One of the first steps to making money from blogging is to choose a profitable niche. Very few blogs make anything approaching a liveable income, with the majority of blogs not making any money at all. Setting up a blog and regularly posting content, for most of us is relatively easy.

If you are struggling with content creation take a look at my article 8 Fail-Proof Ways to Get Fresh Blog Ideas which may help you if you are struggling. For the most part, marketing the content through search engines and social networking sites is not particularly difficult either. However, actually turning your blog into a money-making endeavour to the extent that you can quit your day job is quite a different manner.

Blogging might be fairly easy, but making money from blogging is not, no matter what the gurus might tell you. That being said, there are plenty of bloggers out there who do make a very respectable full-time income.

It takes time and effort to build the sort of recognition that you need in order to succeed, and that partly relies on your marketing efforts and your degree of commitment to both your content publication schedule and your visitors themselves. However, choosing a suitable niche that offers the potential to make a respectable income in the future is a very important step.

There are many things to consider when choosing a niche for your blog, including public interest and the extent of your knowledge in the topic. At the same time, you’re also going to want to stand out among the competition to deliver content that offers unique value to its readers in some way, and given the vast wealth of material online, this is becoming a more difficult undertaking every day.

Finding Your Niche

Start with a bit of brainstorming to identify the topics that are likely to be among the most suitable, and take the following factors into consideration.

• Do you know enough about the topic to produce content that your audience will be interested in? You don’t have to be an expert in your niche to begin with, but you must have enough passion in the topic at hand to be prepared to advance your knowledge as you go along. After all, any form of writing is also part of a learning process.
• Does your topic have a high degree of longevity? A blog that focuses exclusively on a current trend may not be relevant after a few years or even just a few months. Blogs that make the most amount of money tend to be those in which most of the content is evergreen, meaning that it will be relevant to its readers for a long time.
• Is there enough public interest in the topics of your choosing? Given the vast audience of the global internet, it is wise to narrow down your focus in order to stand out among the competition, but it is also important not to narrow it down so much that your content is only likely to be of interest to a particularly tiny segment of society.
• Do you have enough ideas, knowledge and interest in the topic of plenty of content to publish for the foreseeable future? Start by accompanying each proposed topic with a list of 20-25 titles of possible blog posts that you might publish in the future, and if you find this too time-consuming or challenging, then it might be better to shift or expand your focus.
• How competitive is the topic? By far the most important characteristic that every blogger should have is a passion for the topic that they choose. Knowledge and experience by themselves is simply not enough, since any writer who is not passionate about what they write is hardly likely to inspire his or her reader.

Depending on how you answer the above questions, you should be able to narrow down the possibilities and home in on a relatively small selection of topics or a single, albeit broad, niche. However, your choices may still not offer the potential of a respectable income. In order to have the best chances of future success, you’ll need to shift your focus to more profitable aspects of your chosen niche.

Some niches are more profitable than others. If, for example, you intend to start a celebrity gossip blog, you can be pretty sure that the vast majority of your visitors will likely not be interested in spending any money on your website, not least because there aren’t a great deal of associated products that you can advertise.

On the other hand, let’s consider a niche blog that publishes reviews of computer gaming hardware and other content related to the industry, such as hardware optimisation guides and video game reviews and walkthroughs. Such a niche offers a lot more potential, since people will be far more likely to be ready to buy things like hardware upgrades and games or any other related products or services that you advertise on your blog.

The same is true of far more specialist blogs that have a smaller, albeit affluent audience. For example, if you have a passion for astronomy and sky-watching, you could launch a blog that features related guides and telescope reviews, and you can be quite sure that a sizeable portion of your audience will be interested in buying the related hardware.

The above examples serve to show how important it is that your carefully consider your approach and how your topic effects the potential profitability of your blog. Ultimately, you’ll want to determine the value of your potential visitors given the niche that you choose. Ask yourself if your topic is likely to interest potential buyers, who in turn may click on the advertisements on your blog or even buy related products and services directly though it.