This article is part of a series of posts that make up the “How to Start a Blog” guide. If you want to read this series from the beginning, start here.
When creating a blog, one of the most difficult decisions (and definitely most important) is deciding on your topic. While it is important to have a drive to get started writing immediately, too many bloggers pick topics that they’re passionate about without any consideration for market/audience size or the potential for monetization.
How to choose a topic:
- Niche or Authority: Decide if your blog will be a niche (specific-topic) site, or a site that spans a broader topic.
- Consider the Audience – size, budget, competition: Think about the potential audience size, and how much money they’d be willing to spend on things related to your topic. Try to balance that against the competition for that audience.
- Consider the Monetization: How is your blog going to make money? The way your blog is going to make money directly correlates to the necessary size and budget of your audience.
- Consider Your Interests: Your blog should be about something that interests you, but it doesn’t have to be your favorite thing. You just need to be interested enough to be willing to write about it (or hire others to do so).
- Hole in the Market: The best way to determine a good topic is by writing down topics/questions that don’t have clear answers on Google.
I’ll breakdown each of these sections below and provide the tools that you’ll need to make your decision.
Niche vs. Authority
First, it’s helpful to understand the difference between niche and authority blogs, as this will help you narrow your focus a lot right off the bat.
Niche: These blogs are very specific in nature. The audience size is typically much smaller than authority blogs, but the competition is much lower as well.
A few examples are: pet adoption, ergonomic work spaces, electric bicycles, computer building, etc.
For monetization, you’re often looking at partnering with affiliates or advertisers that sell a physical product, or building and selling a digital product with “insider” information.
Authority: These blogs are more broad, and focus more on the authority or expertise of the author. The goal is to be the ultimate source of knowledge on the topic. The audience size is much larger, but so is the competition, and search engines are more picky about what they look for when deciding site ranking.
A few examples are: personal finance, health and wellness, weight loss, business management, etc. This website is also an example of an authority site.
For monetization, you can basically use all of the methods. The net you can cast here is wider, but you miss out on the specific transaction-based queries that niche sites can benefit from.
Consider the Audience
A food blog is going to have a much larger audience than a site about penguins. People need to eat to live and penguins are hard to come by. However, there’s a ton of competition for food blogs. I haven’t done in-depth comparative research, but a few quick Google searches show that there are a lot more sites about food recipes than there are about penguins. Getting this mix right can be absolutely vital for the success of your blog.
You’ll want to consider the size, budget, and competition of your audience. All three of these categories have to be weighed against one another to come up with an overall “audience score.” Once you’ve figured that out, you can compare the audience score of multiple potential topics. I’d recommend first doing a gut check on each category, and if it passes your gut check, you can move on to doing a data check. This will help you save time and quickly eliminate topics that definitely won’t work.
Size
Take a look at the overall size of your target audience.
Gut Check: The gut approach for this is as basic as it sounds – think about the topic and take your best guess at the rough size of your market. Let’s say you want to start a blog about cats. Your posts will be in English, so you’re hoping to target the adults in the United States who pay for cat supplies. Think about the people living on your street. Out of 10 houses, how many have cats? On my street, it’s 3. I think. Typically in a house of 2 adults, 1 makes more of the day-to-day buying decisions. So out of 20 adults on your street, 3 have cats and make decisions about spending money on them. 3/20 = 15% of the adults in the US. That’s probably enough to make some money, so we can move on to a more scientific data check.
Data Check: We can now do some keyword research to figure out what people are actually searching for, and how many are searching. A good free tool is the Google keyword planner. We might want to search for things like “best cat toy” or “healthiest cat food” to see how many monthly searches there are in the US. The keyword planner will also give us a reasonable idea of competition.
Budget
What is the budget for your market, specifically for buying things related to this topic? Using the above example, we can follow the gut-check and data-check approaches.
Gut Check: Using our cat example from above, we can think about the amount of money we guess an average family would be willing to spend on a cat per month. There are larger, rarer purchases like adoption fees, vet appointments, cages, litter boxes, etc. and more routine purchases like food, kitty litter, etc. I’m not a cat owner, so probably shouldn’t have picked this example, but I’m going to throw out a finger-in-the-wind estimate of $100/month overall on average. There’s probably some discretionary spending in there that we could target with a blog. We can multiply this amount by our audience size to get an idea of budget per month or year.
Data Check: We can do a series of searches on Google to find the size of the cat-owner industry in America. We could look at something like American Pet Products to get an idea of the budget for the industry. In this case, the amount spent for all pets seems to be just shy of $100 Billion. With cats representing about 31% of pets, you’d likely be looking at something like a $30 Billion market. This, of course, is assuming that cats cost near the average for pet ownership (likely not a safe assumption, do your own research, etc.).
Competition
How many other blogs and websites are talking about this same topic, how good is their information, and how reputable are they?
Gut Check: Do some quick browsing, and see if you recognize the sites you’re coming across. How many search results does a quick google search yield? Does it look like there are multiple pages with great search results, or are the results lacking? Check out the “hole in the market” section below for more details.
Data Check: We can use Google’s keyword planner to get an idea from them on competition as well. From the above screenshot, we can see that the competition for these searches about cats is high. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad topic. As you narrow down your list of potential topics to your top 2 or 3, you can afford to spend more time really digging in. You could look at 30 other related keywords, and see if there are other aspects of the topic with lower competition.
Consider the Monetization
At the end of the “how to start a blog” series, I have an entire article devoted to how to monetize your blog. But before we get to that point, it’s useful to consider how you’re going to monetize your site, so that you have a clear game plan with a high chance of success when you get to that point.
Here are a few things to consider in each monetization category:
- Advertising – Would someone be willing to pay to advertise on your site? How much would they be willing to pay? Do they have a lot of alternative websites where they could be advertising? How large is your audience? Larger audiences will bring in high advertising revenue. Keep in mind that you’ll probably need hundreds of thousands of visitors before ad revenue starts to be significant (in the thousands of dollars).
- Affiliate Programs – The age-old advice is to slap some Amazon affiliate links on your blog and call it good. Amazon affiliate referral percentages have gone down over time, however. Where Amazon used to offer near 10% commissions on most items, they’re now only offering around 4% for most categories. Consider specific companies that you could partner with and verify that they offer affiliate programs. If they do offer affiliate programs, what are their commission rates, and how long does their website cookie last? Amazon only pays you a commission if someone purchases something using your link within 24 hours. Other sites may offer commissions for purchase 90 or 180 days after you send someone over.
- Physical or Digital Products – What products could you build and sell that are related to this topic? Are you willing to put together a physical or digital product?
- Consulting – Are you willing to offer consulting services related to your selected topic? Would you be recognized as qualified to offer consulting services? How much would someone be willing to pay for consulting services related to this topic?
Hole in the Market
If you tried to look up something on Google and couldn’t find it, chances are that other people are also trying to find answers and are also unsuccessful. This is the best indication that you’ll be able to rank well for a topic. So as long as the audience is large enough and they have enough money to make it worth your while, this is the best way to find your topic. This is especially true if you have some expertise in the area. Make sure to do a number of related searches to make sure that the entire topic has low competition but high demand. You aren’t likely to be successful if you base your entire blog off of one post.
Select a Topic
Once you’ve considered all of the above, and have narrowed down your list, it’s time to select a topic. As long as you’ve checked all of the right boxes, go ahead and choose the topic that excites you the most (either because you’re passionate about the topic or passionate about the revenue potential).
Choose a Domain Name
Now that you’ve decided on a topic, you’ll need to pick a domain name to go along with the topic. Use a domain search like bluehost.com. Try to stick with “.com” domain names, as those are the most common and easy-to-remember. Avoid sticking qualifiers to the beginning of a domain name. Adding “the” to the beginning of a domain name could land you in a sticky situation from a legal perspective.
Here are a few modifier words that you may find useful for tacking on the end of your chosen topic (e.g. catexpert):
- Expert
- Pro
- Place
- Spot
- Stop
- Shop
- Planet
- Questions
- Answers
- Central
- Etc.
You may find success going with more “negative” or “neutral” words in your domain name. I was surprised at how many domain names are available using this route. For example, “catproducts” might sound nicer or more professional than “catstuff”, but “catstuff” might be available, and even fit your brand/voice better. This is partially what led to my decision to call this website NotStealing.com.
Up Next: Set Up Your Blog and Get Started
Now that you’ve selected your topic, let’s get you set up with a blog hosting platform and software. The next article in this series provides a step-by-step guide on how to do exactly that.