A blog is only as strong as its content. If your content sucks, your blog sucks and you won’t get any traffic. That’s why you need to be “deliberate” when you choose your subjects.
That “deliberate” part is very important when you are choosing a topic to write about or make some other kind of content for two reasons:
- Focus
- Direction
When you are writing about a subject that you deliberately chose, you now know what you need to focus on. That focus will then give your writing direction so that you don’t go all over the place, and that’s important when blogging.
So, now that we covered that, let’s discuss the three things that you need to focus on when choosing a blog subject. We could just jump straight ahead and talk about the need to make your topics relevant, related to current events or humorous. However, none of those things are going to work if you don’t take into account the following:
- Your Passion
- Your Skills
- The Market
Your Passion
Your passion is an incredibly important consideration when you are choosing a topic for your blog simply because it’s how you can inject substance into the piece. How can you make something that seems like it would jump out of the page if you don’t believe in it? You can’t, that’s how. So if you are going to choose a topic or even a niche for your blog, be sure to know what your passion is.
If you don’t really have a good grasp of what you are passionate about, ask yourself two things.
What do you get the most excited about?
What can’t you stop talking about?
Knowing what excites you the most can give you an idea of the things that you love. Knowing what you can’t stop talking about will showcase what you have very strong feelings for.
For example, say you are always excited about giving gifts and can’t stop talking about the importance of health. You could write about gift ideas that pertain to health. See how simple that was?
Your Skills
Once you have figured out what your passion is, it’s time to find out how you can apply that to your blog. You could write about it if you have a good grasp of the literary arts. If not, you could always turn to graphic design to make infographics or comics. You could even create short videos if you want.
The important thing to remember is that you have to match your subject to your skills. It’s simply the best way for you to communicate your message to your audience and for them to appreciate it.
By the way, your skills also include your expertise that you may have gained via a job or through school. Who knows, all those hours spent doing spreadsheets might have made you a better writer.
If you’re not exactly sure what you’re good at, you could always try everything out. Afterwards, you can judge each result for yourself or get the perspective of others by showing your work to friends and family.
Better yet, find someone who is an expert at the particular field you worked on and get their feedback. Asking a professional writer or editor to look at your article, for example, can earn you some constructive feedback. If they sound harsh, don’t take it too personally.
The Market
Finally, you need to ask yourself a simple question: What do people want?
Sure, blogging can be a personal thing where you only care about what you want. However, if your goal is to get traffic, you’ll need to consider the demand. What do people want to read, watch or listen to? What are they craving for in their dull, uneventful lives?
You should also decide who you are creating content for. Who is your audience? What’s your target demographic? What topics would interest said demographic?
Answer these questions and you can start laying the groundwork for your blog. There is where you combine both your passion and your skills, and then apply them to the market that suits them best.
Now, there are a few methods you can use in order to find out exactly what topic your market wants you to cover. One is to check out Google Trending since that’s where Google compiles all of the most-searched topics on their search engine. You could do this with other search sites as well, like Yahoo and Bing.
The other method is to pay for market research tools that will do the searching for you. You can have professionals look up everything, from the topics that are most popular among particular demographics to learning about region-specific consumer habits.
Either of these options is good and can give you the results you want.
Actually Choosing The Subject
Now that we covered those three essential matters that can help you choose your subjects, let’s take a look at how you should choose your subjects. You can start with the following:
- Not too competitive
- Not too niche
- Current and engaging
- Profitable but self-fulfilling
You want to start compiling a list of all of the topics that could possibly fit all of these categories: Emphasis on the “all.” You can neglect everything else, but you must always choose your topics based on all of these considerations.
Not Too Competitive
The blogosphere is incredibly congested, and you will have a lot of competition. Trying to go up against established figures in such a crowded sea isn’t going to work too well for you, which is why you want to pick topics that haven’t already been covered by others a million times.
You could approach this matter another way as well, where you write about competitive topics in a thoroughly unique manner. This will help you standout some, but not enough to make a difference. When you write topics that are not too competitive using an entirely unique perspective, however, you just increased your chances to be noticed.
Not Too Niche
There is such a thing as being too niche and this is something you want to avoid if you are trying to run a blog that people will actually want to read. Examples of topics that are guaranteed to have no mainstream following include taxes and sewage maintenance. They’re great and there might be some who find such topics interesting, but you don’t want to waste too much time with that.
What you want to do instead, is to limit your scope to a niche where you won’t have as many competitors as the really popular topics do, but will still give you a lot of potential traffic to work with. That way, you stand a good chance at attracting a significant number of visitors without fighting off too many other bloggers.
Current And Engaging
So you have chosen a niche that’s not too competitive but isn’t too fringe. Now, you have to make sure that the topic itself is relevant to current trends. It should also be engaging since this takes the pressure off needing to make a dull topic interesting.
Some examples include tying a particular topic to recently concluded events, be it elections, holidays, world developments or whatever else. This is the easiest way to catch the attention of your audience, though this isn’t to say that it’s guaranteed. There will just be fewer problems to deal with.
Profitable But Self-Fulfilling
Finally, you need to make sure to choose a topic that is a good balance between being profitable and meeting your own passion. You could write about something that will draw in your audience and make you a lot of money, but if it doesn’t make you happy, the whole thing could backfire. You could risk alienating your followers and ruining the reputation of what had previously been a really good blog.
You could also write only about topics that interest you and spend all your time fulfilling your own passion, but if it doesn’t make money, you still end up in a bad place. This is especially troublesome if you have a family to feed and you were hoping to do that with your blog.
If you’re wondering if it’s even possible to mix your passion with topics that make money, the answer is yes. A lot of other people are already doing it. It won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.
Conclusion
Blogs live and die by the quality and worth of its content. This is something that every experienced blogger understands. If you don’t choose your topics deliberately, you might as well forget about any thought of making money with your blog. It would just be a pointless dream.
The good news is that it’s entirely possible for you to create content that fulfils both you and your audience. You just have to be willing to bend your own needs a bit to suit your niche, your blog and your followers. By doing so, you kill two birds with one stone and keep on blogging happily all the live long day.