3 Simple Steps How To Choose a Right Topic for Your Blog

Note: This is the 2nd post of the posts series Make Your Own Blog. If you not yet read the part one, you need to read it first here.

Why this post

I write this post to help new bloggers to choose a right topic for their blog. It’s important to spend time and work outside of the box and prepare a good blogging strategy to build a popular and profitable blog. Blogging is just a tool, without a concrete blogging strategy behind, it’s hard to make it to success.

What are the benefits

By going through this process, you will be able to workout on yourself to find topics that you are passionate about and have confidence in writing and create contents for your blogs for years to come. The last important thing is to select that right topic that have other people interest into it.

Who could benefit

People who want to start a blog but don’t know where to start. Newbie bloggers who has already a blog but choosing by mistake the wrong topic. It is not too late to start working again on the blog foundation.

Follow to my previous post: Blog Foundation: How To Create a Meaningful Blog, I want to discuss on this post how to choose topic for your blog. Blog’s topic is the core value of your blog. It’s similar to the type of product of a business. You need to define it clearly at the beginning.

Why?

Because you can blog about anything you want but to build a popular and profitable blog, you need to focus on a particularly topic. Some people call this kind of blog as a Niche site.

Regardless the name, a topic should be defined. Don’t make mistake like I did on KhmerBird. I initially wanted KhmerBird to become a place where people could find useful information about Cambodia. It’s the original mission to KhmerBird.

You know what happened?

Cambodia is a big topic. It is too general. Today it generates more than 250 visitors per day. People said it’s a popular blog from Cambodia. Yes they are right! But I don’t consider it as a success.

People arrived on KhmerBird for various reasons. Most of them came because they want to know how to install Khmer Unicode on their phones. Some of them came because they want to know the postal codes in Cambodia. Some of them came because they want to see sexy Cambodian girls etc.

The number 250-300 visitors per day remains unchanged since a few years. You see the reason right?

When my blog talked about too many things, I cannot get their attention. I lost the connection with my readers. Whatever action I want them to take, there’s no result.

People just don’t have any reason to come back to my blog, unless they have free time and don’t know what to do.

That’s the mistake I experienced when I started my first blog. Now I decide to focus more on blogging topic. I still blog about Cambodia when it’s necessary. I would prefer to run a blog that have more engagements from the readers on a topic and make it grow day by day for a clear purpose rather than keep it stuck in this situation.

I hope you could bear with me.

For people who are interested in Cambodia topic, I would strongly recommend to check out The Cambodia Online Newspaper. That’s the result from my experiences in following what they world are talking about Cambodia. It’s updated daily. Everyday you will receive the fresh contents.

So as you could see my difficulty and learn from my experiences, it’s good for you to choose a good blog topic since the beginning.

How to define a topic for your blog?

Many people are struggling to find a topic for their blog. To help this process, I define 3 simple criteria below:

• Passion - You should choose a topic that you are passionate about.
• Expertise - You should have enough knowledge and have confidence that you can write about the topic.
• Market - There are other people interest in your topic.

The perfect blog topic should meet all these 3 criteria.

Make your time! don’t tell me you don’t have time. If you are serious in what you want to accomplish, you will find your time.

Believe me!

Spend one or two hours of your time to sit in a quiet place and grab a paper and pen. List down all the topics you are passionate about in a list. List down the topics you know well about in another list. Then make the interconnection. Select only the topics that exist in both lists.

If you cannot find any match between the two list, start working again on the list. Sometime you don’t focus enough and might forget things.

If at the end, you still cannot find any match, you’re in trouble!

But that’s Ok. Let’s try this way. Try to choose whether some topics from your passion list that you believe you could learn and become an expert on the topics or some topics from your expertise list that you believe you could put your love on.

Like some people said the secret to getting paid to do what you love is to love what you do!

I hope at the end of the process you might have 2 or 3 topics. Then you can use Google Keyword Tool to see how many time people are searching for your topic.

That’s the brief process of how to define a perfect topic for your blog. Go ahead and do it!

You’re still there? If yes I guess you might need a bit more guidelines on each step. Let’s deep down the process together!

1. How to find your passion

If you could do one thing to transform your life, I would highly recommend it be to find something you’re passionate about, and do it for a living. - LEO BABAUTA (Source)

I think passion starts as a hobby. When I was young, I like reading. My father usually arrived home with few books in his hands for me. I read a lot. Then I started to write. I wrote short stories, poems and many blog posts.

I still didn’t realized I have passion in writing. Until I answered to 27 Questions to Find Your Passion by Scott Dinsmore.

I would recommend you to think what kind of activities you like to do the most? What kind of things that give you the most exciting moment in your life? What are the reason that make you wake up in the early morning to do it?

What type of magazine you usually buy at the bookstores? Is it a fashion magazine? Is it a celebrity magazine? Is it a sport magazine? Is it a car magazine? etc.

I hope by working through all these process, you will find out your passion. You are now completed the first step.

Write them down on the paper.

If you are struggling to find your passion, I would suggest that you download the questions by sign up to get the Free Passionate Work Toolkit here and answer them one by one.

It might take some time but it will help you to find out your passion.

2. You don’t have to own a PHD to be an expert

Everybody is an expert about something. Seth Godin - Click to tweet

Today, with the revolution of the internet, everyone can be an expert about something. I started blogging since 2006. I made mistakes. I wrote a lot. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad.

And I like to share that experiences.

I don’t like people to call me an expert on blogging. But blogging is something I know very well. I am not afraid to say I have a good knowledge on blogging. As consequence I could tell people that I have expertise in blogging.

But don’t call me an expert! I don’t know why I don’t like that word. But I like blogging and I like to share that experiences with all of you.

That’s it.

Did you find your expertise yet?

Have you noticed you solve something that others could not?

You can start asking yourself what you know best and could develop yourself to be an expert on that particular topic. Don’t think that everybody know it. Don’t think that it’s useless to people.

Sometime the way of combine different solutions into one single package could make you an expert.

Please note that people don’t have much time. They want quick and complete solution to their problem. If you could provide it efficiently and on time, you are an expert.

Think about it and fill that gap!

3. How to check the market for your blog topic

You might have your passion on a particular topic and you have a big confidence that you could write about that topics for more than 10 years from now.

But what happen if no one interests in your writing?

That’s the big problem and it’s the main reason why blogger failed. There are different ways of checking if other people are interested in your topic.

I will use one of the most popular methods that have been used by internet marketers when it come to verify if it is the good topic for a blog.

Google Keyword Tool is free and allow us to know how many time people are searching on a particular keyword and the level of the competition on that keyword.

The ideal keyword is to have high search volume and low competition. For example I am now interested in blogging. I want to know how many times per day people are searching for this keyword.

I logged into Goolge Keyword Tools, type “How to start a blog” in the search box. I am interested in world wide audiences, so I change locations to All:

Click on the image to view the full image

You will see there are 201,000 searches per month = 6,700 per day. But it is not true. This number of searches is higher than reality. It is because the default match type is selected to Broad.

There are 3 types of match: Broad, Exact and Phrase. What we are interested in is the how many times people are searching for the exact keyword “How to start a blog”.

You can understand the definition and example of the Keyword Match Types here.

So I changed the Match type to Exact. First you can select the tab Keyword ideas, then minimize the window Save ideas as image below:

Click on the image to view the full image

Then you can select the Exact match type:

Click on the image to view the full image

Now you can see that 49,500 searches per month = 1650 searches per day. It shows that there are a lot of people interested in that topic.

But you can see level of the competition is medium. It means there are also a lot of people writing blog posts or create websites on this topic.

To check how many pages that already exists or created for this topic, you can check the result from Google Search.

Click on the image to view the full image

I can see that there are already 21,700,000 pages have that keyword which it is very hard to compete if I want my blog to be appeared on the first page of Google when someone search on the keyword “How to start a blog”.

So I need to narrow down the topic. We call the method as Niche inside the niche. You can see from the results that I looked for “How to start a blog”, there are few others keywords that have low competition.

Click on the image to view the full image

I want to know which one has the lowest competition level, so I go back to Google and type these keywords inside the quotes, then I found:

• How to start blogging (11,600,000 results)
• How to start a fashion blog (83,900 results)
• How to start a food blog (119,000 results)
• How to start a successful blog (146,000 results)

Amount all of them, the keyword “How to start a fashion blog” has the lowest competition. I should target my audiences only to people who want to create a fashion blog. That’s how you could break down your topic into a profitable one.

For those who just started blogging, you can find a topic that have less than 40,000 results. You can have more chance to get your blog appear on the first page of result from Google search.

I hope this will give you an idea on how to choose a right topic for your blog. If you need any further question, do not hesitate to drop your comment.

I hope you will find your time on this process. We will discuss next week on how to write contents for your blog after you choose the right topic.

Don’t just think. You need to take action. Clarity comes from action not thought!

To your blogging success!