How to Choose Profitable Blog Topics

The famous Chinese general, Sun Tzu, once taught that if you want to win, you have to pick the right battles. This cannot be said enough. It applies to relationships, school, work, and business. Since blogging is a form of online business, it definitely applies to it. If you want to be successful blogging for a living online, you need to pick your battles wisely. You don’t want to spend a lot of time, effort, and money fighting a war you can’t win. You can’t spend all your emotional energy fighting battles that you are destined to lose. In terms of making money through blogs, you have to choose a profitable topic for your blog. If not, you might be wasting your time and lose your money. So it is really important that you pick wisely.

How do you pick profitable blog topics?

1. Use Market Samurai to choose the right keywords

When you Market Samurai (you can grab a free 14-days trial), it will list the following information regarding keywords that you enter. First of all, it will generates more keywords around the one you entered. Then it will list how many people search, and how much people will pay for a click on that keyword and finally, it will list the competition level among advertisers for that keyword. This gives you enough information to determine the general value of a particular keyword. With another click you also learn how competitive the keyword and if it is worth to go for it in detail. As a general rule of thumb, use exact match keywords (not broad) and look for those with about 100 searches per day. Then look at the competition level so you can see how long it will take you to rank for it. Market Samurai has a lot of detailed tutorials about that but if you want to learn more about it, consider to join the Living For Mondays Academy.

2. Select keywords based on passion.

Sure you have found keywords that are worth a lot of money, get a lot of traffic and don’t have much competition but guess what, you will lose money blogging about that topic if you don’t have the passion for it. The bottom line is that people are driven by passion. You won’t see the point of doing something day after day if you’re not passionate about it. So you have to filter your keyword list based on whether you like the subject matter, or if you are the type of person who would talk about the subject matter even if you are not getting paid. Of course, you want to get paid, but you have to ask this question to gauge your level of passion for that topic. If you like to learn more about that, check out Crush it! by Gary Vaynerchuck.

3. Select topics based on competition levels.

There are many keywords out there that get searched a lot and are worth a lot of money, but you won’t make any money off of them because there is so much competition for them. There are so many pages built for these keywords. The key is to avoid these highly competitive keywords. Delete them from your list and at the end of the process, you should have a list of keywords that have decent search volumes and that people pay good money for them. Once you have this, then you have the foundation of a great blogging topic.

Mastering Keyword research isn’t easy. But it is the most essential key you need to learn when you want to build up a profitable business. When I just started out I made a lot of mistakes on it. On my first site, Digidesignresort.com, I never did any keyword research at all. If I would have known what I know today, I would have never started the site. But despite that, the site is profitable and making a good income. So as you can see, even if you ignore all this, you can still work profitable. On my second site, TheMacMania.com I have chosen a topic I shouldn’t – I love Mac computers but it is really hard to monetize this profitably. Selling apps won’t happen that much over your affiliate link online (because people download to their mobile device and not computer). And for selling Mac computers you often don’t make that much money at all because no commission is paid (on Amazon) for Mac computers. Again, something I didn’t research well and didn’t know about.

You can see that you ned to consider a lot of things when you research a topic. Always keep in mind if people really buy that on the computer.

Filed in: Blog • Internet Marketing
Tagged with: blog topic • content • content creation