Blog Income Life

Posts Tagged ‘niche topic’

Before you start rolling the presses with your new blog — whether you go with blogger or wordpress, do a little bit of planning. By now you have chosen the topic for your blog, now plan at least 10 posts. If you are doing a review style blog and say your topic is dog toys , you should at least have 10 topics on dog toys, written and ready to go. Here is what I mean

post 1 – How to choose good dog toys. What you look for when you are selecting toys for your dog.

post 2 – Review a new Kong dog toy.

post 3 – Soft Toys or Hard Toys?.

… well you get the idea. The reviews don’t always have to be about a toy. What about reviewing a dog toy site you found on the website, what do you like about it. What in your opinion could improve it. Your overall impression.

This is an important step. Too often people launch a blog, all eager and ready to go. They post two, maybe three posts, and then have to come up with an idea for a fourth post and cannot find appropriate content. A degree of discomfort sets in and an ever so slight coolness begins to seep in. Soon, the posts are far and few in between. There is no traffic. The promise of making money on the blog is a distant memory. The blog languishes.

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU…. this is a business – treat it like a business. Every business requires a plan. Plan a topic within a topic and expand. For example if you are writing about chocolates, then about mid to end January you should start writing articles on Valentines Day, where to buy the best chocolates online (your affiliates). Review some of your favorites.   Post a picture of yourself munching on those decadent morsels. Ditto for March … St Patricks Day, then there is Easter.  If you plan basics for the whole year, you will never run out of content.

But Ten Articles? Come on Valentina?

Yes … its a good way to get started. First it is a good discipline to develop. Then when you open your blog, post them 2 or  3 per week (nicely spaced), all the while writing additional articles. The spiders will love this. Here is a new active blog and the more relevant and fresh the postings, the better these cyber critters like to dine out on it and bring back good reports to the search engines.

More on posting articles on your site further down the road, for now write those articles and get ready to launch your site.

Coming soon …. ok, next week. Announcement of my next blog, its topic and related information.

Quick Links
Dog Toys World

In the world of Internet Marketing, Dan “The Man” Lok is a household name … or should that be “cyberspace” name? Dan went from bagging groceries to banking big bucks for his efforts on the internet. He is now a self made multi-millionaire and I had the privilege of attending his seminar this weekend.

The seminar itself was nothing short of fabulous. It was classic Dan – two jam packed days of content, content, content, all by The Man himself. Limited to just 60 attendees the feeling of being in an inner circle was definitely clear and present. Some of what I learned will be covered later on in this series of blogging, some of it will unfold in due time.

I’ve known Dan for almost three years now. Met him at a friend’s BBQ. We spent an hour chatting over a hot grill. I was just starting my internet marketing career, he was well into his, although at the time I had no idea just how well.  At the end of the conversation his sage advice to me was to blog and publish my articles.

I should have listened to Dan then. As I mentioned in my post Blogging, The First Step to Mastering the Internet, knowing what I now know, I would have started my Internet Marketing career by blogging. I think there is some inborn streak in most of us, we don’t listen to our parents and we don’t listen to the gurus in our own backyards!

I have also been researching five topics to launch my next blog. I have come up with a good niche market, something I know about and narrow enough that it could qualify for inch-wide, mile deep, but its not something I would want to carry on for the long term. If you are wondering about what that topic might be it is embroidery.

I know something about embroidery having learned it at school — we started with the most basic stitchery in grade one and by the time we graduated high school we had learned not only how to make french knots but cutouts, shadow stitchery and tedious cross stitching (the kind you counted by the squares on the fabric, not pre-printed). Amazon carries both books and a decent number of magazines. The term embroidery may be too broad as there are over 28 million results when Googled, but I did note that there were sponsored links on the right hand side. Clickbank was a bit disappointing in that it did not seem to have many affiliates to offer and the pricing was low, so low profits.

I could have done more research on the subject, but decided against it for these reasons:

1. Incongruent: I have some 20 sites and blogs in total. Not all are themed, but they are grouped by topic themes. This is good for cross marketing which will be covered down the road. If this is your first blog, don’t be concerned. If you already have several blogs and/or websites, a complementary topic is a good idea, an example might be if you have a site on travel, a good complementary topic would be something like canal tours, travel by cycle and so on. You could then post reviews on the various places you can take canal tours, the types of boats/barges/cruises that are available etc.

2. Little Personal Interest: Even though I have a good deal of personal knowledge and could write well on the topic, it is not one that grabs me.

3. Monetization seems to be somewhat limited. The magazines were well priced for annual subscriptions which is good and Google defintely has advertisers, but I was surprised at the somewhat limited affiliates through Clickbank. If I had my heart set on this topic however, I am sure that there are better affioliates that are available with Commission Junction.

4. Product Development : Eventually to up the ante it is a rule of thumb that one should develop a product of one’s own. Now this could be something as simple as embroidery patterns that can be delivered digitally to DVDs showing how to execute certain stitches. Absolutely no personal interest.

So that is one down, four to go.

ACTION: Continue checking the viability of your niche.

Even though I have several blogs, most were thrown up in a higgledy piggledy way — the purposes varied; as support to an existing website that I have, others are a commentary and still others are on personal development. I want to do this one differently. This one has to be an example on how to blog for money. With this as the prime reason for starting a new blog, I have to give more thought about the way I go about it.

Immediately questions need to be answered:-
- what is the topic going to be?
- who is my target audience?
- should I use blogger or wordpress?
- should this be a stand alone blog or should it promote one of my online businesses?
- how do I best monetize it?

The first question that I am going to tackle is topic. There is no shortage of topics to write about. If I want to make money on this blog then I have to be able to rank high in the search engines, choose my keywords carefully, even the domain name makes a difference.

If the topic is too broad then I have a lot of competition out there. An example would be both my Buy Me a Mercedes Benz site and the corresponding Mercedes Benz blog. I threw both of these sites because I like the car and just wanted to write about it. Even though I am making some money on the site (the blog is not monetized for a reason)I don’t expect that it will be up on page one of any of the search engines any time soon. This will be a labor of love and who knows, years hence it just might show up on page one!

The way to success is to “niche” your topic. The saying in the internet world is “inch wide and mile deep”. An example of that, still staying on the topic of Mercedes, might have been on the McLaren.

Between now and the next time I post here, I will do some research on my topic and will post here on how I arrived at it. Till then …. happy blogging to you!