You think you want to try blogging as a way to make money, but aren’t sure what the first step is? Lucky you found this post!
The absolute first step in starting a blog is to pick your niche. Before keyword research, before getting a domain name, before picking a blogging platform, before anything else, you must decide what it is you’re going to blog about.
Here are some tips to help you pick a niche that will work for you.
The Niche You Know
Topics you know and are passionate about work well. If you can’t get both of those qualities, then pick something you’re passionate about, whether you know anything about it right now or not. You can gain knowledge through learning and research, but it’s hard to gain passion if it doesn’t exist at the start.
Why is passion so important? Simply put, you’re going to be writing about this topic for a long time. A daily posting schedule is great for building readership and keeping your readers interested. But think about what a daily posting schedule means. Seven days a week, you have to come up with content that’s interesting enough to be read. Days when you’re not feeling like writing, days when you’ve had a fight with your spouse, days when you couldn’t sleep, days when you missed the mortgage payment. You still have to write.
If you’re not passionate about your topic, you’ll skip days and lose readers, and eventually stop writing altogether. There’s a reason most blogs don’t get past the six month mark.
Popular Topics
If you have a choice between passions, blog about something popular. You want to make money with your blogging, which means getting as many people to read your blog as possible. A blog about the wear patterns on ant thoraxes might be interesting, but probably won’t get you the volume you need to make serious money.
Don’t be afraid to blog about topics you don’t think are popular, though, if that’s where your passion is. It’s a big world out there, and you never know who else happens to be Googling looking for a blog about ant thoraxes.
Unpopular Topics
If your passion is on a topic that is distinctly unpopular, that’s fine too. Note that I don’t mean unpopular as in nobody else is interested in it, but unpopular in that everyone hates the topic. You can generate a lot of blog traffic by being unpopular. Controversy is an amazing attractor.
Stay Away from Making Money Online
Just because you want to make money online doesn’t mean your blog has to be about making money online. There are plenty of people making respectable incomes blogging about various topics that have nothing to do with making money online. You might want to make money online, but are you passionate about sharing your knowledge on the topic with others?
Think carefully before starting a blog in this niche.
Write Daily Articles
Once you have a topic picked, then it’s time to write some articles about it. Don’t setup a blog, don’t pick a domain name, just write an article a day about the topic for a week. This is your dress rehearsal, to see if you can actually write about the topic and keep your passion for it.
When you make it through the week and still feel like you want to keep writing about the topic, then you’ve found your niche! Now it’s time to pick a domain name, do keyword research, identify categories, pick plugins, etc.
After you setup your blog, you already have those seven articles written. Post them all at once to make your blog seem lived in, and then start writing your daily posts.
So how did you pick your niche?