In this article I am to talk about the impact that your topic selection has on your blog and guide you on on the relationship between the profitability of your niche balanced again your passion for the topic.
The Profitability / Passion Relationship
My advice is this – pick a topic you are most passionate about. Do a little research to see how profitable it is, and perhaps tweak it slightly or extend it a little but make your passion about the topic your number 1 consideration and the profitability factor just a secondary factor.
If you want to create a profitable blog then it may seem counter-intuitive to go for passion first but I want to explain why I say this. In the simplest terms, if you want to make money blogging then you’ll need to build a popular blog that attracts lots of traffic and you’re only going to do this with hard work! That is a lot easier to do in a topic that you’re passionate about!
Many bloggers pick a topic with high paying keywords and affiliate programs but this is a mistake because it takes time to really get a blog off the ground and they find their enthusiasm quickly waning before they ever see a slice of that profit potential. Blogging involves lots of writing and you’re going to have to be able to write by the bucketload on your chosen topic. If you run out of ideas after a few posts you’ll be in trouble!
Now looking again at the monetization issue, there are certainly no shortage of ways to make money from a blog but I find they fall into two groups. The first are the easy ‘on-page’ methods – these include many of the simple contextual ad systems such as AdSense. These will perform better in high-paying niches but they will still not make anywhere near the money of the second group of strategies.
The second group contains more complex techniques such as creating your own products and to do this kind of thing you need to really be able to sell your work and this is another area where your passion needs to come through. If you are blogging about payday loans or mp3 players because you’ve determined that those topics are highly profitable but you’re not passionate about them you will really struggle with any of the advanced monetization strategies.
Lets assume that a topic you are interested in but that doesn’t sound very profitable is Rose Gardening. If you are genuinely interested in this topic you’ll find it easy to write for the blog, easy to create a product such as an ebook, other Rose Gardening enthusiasts will love your blog, connect with you and they will want to buy your stuff without you even having to try!
To conclude, there are lots of ways to make money from your blog but without having passion for your topic you’ll never be able to build the blog to the point where it gets enough traffic to make money and you’ll either be limited to low-paying strategies such as AdSense or you’ll be struggling to sell products that you are not interested in.
