Blogging Tips

Blog-aholics beware. You will be inspired. You will be energized. And you will want nothing more than to start yet another new blog that you’ll forget and leave at the wayside inside a year. Well, hopefully it won’t happen quite that way – but you get my point.

Photo by Dani Simmonds

Most blogger-preneurs struggle to find “the next big thing” for their next blog-building project. You could go with the completely arbitrary method and write what you love, or you could leave it up to the Fates and pick a topic out of a hat – but why leave it to chance when you could use good old fashioned supply and demand?

Discovering Demand

You sit in front of perhaps the grandest reservoir of information ever known to man. It’s time you stop taking the power of the Internet for granted, and start using it to your benefit.

Finding and perfecting a topic for your new blog is not at all difficult. There’s no mysterious super-secret formula for success. You just have to know where to look – and there’s a perfect place to start no matter how far you are in the brainstorming process.

If you really have no idea whatsoever, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit are great places to start. Look around each topic to see – for one – how many articles there are in that topic (in other words, how well-served the topic is by others) and – for two – which topics have the highest average vote count (in other words, which topics have the most fanatic fans).

Logically the best topics are those which either have the highest average vote or the lowest number of competitors. If anything inspires you of those two “bests” then you’re ready for the next step.

Narrow Down Your Topic

Next you want to visit a keyword suggestion tool like the one at SEObook.com to get a more concrete idea on demand for your topic. Just plug in some keywords on your topic and watch the targeted results roll in.

It’s a very good idea to download all of your keyword suggestions and merge them into one spreadsheet. Once you have that, just sort the data in descending order for a clear snapshot view of what people really want to know within your topic. From here you should have a really good idea of your final topic.

Harness the Crowd

Once you know which niche you’re going to write about, you need to get your thumb on the pulse of your market. In order to really know what your readers want, you should hunt down and troll around email groups (like Yahoo Groups and Google Groups), forums relating to your topic, and answers sites (like Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn).

Really, truly, take a pause on starting that blog and invest some quality time in these sites. Even if you think you know what you’re talking about, you will likely be very surprised by what the people really want. Even better – when you’re done being involved with the community for research, you already have one powerful shoe in the door with your target audience.