justlife

I’ll be honest; when I set this blog up a month ago I didn’t really know a lot about blogging. As such justlife has become something of a hodgepodge of topics thrown together. Almost a journal, but not quite. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that and I shall continue to post useful titbits of advice and information, as well as potentially entertaining snippets of my life.

Now that I’ve done a lot more research on the topic of blogs and their content I plan to set up one or two independent sites on particular niche topics. A blog is not a lot of use without an audience. To get an audience I need to select topics that people will actually be interested in; and therein lies the question. How can I decide what will be a compelling topic for my blog?

Research

Selecting a topic for my blog on which there are already hundreds of very good blogs will not make a lot of sense. To generate traffic to my chosen subject my page will ideally need to be on the first page of a Google search; this will be impossible if there is a lot of competition.

There is also no point in creating a blog to cover a gap in the market if there is no market in the gap. You might find a topic that no one else has blogged about, but if only ten people will ever be interested in the content is it really worth it?

So I’m looking for the following in my topic selection:

• Low competition;
• Lots of Google searches;
• Ideally something that is of interest to me / that I know something about.

Google Keywords

Google offers a powerful tool which enables you to enter a keyword and see statistics about it. These statistics include advertiser competition and local search volume. As this tool is linked with Google’s adwords you can also add fields to the search such as average CPC (cost per click) for a given keyword set.

As an example I have entered “weight loss” into the keyword search to see what results this produces.

These figures show that a lot of people search for topics pertaining to weight loss in Google. However they also show that there is a lot of competition in this market. It might be possible to build up a blog that receives some views but getting enough traffic to make it worthwhile could be very difficult.

It’s going to take me some time to come up with a topic with high enough demand but low enough competition to make an effective blog. But I am well aware that investing this time initially, before I begin to ‘blog for real’, will help in the long run. There is nothing more depressing than investing a lot of time to generate high quality content for a site that no one will ever view.

Remember that I updated this blog every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you want to follow my journey as I step into the realm of monetizing and creating captivating content for my blog please keep checking back. I may post on other topics but I will be sure to continue this to completion; even if it is with the eventual admission that I haven’t been able to make an impact with my chosen topic.