How to choose a niche for you blog

Posted by bill

September 27, 2007

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What is niche research? Niche research is the act of finding a subject that you are going to create a web blogging business around. Niche research is of course incredibly important because if you shoos a market with either too small a demand or too much competition then you are likely not to be successful.

There are two ways in which to decide what niche to pick, the first way to pick a niche is to take advantage of an underutilized market, the second way to pick a niche is to choose a subject that you have a definite interest in. I believe that for any person to try to start a web business by picking a niche that is just good opportunity is never going to make it work as they will lose interest after a few weeks if the money does not roll in and that is a real possibility as you try to build your markets interest. Out of all the important reasons to start a blog besides money, enjoying what you are writing about is the most important factor when starting out.

OK now if you are following the way that I have laid out how to find a niche here are the steps that you will need to follow to find a niche with the best chance of success.

Spend a couple of days writing down exactly what you are good at or have a lot of interest in. Is it boating? Stamp Collecting? Pizza recipes? Fast food restaurants? These may seem like pretty insignificant markets but there are thousands of searches within them so make sure that you are not looking for too broad a niche.
Take you list and start searching for blogs that are about you category. If there are no blogs than you may have a winner but more than likely is that there is not enough interest in the subject. Take a look at these blogs and see what the writing style is like, how they cover the niche and go to Technorati and see how popular they are. A good blog would have an “authority rating over 100 or 200 at least.
Go to overture.com or get the program “good keywords” (it’s free) and start looking at the volume of searches within your possible blogs categories. What you are looking for is an interest that people have in your subject so that if you start writing posts about a particular subject then people will be looking for it in Google or another search engine.
Fire up Firefox, go to seobook.com and download the latest copy of the seobook plugin. This plugin is great as it will allow you to easily see the pagerank of sites when you do Google searches. What you want to do is look for a fairly good searched for keyword, some of these are keywords that you would search for in your blogs category and see what the top listings have as a pagerank. This is not very scientific but it is the best we can get. If I look up a term and see that the pagerank of the highest listing is only a 2 or 3 then I know that with just a little work I could rank highly for that term.

I hope that this helps you in your quest for finding a niche for you blogging business.

There is of course a lot more that you can do to ensure success. I have also written a complete review of the popular blogging to the bank book that not only will show you what you need to know but also will help you decide if the book is good for you.

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