. What are your hobbies? What do you enjoy learning about? What are you already an expert on? What (for those who are lucky enough to enjoy their work) business are you in?

Write down as many topics as you want. You don’t have to be an expert on something to start a blog on it; through research and writing, you’ll become knowledgeable and people new to the subject will value your teaching and respect your authority.

Determine Profitability of Your Potential Niches

Got your list of topics?

Good. The next step is to cut out the ones that are unlikely to make you much money, which should leave you with a couple of promising candidates.

Next write down some of the products or services associated with each topic. If you were thinking about creating a blog on snowboarding, you could list snowboards, snowboard gear, ski resorts, etc. If you wrote down dogs, you might list crates, books on training, pet food, etc. For my freelance writer friends, you might write down books on writing or perhaps services that post jobs.

Why do this? If you’re blogging, you’re probably going to start out making your money by selling advertising or participating in affiliate programs (you can create your own products, too, but that’s a bit different so we’ll talk about that another time), and these things revolve around the exchange of products and services. Even if you’re not planning to write posts that sell or pre-sell anything, it’s wise to think of the products those merchants in your niche are trying to sell. At the end of the day, your getting paid depends on some of those visitors clicking through from your site to the merchant’s and making a purchase. If merchants don’t make anything this way, they won’t pay for advertising on your site.

Okay, let’s get back to that list. Look at the products/services you associated with each niche. To get an idea how much advertisers might be paying for “clicks” for each item, you can head over to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (it not only shows you how much advertisers are paying to get visitors in certain niches but it also shows you what words people are typing into the search engine for information on those niches as well as how many people per month are searching). This is a powerful tool and I’ll spend some quality time discussing it in a future post, but for now you may just want to tinker around. Get a feel for which of your interests command a premium in the advertising arena.

Keep in mind the Google tool is only letting you know what people are paying through the Adwords/Adsense program, but it’s a fairly good bet that if clicks cost a lot for a topic there, then that will hold true across the board, with other advertising programs as well. And Adsense is a great starting point for bloggers who are new to making money online (it still counts for a big portion of my income too!).

A less scientific method for determining potential profitability of certain niches is to just look at the overall cost of the products you listed. Generally, more expensive products mean a higher advertising budget for the merchant. People can spend more to get visitors to their site if they’re selling a hot tub and making $1,000+ per sale than if they are selling books or cds. So, you might get higher paying ads creating a blog that instructs people on snowboarding tips and reviews ski resorts than a blog on freelance writing or dog training, just because the associated products and services command a higher price.

And that’s how you go about narrowing down your list.

Cross out the topics that don’t seem to have high value items associated with them, and keep the others.

Scoping out the Competition

If you have two or three (or more) items left in your list and you’re not sure which would be best to do, scope out the competition by heading over to Google and searching for other websites and blogs on the topic. Click all the top results. If the first five sites are really professional-looking sites that are updated every day and have multiple authors, it’s going to be hard to break into those top spots. On the other hand, if the sites at the top are smaller or just links to back pages at Amazon or some such, you know there isn’t as much competition on the topic.

Your home page doesn’t necessarily need to be #1 in Google for a certain keyword for you to do well with a blog (my big home and garden blog gets the majority of its traffic through the back pages from terms that are too scattered for anyone to devote a whole website to), but if all other things are equal, you might want to enter the arena with less competition, especially if it’s your first serious blog, and you’re still learning about site promotion.

The only other thing I’d warn you against is picking a niche that is too small (sometimes the fact that there are no big sites on top means that it’s a small topic with a limited audience and you may find yourself running out of ideas to blog about before long).

Pick something broad enough that you’ll be able to blog it for years to come. And pick something you’ll enjoy blogging about for years to come as well!