If you are considering blogging, one of the things that may be holding your back is what you should blog about. If you are like many people, it’s difficult to imagine a topic you can write about regularly without running out of things to say. Here are some things to consider when choosing a topic to blog about.
What do you know well or are willing to learn?
The easiest type of blog to start is on something that you already know well or have been meaning to learn for awhile and need a kick in the pants to get started. You need to make sure that your topic is broad enough that you won’t find yourself stuck with nothing to say within a month but not too broad that you can’t cover subtopics in detail. You also need to pick something that you have enough interest in to post about at least once a week or so.
What are you passionate about?
What could you talk about for hours if given the time and a willing person who’ll listen to you? Being passionate about your subject is extremely important because your tone will come through in the way you write. If you think your subject is a drag, your prose will most likely come off as impersonal and boring. If you’re really excited about something, that will come through as well.
What types of readers do you want to attract?
If you’re blogging for business, you should decide whether you want to target prospects or peers. If you target prospects, you must decide what types of people make good clients, what interests them, and what would attract them to business. Then, you’ll need to write posts that cater to their interests.
If you target your peers, you position yourself as a thought leader within your industry and might write on topics of concern or upcoming changes. Writing with peers in mind also is a good networking strategy, particularly if you are in the job market.
How popular is your topic?
If no one’s searching for your topic of interest, you’re going to end up with few readers, so you need to choose a topic that has a decent size audience. How can you tell?
- Have major newspapers covered the topic recently? Try a search on Google News to see how many news stories it gets.
- Check out Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool or WordTracker to see which keywords are getting a fair amount of traffic.
How many other blogs are there on your topic?
Finally, search Technorati , Alexa and Google Blogsearch for sites and blogs about your topic. Once you learn what the top blogs are, subscribe to their feeds and check out some of the blogs on their blogroll. It’s perfectly fine if there are a lot of other blogs on the topic, but it probably means that you’ll have to take a different angle to stand out.
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