Choose a Best Niche for Blogging Success

This is first report from Fourblogger Labs.

Before going deep into how to choose the best topic to blog about, I want to share my unsuccessful attempts on blogging. My experiences will be a great lesson for you.

I had been writing two blogs, one was about online ideas and another one was on RedisRed. I worked on those two blogs for a period of 90 days. Both are unsuccessful. I failed on them.

If you have already blogged about something, then take couple of minutes to have a quick look on my 2 unsuccessful blogs.

(After looking at these two blogs, if you felt that both blogs are better than your current blog or at least good enough and you don’t find any good reason for why I failed on them, I want to tell you one thing, your traffic or earning targets too low. Don’t worry. Some simple but powerful truths are going to be published in upcoming Fourblogger labs that will reveal the real earning potential  of blogging.)

How Not to Choose a Niche for Blogging?

A common mistake every start up blogger makes:

If they don’t know what topic to blog about, then they call themselves “tech bloggers” and write on random things that have been posted on big news or gadgets sites like Mashable, Techcrunch, Lifehacker, Readwriteweb, Webpronews, etc. Sometimes, start up bloggers write about their favorite movies in one day and another day about sports. Oh! These are the deadly start up ideas. Have you made this mistake? This is the mistake I made for  my Online Ideas blog. Posting about randomly ideas will never help grow your blog.

I want to ask you one thing. How do you describe the term ‘blogging’? Writing content for search engines, putting PPC ads like Google adsense, getting clicks on these ads through search engine visits, expecting money from Google? Isn’t it? If you describe “blogging” like that, then I am not the right person to guide you. The reason I say that is because my blogging experiments going this order: finding a powerful niche, writing quality content, delivering contents in different formats (eg. videos), identifying unique traffic sources to the niche, driving traffic through untapped traffic sources, helping readers, building a brand name on the blog, launching products, and multiplying income streams (Yes. You and I both are here to make money.), etc. So if you are on the same frequency as me, we can walk together. I hope, you have my fingers still in your hands.

If you have already read some blog posts about choosing a niche, I am sure some of the methods below have been recommended.

1. Using a Google adwords’ or some other brand Keyword research tool.

2. Analyzing recent thread topics or most discussed thread topics in popular forums.

3. Whether Google search has more paid (sponsored) ads for your keyword.

If you ask those bloggers who recommended the above techniques, whether they used these tricks to choose their niche when they started blogging, the majority of their answers would be “No!”. Then how can those recommendations help you get success? It gives a rough idea alone about whether you can blog about that keyword or not. I strongly recommend avoiding the use of those methods.

Note: Don’t choose any topic which is not sustainable for long period. For example, Google buzz.

So now you must be asking, how should we choose a niche to blog about then?

Follow the steps below carefully.

1. Every blog post that tells about how to choose a niche contains a very important word “Passionate”.  That tells you that you should blog about something you are passionate about. Yes, it is somehow true. Working on your most passionate subject will yield great results. If you are really passionate about something, there is no need to read this long post. For example, if you really love everything about your pet cat, then no need to search for a topic to start a blog. You can immediately start a blog about cats. If you really love biking then you can immediately start a blog on that topic. Those who have a great passionate for something, no need to search further.

Wait.

I know how hard it is for everyone to find a passionate thing to blog about.

But will a passionate subject alone help you succeed in blogging?

Confused?

I will assume you are a person who does not have a passion to start a blog on. I apologize for this assumption, but I hope, that since you are still reading this paragraph, that my conclusions are correct. Let us start the procedure.

1. Don’t Look for Passion. Have Passion to Learn.

If you even don’t have a passionate topic, you can still become a successful, professional blogger.  From my two failures, which I mentioned before, I did not have a passionate topic to start. I will tell you a trick how I resolved this problem in Fourblogger start up… having the passion to learn anything. Yes. This is the simple but powerful trick which increased 1000% traffic when compared to my online ideas blog. I will explain a little more. If you have the passion to learn continuously, you can choose any of your preferred topics. By increasing your knowledge in that area, you can then deliver great content.

In my case, for example, I did not have much knowledge about theme customizations (even for my failure blog Redisred, I hired a designer and paid 200 US dollars), php and CSS, etc. I had not used the Thesis theme before Fourblogger.com launched. Since then, I have successfully created more than 60 Thesis video tutorials and helped more bloggers to customize their theme.I know another question on your mind. Will having passion to learn a topic help me succeed in a non-passionate topic? Can I write continuously without inconsistency?  Yes, you can. I will tell you in my next report about how to start writing content in non-passionate topic. Today, you will just select one topic.

So now you eliminate your fear to choose a non-passionate topic. Just tell your inner-mind, “I should learn about a topic to become a professional blogger”.

That is enough. You have completed 25% of niche selection.

2. Select some topics

List 5 to 10 topics. Take 1 to 2 hour for selecting 5 to 10 topics.

I know you will struggle to select more than 2 or 3 topics. While you were selecting topics, your mind was thinking you are selecting topics for blogging. This is the mind-block to success. Here you should not think that you are selecting a topic for blogging. Rather look around yourself, your television channels, your favorite websites, etc. and list the topics you see and feel are popular.

For example, you can list like this

Look around you.

1. Your favorite pets

2. Home appliances

3. Mobiles

Just watch your favorite websites or blogs.

4. YouTube.

5. College humor.

6. Facebook.

What was your last search on Google:

7. How to prepare for an interview?

8. Funny Videos?

Just go out of your home.

9. Bike or Car.

10. Gardening.

You have completed 50% of niche selection. Now you can congratulate yourself and take a coffee break.

3. Narrow Your Niche

I bet your chosen topics are wide. You can not conquer a wide niche easily. You should have great entrepreneurial skills to be successful at blogging on a wide niche in a short time. If we have great entrepreneurial skills then we have no need to start blogging or spending hours to select a niche. Right? So now we are going to narrow our niche topic to have success in blogging.

How to narrow your Niche?

For example, from the above topics, we can consider “Mobiles”. If you write generally about mobiles, you cannot build a good level of loyal readers on your blog.  I thought “Oh. If I narrow down my niche, I cannot advertise all the stuffs related to my wide niche and I cannot earn much”. This is another mind-block to success. If you blog on wide topic, I bet you would not earn at least what you could have earned in ‘narrow niche blogging’.

So you have to narrow your topic. Once you blogged about your narrow topic for 3 to 6 months, then your readers would like to know more from you and at that time you can widen your topic slowly. Now please follow me.

I just try to narrow the above topics:

1. Cats

2. Television – To narrow more – Flat Screen TV’s or HD TV’s.

3. Vodafone (Mobile service provider) or Samsung (Mobile manufacturer).

4. Viral Videos on Youtube or Screencasting Vloggers on Youtube.

5. Best of Colleghumor today or Collegehumor on Digg today.

6.Creating, designing, auto submitting feed in Facebook fan page or Facebook for Bloggers.

7. How to tie a tie.

8. Funny Accidents

9. Biking

10. Lawn mower

Fine. You have completed 75% of Niche selection process.

4. Finalize the Topic.

You should analyze two things.

1. Available resource for each topics.

When you choose any topic, you should not consider how much popular that topic. I tested this in Fourblogger by writing two topics. Both are popular. One is Wordpress. Another One is Thesis Theme. I wrote tutorials on Thesis for 45 days. After that I have been writing about Wordpress for one month. The average search engine traffic which I have received after 45 days is same after 75 days also. The “Thesis” niche sent huge traffic. But Wordpress did not.

Both are popular topics. But the difference is huge in search engine visit? The reason I found here, is the ratio between available resources vs. demand for resource. Yes. Wordpress has huge resources all over online as text and videos. So it is hard to fight with popular Wordpress video to rank high for my Wordpress videos.

So now analyze which topics have less resources or interesting contents. Choose to blog about that.2. How do you want to make money through blogging?

Do you have any plan to release a paid e-book after 6 months of successful blogging? Do you plan to release a physical product to sell? Do you just want to make money through putting up affiliate links? Or, do you want to get more direct advertisements alone?

Choose your preferred earning method and decide which niche has more chances for that? For example, if you want to sell physical products to your readers, you can choose to write about cats and buy, stock and sell the wheelchairs for disabled cats. If your preferred earning method is direct advertisements or PPC ads, you can choose to blog about a particular mobile brand. If you choose affiliate marketing, then try to blog about their online products.

Now, analyze your previous narrow niche list with these two things and finalize your topic.

If you have finished this step, you have successfully completed the topic selection for blogging. Do not make it a difficult decision. Your hard work alone will bring you success.  If you have already written fewer contents with no success in your blogging, you can remove them and kick start your blog growth by writing in a new niche. If you have already written more contents with no success but still want to continue, no problem, focus on narrowing the topic.

Final Thought:

Do not choose a topic that is easy to write and throw daily contents, in your blog. If you can write something easy, then it is not going to be a valuable content for your readers. I have not written this guide for someone who wants to work less. Blogging needs your hard work.

Those who don’t have passionate topic to blog about, can choose a topic, learn continuously about it and blog about.

Fear & Laziness alone will stop you.

I need your valuable thoughts, experiences on this post. I will update this post when you give some good idea or experience.

Related Tutorials:

1. Start Writing Content Once You Selected Blogging Niche.
2. Fourblogger Labs – Tons of Blogging Experiments
3. 20 Best Niche Blogs that Stand Out from Crowd
4. Deliver Contents In Video Format – Add Value to Your Blog
5. First Video on Video Blogging

Tagged as: blog content, blog topic, blogging niche, choose content, fourblogger labs