How To Choose Your Blog Topic – Passions Vs. Profits

There’s a lot of advice out there regarding how to choose a topic to blog about. Some will tell you to focus on profitability. Find the niches that people spend money in and that are currently not serviced well by other blogs. Others will tell you that it doesn’t matter about the money, it’s all about how much you care about the topic. If you focus on passion, things you personally enjoy and know about, creating good content will be easy and your motivation will be strong. I don’t have specific advice on whether either methodology is better. If anything, I suggest you consider both aspects, with a slight emphasis on choosing a topic you care about over the potential to make money from it.

Do you pick a blog topic because of the potential for making money from it, or because you like it?
Consistent output is crucial, so if you can’t see yourself writing about a topic in six months, don’t choose that topic.

People are very different. Some remain motivated because of the process, not the topic, and these people could run a blog about a topic they don’t really care about because the process of profiting from it keeps them going. That doesn’t work for me. I only cover topics I enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t written content with profit as the main driver. Whenever you do an affiliate promotion – for example a product review – much of your motivation is the affiliate commission, yet you realize the importance of providing value to your readers as well.

This typifies the mesh in professional blogging between writing for writing’s sake vs. writing for income. It’s not black and white and all you can do is what works for you and you feel comfortable with. Consistency is such a key component of successful blogging that I advise people to forget about profits for the first few months – even six months if necessary – and focus on giving value. This reasoning suggests you choose a topic that you personally could sit down and write something about every day without reward (that’s a good question to ask yourself – can you write every day on the topic you are considering to blog about?.

On the flip side, you don’t want to blog for 12 months only to earn a few pennies a day. It’s important to, at the very least, consider the type of reader you are attracting, whether they buy things, whether you can sell them things, or find sponsors who would pay to advertise to your readers. I’m inclined to believe that as long as you have some traffic, you can earn some money, but if you do this strategically and prepare in advance, a little research can help to avoid wasting time. As much as it feels great to build an audience, we are also here to make money, and it won’t feel great if you can’t effectively monetize your audience.

The key is to understand your reader, their motivations, passions and spending habits. If you love the topic you blog about, you are in a much better position to understand your reader because you are part of the same niche. You know what you like, what you buy, and therefore what your readers enjoy and purchase.

If you are a good marketer you don’t have to be a fan of the market to actually understand it, but for most people I suggest you gravitate to topics you enjoy. It will make two key areas of successful blogging – content creation and monetization – that much easier if you have an inherent insight into your topic and audience.