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Starting a For-Profit Blog Part 1: Research Your Niche

Written by Brandon on December 14, 2007 – 3:52 pm -

As I mentioned in a previous article, there are a number of online businesses that you can build your wealth from. I’ve listed the businesses from least risky to most risky, and today I’m starting with the least risky which I will call the media company. Media Companies would be composed of such businesses as blogs, podcasts, video blogs, news agregators, and even things like how-to sites and fan sites. Their primary money making opportunities include:

Advertising
E-book Sales
Premium Content
Fan Sales
Affiliate Sales

Let’s take the most common business as the very beginning starting point: the blog. How do you start a business? I will give you broad steps at first, and then cover specifics in later articles.

Your wealth

Phase One: research your niche topic

Before even starting the blog you should choose a handful of niche topics that you are interested in. Let’s say you’ve chosen bicycling. Now, you will want to start to search for bicycling in Google’s Blog Search or at Technorati to find out what bicycle blogs are popular. Next, you will want to write down a number of blogs on your topic.

I then like to go to Alexa and compare blogs in my niche to blogs in very popular niches to see how they stack up. So, for instance, here is a link to two very popular design blogs and Engadget which is arguably the most popular blog in the world. What this might start telling you after doing a bunch of searches is that tech gadgets are more popular or that Engadget has some features that could be better done in your niche. There is a lot to infer which I can help with in future posts.

Also, I highly suggest using Google Trends to start to see if your niche is a heavily searched topic compared to other topics. A simple starting point is to check the trend on “cycling” versus a random topic like maybe “jewelry” and a topic you know must be popular like “ipod”. What you find is that iPod is, in-fact, a much more popular search term, and surprisingly, jewelry is much more popular than cycling. This might give you more insight as to what topic you want to blog about based on its overall popularity. Maybe jewelry is better than cycling. This might also clue you in on topics that people often search for, but no good media outlet has developed for that topic.

Regardless of what your searches begin to tell you, do something you like. Again, this is just scratching the surface of how you might prepare for your blog, but I will cover more in the near future. AT least this gives you a simple base for how you might choose your topic.