topic blog

How To Choose Your Blog Topic – Passions Vs. Profits
Passions Vs Profit
Do you pick a blog topic because of the potential for making money from it, or because you like it?
Consistent output is crucial, so if you can’t see yourself writing about a topic in six months, don’t choose that topic.
There’s a lot of advice out there regarding how to choose a topic to blog about. Some will tell you to focus on profitability. Find the niches that people spend money in and that are currently not serviced well by other blogs.
Others will tell you that it doesn’t matter about the money, it’s all about how much you care about the topic. If you focus on passion, things you personally enjoy and know about, creating good content will be easy and your motivation will be strong.
I don’t have specific advice on whether either
methodology is better. If anything, I suggest you consider both aspects, with a slight emphasis on choosing a topic you care about over the potential to make money from it.
People are very different. Some remain motivated because of the process, not the topic, and these people could run a blog about a topic they don’t really care about because the process of profiting from it keeps them going.
That doesn’t work for me. I only cover topics I enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t written content with profit as the main driver. Whenever you do an affiliate promotion – for example a product review – much of your motivation is the affiliate commission, yet you realize the importance of providing value to your readers as well.
This typifies the mesh in professional blogging between writing for writing’s sake vs. writing for income. It’s not black and white and all you can do is what works for you and you feel comfortable with.
Consistency is such a key component of successful blogging that I advise people to forget about profits for the first few months – even six months if necessary – and focus on giving value. This reasoning suggests you choose a topic that you personally could sit down and write something about every day without reward (that’s a good question to ask yourself – can you write every day on the topic you are considering to blog about?).
On the flip side, you don’t want to blog for 12 months only to earn a few pennies a day. It’s important to, at the very least, consider the type of reader you are attracting, whether they buy things, whether you can sell them things, or find sponsors who would pay to advertise to your readers.
I’m inclined to believe that as long as you have some traffic, you can earn some money, but if you do this strategically and prepare in advance, a little research can help to avoid wasting time. As much as it feels great to build an audience, we are also here to make money, and it won’t feel great if you can’t effectively monetize your audience.
The key is to understand your reader, their motivations, passions and spending habits. If you love the topic you blog about, you are in a much better position to understand your reader because you are part of the same niche. You know what you like, what you buy, and therefore what your readers enjoy and purchase.
If you are a good marketer you don’t have to be a fan of the market to actually understand it, but for most people I suggest you gravitate to topics you enjoy. It will make two key areas of successful blogging – content creation and monetization – that much easier if you have an inherent insight into your topic and audience.
Compound Effects
Okay, so how do you become a top blogger with huge traffic?
You use the power of compound effects, starting with little communication channels, leveraging what traffic you have until you hit bigger and bigger communication channels.
The problem when you first start out is no one will give you access to big communication channels and you probably haven’t built one of your own yet. Obviously if you already own a top blog or have a newsletter with thousands of subscribers you will use these tools – your existing big communication channels – to help with the launch of your new blog.
Most bloggers just starting out do not have access to large sources of traffic to begin with, hence it is always hardest when you first start since you have nothing to leverage (use this knowledge to motivate you, not discourage you – it only gets easier as you build your web assets).
The strategy to use is still baby-step methodology, but you focus on taking an ever-larger step each time – 1+1+2+2+2+3 etc - until one day you hit a big break.
Suddenly you’re adding 100+90+70 new readers each day when you hit a large communication channel. It will die down again eventually, but you won’t settle back to only adding two or three new readers a day, it will be five or ten because you opened up a larger source of traffic that keeps flowing and has a runoff effect.
Once you get to your first 100 readers it’s just that little bit easier to get your next hundred. Each time you tap into a big source of traffic you will add a new chunk of readers to your base audience, making it even easier to get your next big source of traffic. This is the result of compound effects and it applies just as well to blog marketing as it does to saving money in a bank.
It is through compounding of the traffic you attract from multiple communication channels, starting with the small sources, that you increase your leverage and access to ever greater sources of traffic.
from: Yaro Starak