Lesson 2: Choosing a Blog Topic

Posted by Robert on January 27, 2010

Moving forward with the following lessons I am going to be focusing on how to make money using a Wordpress blog.  I may in the future add a lesson plan for how to create a Squidoo Lense, Blogger Blog, or HubPage, but for now I'm going to stick with Wordpress blogs since I believe this is where most of the potential lies. 

I would suggest you start off with a blog topic that you are interested in.  It's always a lot easier to write about things that you are interested in and have a lot of knowledge about.  If nothing comes to mind go to Amazon.com and browse through all of the categories.  You can also check out all the magazines that are on the shelves and browse through all of the different magazine topics.  If Amazon has a category for it or if there is a magazine about a certain topic then there is going to be a niche market out there for it. 

Also keep in mind that you do not have to market a specific product to make money online, you can also make an information site.  An information site would be something like "how to cure athletes foot" or "everything you wanted to know about ear infections".  As long as you can provide useful content and drive traffic to your site, you can make money with pay per click programs such as Adsense.  Even if your blog is purely informational you can usually find something that you can sell that is related.

Here are some example topics:

Arts & Photography
Brides & Weddings
Business & Investing
Children’s Magazines
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Crafts & Hobbies
Electronics & Audio
Entertainment
Fashion & Style
Foreign Language
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Literary Magazines & Journals
Men’s Interest
Movies & Music
News & Politics
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Family
Professional & Trade
Recycled Paper Magazines
Religion & Spirituality
Science # Sports & Leisure
Teens
Travel & Regional
Women’s Interest

These topics are a great place to start, however they are still way too broad of a topic.  If you are going to be successful with your blog you have to choose a more targeted niche.  Lets take the instance of "Home & Garden".  Well Home & Garden is a very broad category that includes Kitchen & Dining, Furniture & Decor Bedding & Bath, Home Appliances, Vacuums & Storage, Home Improvement, Patio, Lawn & Garden, Pet Supplies, Sewing, Craft & Hobby, etc.  Take this a step further and choose Home Appliances.  Take this a step further and choose Convection Ovens.  And take it one last step further and get Convection Oven Recipes.  Now you are finally at a micro niche level category.  So we basically broke down a very vague category and dug down deep until we got to a very specific category called a micro niche.

Home & Garden >> Home Appliances >> Convection Ovens >> Convection Oven Recipes

This tactic can be used with any category.  The idea is to pick a specific targeted micro niche that will appeal to people searching exactly for Convection Oven Recipes.  If you choose too broad of a topic then you will be running up against some really high competition and your blog will just get lost in the mix.  So think of a few topics and break them down into micro niches similar to the example shown.

In the next lesson I will go over how to use your blog topic to choose keywords that are related to your blog topic.

Lesson 3: Keyword Research

Related posts:

1. Lesson 1: Start Making Money With a Blog Congratulations for taking the 1st step to making money...

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