If you have an eye towards making money from your blog, then you should first have an idea of what makes a profitable blog so that you can make decisions right from the start that support that goal.
There are two primary ways to make money from a blog.
1. Get lots of traffic.
2. Be in a market, or niche, that either has a lot of products or services or unique products or services that other bloggers aren’t targeting.
There are two pretty simple ways to determine whether or not your topic will get lots of traffic or if it is in a ‘rich’ market.
Method 1, Search for a High Traffic Topic
To test the traffic level of your topic, use Google Trends
Look for growing or high volume topics. Most celebrities and popular technology topics would be candidates for very high traffic sites.
You can enter a few terms into the search box to get a comparison of number of searches for the topics.
This search:
bicycles, lindsay lohan, personal finance
Will show you that “Lindsay Lohan” is more popular than bicycles and bicycles are more popular than personal finance. Another thing to look for when you are targeting a high volume topic, are the spikes of extremely high traffic that you can see in the Lindsay Lohan chart. These are another indicator of a niche that can produce very high interest and therefore traffic.
Therefore if you want to have a high traffic blog, then the best pick of these three choices would be “Lindsay Lohan.”
Method 2, Search for an Lucrative Topic
To test the products or services in your market or niche, go to http://www.Google.com and type a few of the keywords that best represent your topic into the main search box. An example could be…
personal finance
Over on the right hand side of the results page, you’ll see a list of “Sponsored Results”
Count how many ads are in the list. When you get to the bottom of the list, it may say “More Sponsored Links” if it does, then click that link.
There may be many pages of links, count them all. If there are more than 20, then you have found a pretty good topic for a blog. You should be able to get advertisers on your site and be able to find affiliate products to promote.
Using this measure, “personal finance” is a better topic than “Lindsay Lohan.”
The Final Choice
The only thing you need to decide now is which strategy is best suited to you and which topic you are more interested in. Both strategies can work very well, but it is a very good idea to be clear right from the start about which one you are targeting because it will affect many decisions that you make about your blog; everything from which hosting company to sign up with to how often you post.
Choosing a topic that passes either one of these two profit tests will greatly improve your chances of success and turning a profit with your blog.
There are varied remedies for sundry diseases. Several remedies are antifungal medicines. In definite instances pharmacies offer to them customers Viagra. If you’re concerned about erectile problem, you have to study about “cialis daily” and “daily cialis“. Probably you already know some about the matter. Maybe “cialis for daily use cost” is an extremely complicated matter. Matters, like “undefined”, are linked many types of medical problems. A scientific research found that about 14 percent of patients taking Bupropion had sexual malfunction. Finally ordering remedies from the Web can save money, but keep these tips in mind.
August 10, 2007
Your tips on finding a profitable niche are great, and most likely true, but what about passion? Shouldn’t you narrow it to areas you are truly interested in, or do you think you can write about any topic if you try hard enough?
August 10, 2007
Michael, you’re right. No I don’t believe in trying hard. Passion is essential, but this article is just about deciding on a strategy for making money. First pick a topic that you’re passionate about, then use my tests to see if there is money in it. 🙂