Welcome to coolformula.com
A Beginner's Guide to Blogging for Profit
How to Find a Niche Market
Before building and monetizing a blog, you must choose a niche market to concentrate on. It's important to focus on only one topic, and deciding on one can be a little intimidating. However, if you just relax and follow my simple guidelines, I promise you will find the process easier and more rewarding than you would imagine. So, grab a pen or pencil and let's get started.
The first thing we need is a list of your talents and specialized knowledge. Successful bloggers stick to topics they truly know and love. Unfortunately, however, most beginners are quick to overlook the value of their own experiences. Do NOT fall into that trap. You have much more to offer than you might think, and I'll prove it to you. Take a minute to download this cool little skills assessment worksheet that I prepared especially for you.
After saving a copy to your computer, print and complete the entire survey. Take your time and remember these tips:
· Strive to capture as much detail as possible when completing the survey, and NEVER underestimate the value of your day-to-day experiences. Even the most seemingly mundane chores such as parenting, cooking, lawn care and others can spark great interest and attract large audiences to your blog. So, be creative and pay attention to the little things in life.
· The trick is to be as specific as possible, without getting too narrow. Othewise, you run the risk of struggling to generate content down the road. For example, if you love animals, instead of simply listing "pet care" as a hobby, it would be best for you to focus on a particular type of pet care. In this case, you should specify pet bird, cat, or dog care - etc.
· While working through different sections, you may feel the urge to stop repeating talents, skills and knowledge already listed elsewhere in your survey. Resist that urge! The purpose of this exercise is to identify your strongest fields of expertise. Therefore, you definitely want to see some items show up more often than others.
After completing the assessment, you'll probably want some additional input. You will either want something to spark niche ideas, a way to measure the potential success in your target list of blog topics or "keywords" (all based on your fields of expertise), or you'll want both. So, here are a few websites that you are certain to find quite useful while performing basic keyword research. Be sure to take plenty of notes:
Amazon.com is a great place to get new niche ideas or validate existing ones. From Amazon's homepage, put your cursor over the "Books" navigation menu (upper left). Then, click the "Magazines & Newspapers" link and browse through the many different categories. Remember that if a subject is popular enough to spawn a subscription-based magazine or newspaper, then there will also be plenty of potential readers for your blog.
The same holds true for web-based newsletters and ezines - if people are subscribing to a dedicated newsletter or ezine, they are also a potential audience for any related blog. So, you can use your favorite search engine to look for newsletter and ezine directories or start with these two helpful sites: New-List.com and NewsLetterAccess.com
Now, just imagine how easy it would be to find niches if you knew exactly what people were searching for online. Wouldn't it be nice to know the actual keywords that people use during their searches? Of course, it would! Right? Well then, check out this amazing free resource: SEO Tools Find and click on the "tools" menu near the header, then look for "The Keyword Tool" graphic.
When you've accessed the keyword research tool, simply enter any keyword or phrase into the search box and click "Submit". Within seconds, you will have a list of the 100 most popular related keyword phrases used on the best Internet search engines, along with the estimated number of daily searches. This is truly a quick and easy way to zero in on high-demand topics.
Finally, you will want to check out your competition. This is an important
part of your research because you do not want to choose a niche that is
too saturated with competitors. So, make sure you spend some time using
the Google Blog Search. Perform
a search for individual target niches and related keywords. Note the total
number of results returned (upper right), and compare it with the estimated
number of daily searches in the previous step.
You now have all the resources needed to make a well-informed decision when choosing a niche market. Remember to take your time and complete your skills assessment first, then do some research and make plenty of notes. Give it some thought, and pick a topic that you truly know and enjoy. Once you find a niche, the hard part is done and we're ready to start a blog.