Choosing Your Blog Topic

For Day 2 of the "Build A Blog Workshop" we are going to discuss how to choose a topic for your new blog. In the last post, we talked about Finding A Blog Host. I recommended Blogger.com for various different reasons. If you would like to set up a free blog here at Blogger.com, click here.

Now that you have found where to host your blog, I can help you with choosing a blog topic. 

Here are 5 things to consider while your trying to think of an interesting topic.

1. Is this something that you are knowledgeable about? You don't want to choose a topic that you know very little about. If you have no idea what you're talking about, people can see that and they will call you out on it. So pick a topic that interests you and that you know a lot about.

2. Make sure your topic is something that you either really care about, or something that you hate. Many people think that your blog should be about something that you love or care about. The truth is that you can blog about anything. There are a lot of successful blogs out there, where bloggers will complain about something that they dislike. If you're passionate about what you're blogging, your readers are more likely going to relate. No matter how much you love or hate it.

3. Do you want to have a personal blog, or is your main goal to make money? I'm not saying that personal blogs can't make money, they can. But when somebody goes to a blog it is usually because that blog has information that they're looking for, not because they want to hear about someones day at work. On the other hand, somebody who is blogging about their battle with cancer, might have some helpful information for other cancer patients out there. Helpful information is what will generate revenue.

4. Are you going to have something to blog about 6 months down the road? You want to pick a topic that gives you a lot of different things to blog about. A successful blogger will post something to their blog every single day or at least every other day. If your blogging about the first baseball game that you ever went to, you will probably run out of things to blog about after the first couple of weeks.

5. Try to choose an original topic. You don't want to start a blog if you are going to have to compete with 3 million other blogs that have the same topic. A blog about the war in Iraq would be a great idea. Even if your blog supports the war, you will still get people coming to your blog that are totally against it and just want to leave a comment to disagree with you about your latest post. But who really cares if they disagree with what you have to say, as long as they're reading your blog!

I hope this post gets your creative wheels turning and helps you to pick out an original and interesting topic for your new blog.

Check back to get new tips everyday in December for the Build A Blog Workshop. Tomorrow we will talk about "How To Choose Your Blogs Domain Name". Until then, keep working smart not hard, and as always, good luck!