How to Find a Profitable Blog Topic Idea: How to Blog and Generate Profitable Blog Topic Ideas?

by Scott Aaron

Table of Contents

1. Chapter One - How to Spot a Profitable Blog Topic Idea

2. Chapter Two - How to Become a Master in Your Craft

3. Chapter Three - Is Passion a Key Factor?

4. Chapter Four - The One Element That Will Set Your Blog Apart

5. Chapter Five - Market Research for Your Niche Topic

6. Chapter Six - Five Easy Ways to Choose a Blog Topic

7. Chapter Seven - Tools and Apps for Bloggers

8. Chapter Eight - Promoting Your Blog the Right Way

9. Conclusion

1. Chapter One - How to Spot a Profitable Blog Topic Idea

There are numerous factors you need to keep in mind when you select a blog topic that will create profits or let you build a large and dedicated audience for the blog. You have to keep in mind public interest, your expertise on the topic, the potential longevity of the topic, and the audience’s interest in that topic. It’s also imperative to study the competition and develop a way to deliver your content that’s different, more engaging, and simply better. Begin by coming up with a few possible topics you’d like to use, and then consider the following:

·          Who is the audience for your topic? As the writer, you’re going to cater to that audience and write or produce content that the audience can relate to.

·          Does the topic have some long-term appeal? Is this topic going to be relevant in a few months, a year, two years, maybe even five years down the road?

·          How large will be your target audience for this topic? How are you going to reach your future audience to notify them of your blog?

·          Is there going to be sufficient to write about this topic in the future? In a few minutes, can you write down twenty-five things you could blog about in future posts? Will you be able to come up with some new things to blog about to keep your content fresh over the long-term?

·          How much competition is there when it comes to this topic? Consider other websites, blogs, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, television shows, vlogs, podcasts, radio shows, YouTube channels, and Facebook pages. There are many other outlets you can consider, too. Think about the other content that’s available to your targeted audience.

·          What will you do that’s different to make your blog more appealing, entertaining, engaging, and interactive?

For every potential topic, you can offer experiences, opinions, commentary, how-to information, news, and delve into subtopics that relate to your main topic. You can also focus on any controversies that surround your topic in order to engage your audience.

Here are a few general areas you could consider blogging about.

Industry Related Topics. Focus on a certain industry and blog about that industry as an entirety. Most of your time preparing content is going to be spent looking for industry news, following any developments, reporting about innovations, and debating industry talk.

Personal Topics. There are numerous successful bloggers who don’t cover a specific topic at all, but they cover a variety of topics with humor. If you’re good at making others laugh, then go ahead and try a humor blog. If you’re a photographer, artists, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, or another creative genius, then you could share your work online and build up a fan base.

Political Blogs. Maybe you have an insightful and informed opinion, or you have an interesting way of communicating your ideas and opinions. You could consider a political blog. If you want to have a political blog but not proclaim personal opinions, contemplate using your blog as a sieve to help your audience plow through all the political mumbo jumbo out there.

Special Interest or Hobby Topics. Many bloggers have achieved a lot of success just selecting a topic they were previously ardent about. You will find informative, creative, gossipy, and how-to blogs about many different hobbies out there. The trick for this type of blog is to find a niche that you are knowledgeable about and interested in, and then share your unique information and perspective about this topic.

General Interest Topics. Never limit yourself to the topic areas that have been listed this far. There are thousands of possibilities out there for blogs! You never know what’s going to spark some interest or catch on. If you have a crazy idea that just might attract some attention, then go for it!

When you are choosing a topic to blog about, remember to choose one that isn’t going to dry up. Public interest will rarely stay on a subject for long, so be sure to choose a topic that’s held the interest of your target audience for quite some time and will continue to keep doing so in the future.

You also have to have or develop a more than normal familiarity with the chosen topic if you want a reader to take you seriously. Readers are not going to stick around to read things they already know or that they don’t believe is interesting or relevant.

Therefore, never choose a topic that you don’t know anything about. Chances are, if you know nothing about it, then you most likely don’t have much interest in it. Ideally, when your audience is reading your blog, it should be obvious that not only are you an expert on that subject, but you’re also passionate about it.

In addition, be sure to research competition. Find out who they are and how much of it really exists. Unless you develop an original approach, you’ll do yourself harm by entering a topic that’s already flooded.

If your topic area appears crowded when you first take a look, remember that every topic has countless niches that have been unexplored. Do your homework and find a topic no one else has done and what might work for you, based on your knowledge, experience, passion, education, and interests.

Before you commit yourself to a specific topic, understand that whatever theme you choose is going to become the central point of your blogging career. Your passion and interest for the topic should be strong enough to sustain you through times when you’re not sure you can bring yourself to read another article on that subject, much less write another blog entry about it.

2. Chapter Two - How to Become a Master in Your Craft

One of the largest challenges you’ll have to overcome when you’re a blogger is proving to your audience that you’re an expert in your niche. It’s imperative to pass the message to your audience that you know what you’re talking about so they’re able to trust you. Trust is what will convert a simple reader into a loyal reader, follower, or customer.

The most obvious way is to begin a blog in a niche you’re an expert in. For example:

·          If you’re a lawyer, then begin blogging about laws.

·          If you’re a doctor, then start blogging about nutrition or general patient care.

·          If you’re a writer, then blog about how to write.

·          If you’ have a hobby, such as model train building, then write about model train building!

A successful blog will depend on the quality of your content. Content is the king, and you have success with or without having SEO on your blog if you have good content. To make good content, you have to have a passion for that niche. Passion is way above expertise, and this is what distinguishes a good blog from an exceptional one.

However, what happens when you’re not the true expert in a niche but you still want to run a website on that topic? You have a few different options.

Hire an Expert

This might sound a little odd, but one of the great things about the internet is that it makes this ability to hire an expert to assist you to cover the gap between just okay content to excellent content. Whenever this is brought up, many people have questions as to how this works.

Basically, you play the role of an entrepreneur and approach the blog in the same way you would a business. In the real word, when a company needs a skill in a certain area, they hire an expert or outsource to another company. This is how it works in the online world, too.

Where?

There are numerous websites that will bring freelancers and clients together. Some of them include upwork.com, freelancer.com, and many others. Do a simple search on a search engine website and take a look at all the sites that come up.

How?

The process is relatively simple. You sign up for the site and verify all the information you need to. Then you create a job description explaining what it is you need, with as many details as you can and ask any interested parties to apply for the job. You can add restrictions on how might be able to apply, but at this point, don’t talk about price. Then post the job.

In a few hours, you’ll receive applications for your job. Depending on the type of expert you want, you could get hundreds of applications, so be ready to manage them! Screen them so you can find the right candidate for the job.

It’s a given that most applicants will not be suitable for the job at all, and they simply applied without reading your requirements, so you have to be careful and reject them from the beginning.

The next step is to make a short list of three to four applicants and begin the interviewing process. Ask questions and do it like you would in the ‘real world.'

At this stage, you should look at qualifications, previous work experience, availability, portfolio, and reviews.

Do a short pilot about what the job is about and give the more details. Include payment details in this and invite them to participate in a short, paid test job. In the test job, just give them one or two titles and ask them to write articles. The applicant who works best should be hired for a trial period of a month.

You could choose to follow the same process as above, or you could come up with a completely different process. What’s important is to understand that you don’t have to do anything alone when you run a site or a blog, and you can hire real experts to fill in the gaps.

Become an Expert

If you don’t want to hire an expert because you’re not able to afford one, you don’t want to take the risk of finding a bad, or your niche is specific and there are not any experts available, then you could become one!

How?

First, find out what research has to tell you. Good places to begin are scholar.google.com and look for a published journal that deals with your niche topic.

Find out who the experts are in your niche by searching Google or Bing for your niche and find out who are considered the leaders and influencers. Then follow them on social media channels.

Does your keyword research to find out what you need to write about? You should learn how to select blog titles cleverly so you can increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.

Remember that practice makes perfect! This is true for the real world as much as it is for the online word. The more you write, the more content you will put online and the more interaction you have online. This will make you better! Begin producing content about your niche and always have in mind that quality is more important than quantity.

If writing isn’t something you’re comfortable with, then there are options. If you have the knowledge for a topic, but your writing’s not up to par, and you don’t have time to make it better, then you can choose to hire a copywriter to fix mistakes or look for alternatives, such as creating videos, slideshows, or podcasts. Infographics are quite popular at the moment, too!

Lastly, refresh those SEO skills. Don’t forget to look at the basic principles of SEO when you’re writing content. Your focus needs to be on content, but SEO will give good content and amazing boost and value.

Defining an Expert

Experts are people who know the subject well, and someone others feel they can trust and consider an expert. So what does that tell you pertaining to the online world? First, you need to show off your expertise through writing and, second, you need to show off your trust using your social media profile. A professional is more likely to have supporters on many diverse social media platforms, which is a sign that people trust this person.

Consider it this way; would you believe someone with a few fans as a professional in a niche or someone who has thousands of supporters?

If you have expertise in a specific topic, then you need to prove it by creating excellent, relevant content and work on your social media profiles.

If you lack expertise, you can hire one to fill in the gaps or try to become one by building new skills. Either way, the goal is to establish trust between you, your blog, and your users.

However, being an expert isn’t the only thing that will help you in the blogging world. Many are asking the question: Is passion a necessity? We’ll figure that out in the following chapter.

3. Chapter Three - Is Passion a Key Factor?

If you ask any blogger out there, they will most likely tell you to blog about what you love, and if you have enough passion, then people will see it, and they will want to be part of your community. While blogging your passion is good advice for getting started, it’s not the entire truth.

If you’ve been blogging for a little bit, you know there’s more to it than just blogging your passion.

When most people begin a blog, they have many different ideas. They pick a topic they can discuss forever. Making a list of blog posts to put up is as easy as taking a moment and questioning what you know and what you want to share.

This leads people to believe that if they just write a good post about what they know, then they will be successful.

While this isn’t the world’s most terrible way to begin blogging, it’s a good way to end up with a few hundred posts and only a few readers.

So why does this happen?

Because these bloggers are going at it completely wrong.

The problem with dwelling on what you know is that you could put a lot of information out there on the blog, but you might never reach the person who’ll be the most passionate about sharing your posts, retweeting ideas, and spreading the message.

For example, let’s say that you’re someone who’s really into nutrition, and you love eating your vegetables and fruits. Unfortunately, this describes thousands of other nutrition bloggers. However, you assume that because you have amazing pictures of different training methods, and you define new workout plans that truly get amazing outcomes, you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

Now, let’s talk about Marie. She’s a potential reader who is thirty-five years old, and she’s a single mother who works nights as a janitor at a local school. She already knows she needs to eat better and exercise more, but her problem isn’t what she needs to do, but finding the motivation and time to do it!

If you stick to your original topic and only blog about nutrition in general, you’ve lost Marie. She may follow a link to your blog once, but she won’t stick around as a follower.

However, the day she discovers someone who is talking about the problem she has and helps her overcome the challenges she’s facing, then she’s going to be that blog writer’s number one fan.

Then she’s going to tell her friends.

If your blog is ever going to be successful, you have to help someone. Inspire someone to think differently and change their life. Make someone’s life better.

Focus

The next thing an excellent blogger has is focus. Ask yourself this one question. If you had a hundred new subscribers to your blog today, but they all had to be a clone of a single existing reader, who would it be?

The greatest way to find that existing reader is to figure out who is the most generous about sharing your content, gives you thanks and praise, refers their friends to your site, purchases your eBooks, and someone you get excited about seeing in the comments section.

Once you’ve identified this reader, ask yourself what they came to your blog looking for, what specific problems did they need to be solved, what are their passions, what are their goals, and what value do you offer the relationship.

Now visit your blog and read the last ten posts on it. View all the images and work your way through your entire site with your top reader in mind. Imagine this site has been constructed precisely for that person.

Ask yourself if the stories on the site pertain with that reader. Are the images engaging? Is your reader able to connect with the real people who are behind the blog? Is the information relevant and interesting?

Your blog needs to be built for your top reader and no one else. This is pretty hard to implement because you’re most likely afraid of losing other traffic that might come through. However, when you strike a chord with that one reader when you solve their problem and make their life better, that reader tells their friends, promotes products, and keeps telling the story of your blog long after your other site visitors moved on to the next blog.

If there’s one Marie out there for you, then there are thousands more just like her!

So whose life will you change with your blog?

In the following chapter, we’re going to take a look at the one thing your blog has that no one else’s does.

4. Chapter Four - The One Element That Will Set Your Blog Apart

There are millions of blogs on the internet. To be exact, there are 152 million at this moment. It might seem easy to get lost amongst them, but the truth is, it’s not hard to set yourself apart from the others.

Your blog is a content marketing channel that’s very powerful. A recent study has indicated that small businesses that blog have a 126% growth. Marketers who have made blogging a priority are thirteen times more likely to generate a return on investment. You don’t have to be a small business to benefit from blogging. One in three fortune 500 companies have active blogs.

There are numerous other benefits to blogging, too. One of the more obvious ones is improved SEO because the fresh content comes up first on a search, driving more content to your site. The process of blogging is also beneficial to your startup company because it helps your company define its position and voice in the marketplace, crafting an identity that can appeal to both investors and clients.

Blogging will also help you build your network and create a community. This takes some time and patience, but as the traffic and network builds, a regular readership emerges. It’s hard to quantify or evaluate a community with analytics. It’s a feeling of inclusion and participation, which comes across through the topics you blog about and the discussions that are created in the comments section. Blogging is also a way you can give back to your community, by direction attention toward worthy causes and events that your startup might support.

Therefore, blogging works. But this also means that with the noise generated by 152 million other blogs, your blog could be part of an endless echo that’s bouncing around the internet. Your blog has to stand out.

The right keywords are not going to make your blog stand out. Neither will inbound links and authoritative writing. If you really want your blog to stand out above the noise of the internet, then harness the power of storytelling. This is what it meant when voice and identity were mentioned earlier. This might sound like fluff on the surface, but it will have a large impact on your business.

Storytelling can bring up images of parents reading a bedtime story to you, or story hour during your elementary school days. Our childhood was chock full of tales that taught how to interact with the world and be good people. However, storytelling is more than just for children. The national Storytelling Network defines this as the interactive art of using actions and words to reveal the images and elements of a story while encouraging a listener’s imagination.

Stories are not only transmitted through writing. Video games, films, television series and your favorite brands have stories behind them. In addition, your startup blog doesn’t have to be text; you can share your stories through video, images, and audio.

Here’s how you can start using storytelling to set your startup blog apart from the rest.

Storytelling Elements

The most basic way is to use storytelling elements. You might remember some of these from your high school English class or college English courses.

·          Narration: You need to tell what happened. For a blog post, this might be in the form of a bio, interview, or a case study.

·          Description: You need to appeal to the senses by describing tastes, sounds, and colors.

·          Explanation: Provide facts, definitions, and statistics to explain your posts.

·          Argument: Use persuasion to convince a reader to purchase your service or product.

Persona

Create a persona by finding an identity and a voice for your blog, and then base your posts on this voice. Voice is one of the vague and elusive things that everyone talks about, but few are able to define it. Here are four ways to find the voice for your blog that readers will relate to.

Get in the flow. Every day, you should do a three-minute writing warm up. The objective is smoothness and to create as much text as you can in three minutes. Some of the best writing you ever produce can come from these three minutes. By removing the pressure to have quality and focusing on quantity, you’re free to flow. What comes out can be quirky, natural, and authentic. What comes out has a voice.

Write how you talk. Read your writing out loud and ask yourself if it sounds like you. If it doesn’t, then challenge yourself to talk about the subject in your post for a moment and jot down some of the phrases and words you use. When you insert some of these snippets into your writing, then voice happens.

Forget conventions. Most people have been taught by a previous teacher to stifle your voice by writing Standard English. Most people also don’t even know what this means. Writing has to communicate a message, and writing in proper English is encouraged, but in most instances, these rules hinder your ability to make a realistic voice. The rules of your language have evolved over time, and it breaking a rule will enhance your clarity, then you should break it.

Write about what you know. This is huge. Bloggers fall into the trap of trying to find a topic that’s popular or seems smart, even if that topic isn’t really close to their heart. The result is there isn’t any voice. So try to find something you enjoy.

Identify Main Characters

Once you’ve made a persona, ask who the hero is. It should be you! And the antagonist is the problem that your business or blog will solve. Just like in every good story, this tension gives the blog content a wow factor.

Be Consistent and Authentic

Despite this chapter being about storytelling and crafting stories, you cannot underestimate how important it is to be yourself. Be authentic at all times, not just when you feel like being authentic. A great story is a true story because readers are able to find the inconsistencies. True is defined as being believable, not factual. You want people to believe what you promise them.

Insert Yourself

Great brand stories aren’t objective. The most successful ones are very subjective. You’re not a journalist, so there isn’t a need to be objective. It’s easy to confuse yourself with your voice or your persona, but there’s a slight difference here. Here, we’re talking about dislikes, likes, opinions, and biases. These are the details that will reflect your blog’s worldview and its position.

Be Vulnerable

This is a tough one and the element that you need to use in moderation. While having an air of professionalism, don’t be afraid to let your sensitive side come out every now and again. It’s part of your story. Divulge in failures and setbacks to connect with the audience, but be prepared for a potential backlash. Transparency and honesty can create trust, but be careful about oversharing and driving people away if you’re too negative and open.

Conversation

Stop talking at your customers and start having a conversation with them. Even though it’s storytelling, you should still listen and ask for feedback from your readers. This can be as simple as a call to action in the post or encouraging them to leave feedback and comments.

You can apply any of these suggestions as visual content, such as an infographic or a photo gallery, and make the same type of emotional bond that will make your blog something they won’t forget anytime soon.

In the following chapter, we’ll take a look at market research for your particular niche to determine if it’s an investment you want to make, or not.

5. Chapter Five - Market Research for Your Niche Topic

Researching a profitable niche for your blog can be a little bit of a challenge. It’s easy to assume a market is characterized by a high demand and that this one will be profitable, but that’s not always true. A good example of this might be the cookie baking market. You could be amazing at baking cookies, but beginning a blog about cookie baking might not be profitable for you, especially if your visitors are seeking quick recipes and not really interested in purchasing anything.

Let’s look at a basic methodology for market researching a niche topic that’s commonly used by internet marketers. While this approach is geared toward entrepreneurs who would like to create revenue off their website in the niche of their choice, which is essential if your business is completely online, it’s also very powerful if you are a brick and mortar business who’s seeking to grow online income streams.

While researching niche methods might vary a bit, contingent on whether you hope to sell physical goods, digital products, or services, the standard is still the same.

Step One: Identify the Audience

If you’re a beginning entrepreneur who wants to begin a practical business in the market you’re passionate about, instead of concentrating on what product you’d like to sell, begin first with understanding your audience. So why should you focus on the niche audience first rather than products?

There are two solid reasons you should prioritize finding an audience to promote to over identifying products to promote.

Products will come and go, but a niche audience will stay with you forever. If you’ve ever promoted a productive gainfully and then had it decay in demand or it was removed from the market completely, you know what this means.

When you choose a niche audience, and you take the time to understand what it is they need, a whole new world of options is available to you. You go from trying to find concepts for a product to suddenly knowing precisely the types you need to promote because they’re what your niche audience needs.

This is excellent advice for anyone who is seeking to better connect with their audience who have the inclination to purchase something and the capacity to buy it.

Step Two: Research Keywords

You need to identify the keywords your audience will use when they research a topic related to your niche market, especially searches that are related to problems, deepest desires, or pain points.

This information is not only going to tell you what topics your audience cares about, but it'll also tell you whether or not there is a potential for profit in this niche.

An easy and fun way to start is with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can use it to figure out the keywords your audience uses to research services, products, solutions, and information related to your niche market.

This tool will provide you with a lot of useful data that’s related to your keywords, such as global and local search volume, the level of competition for it, the average CPC or cost per click, and much more.

What you want to pay attention to when you research the industry keywords is the monthly search volume. The higher it is, the larger the market is. Anything that is over a thousand exact match searches is worth looking into. Yet, there are some niche markets with a smaller monthly volume that have some profit potential, too.

Let’s take a look at the example of the personal development market. In this market, at forty-nine thousand five hundred exact matches a month on a global basis, this is a large amount of people that are interested in all the things that are related to the Law of Attraction.

Step Three: Analyze Your Competition

The level of quality your competition is in a niche is a decent sign of whether it’s a lucrative niche or not. So what are the most lucrative keywords?

·          They have a high average CPC or cost per click.

·          They have more than one page of ads.

·          There are advertisers in the top three premium positions.

·          The ads are highly targeted to the keyword.

While the law of attraction niche is rather large, competition appears to be low to medium and with the average CPC less than a dollar.

This raises the question of whether or not this niche has enough money to make it a worthwhile investment. The best way to get an idea is to see if there are any PPC or pay per click advertisers who are bidding on the law of attraction keyword in Google AdWords. These ads are the text ads that appear at the top and on the right of the sidebar area on Google search result pages.

While there are a lot of competing pages in the organic search results area for this keyword, this high key phrase is devoid of any PPC advertisers.

The lack of PPC suggests this key phrase isn’t very lucrative and that the law of attraction could be a tough market to make money in. at forty-eight million competing pages, it’ll be very tough for you to launch a new blog and rank on Google’s page one for the term law of attraction. Odds are, it won’t be worth your time.

This doesn’t mean it’s not a profitable niche. Ask yourself why no one is advertising as this tells you a lot of information. A great way to find some answers is in the list of keyword suggestions that is presented by the Google Keyword Tool. Are people looking for the law of attraction books or could it be that most people are looking for free info? Beyond the book, are there any other types or products this specific audience would purchase? Coaching? Maybe some courses?

It could be worthwhile to drill down to the long tail keywords that are related to the niche market’s desires and pain points of the audience. For example, those who believe in the law of attraction might find it’s not working well for them, and they’re seeking some help in unleashing the full potential of it.

Advertisers in this keyword niche suggest there is money to be made. However, the number and quality of the advertisers and the ads suggests the law of attraction courses isn’t a hyper-competitive market, and that there could be room to accommodate some new players.

However, just to be sure, you should go back to Google Keyword Tool and see if there’s enough search volume for this particular keyword niche to support a decent business or audience. With only thirty-six matches globally in one month, it might he difficult to build a business solely focused on selling some law of attraction courses.

Step Four: Research Industry Trends

Another critical piece of knowledge to have is where the niche market is heading. A great free tool to use would be Google Trends.

The keyword law of attraction peaked in 2007 and has been declining ever since. This indicates a declining market. This means it’ll be harder and harder for you to grow traffic to your blog if overall traffic in that niche is becoming smaller. If you want the blog to be there for the long-term, it’s better to establish yourself in a marker that’s growing or remaining steady rather than begin a business in a pie that’s starting to shrink.

Step Five: Decide if You Want to Enter the Niche Market

This is the point where you’ll need to decide if the market is worth getting into for you. The law of attraction courses sub-niche shows some profit possible, but not much competition. Unfortunately, it doesn’t demonstrate a great enough monthly search volume to be viable by itself.

As a general rule, if you see a lot of highly targeted ads at the top and in the right sidebar, on many pages, with the top brands in the market consistently in those top three spots, it’ll be a tough break to get into that market as a new blogger. You’d be up against some established brands with a huge marketing budget.

However, there are many other lucrative long tail keywords or audiences in the law of attraction marketplace you could target. It’s up to you to get down to the niche to ascertain what moneymaking keywords are there and what products, services, and overall solutions this audience is keen to pay for. So if you’re determined to be in the law of attraction market, or whatever niche you decide to go with, the solution would be to establish a blog presence around a less competitive keyword.

In the following chapter, we’ll take a look at how to choose a blog topic in five easy steps.

6. Chapter Six - Five Easy Ways to Choose a Blog Topic

Chapter Six - Five Easy Ways to Choose a Blog Topic

After all the research you’ve done, choosing a blog topic might seem like a nightmare! Let’s break it down into five easy steps that you can follow. Then you can choose a blog topic that will be profitable and build you a large audience.

Step One: Social Listening

This is exactly what it sounds like. It means listening to what people are talking about on social media channels. You want to focus on your target audience’s conversations. This strategy requires you know where the social media sphere is that your likely audience will haunt.

Social demographics and some well-honed customer personae can assist you in cutting out the noise and turn around your social media monitoring labors. Here are some social media platforms you ought to consider.

LinkedIn

If you have a company, and you’re beginning a blog for business to business information, then you want to listen to conversations that occur in some LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your topic. You also want to pay attention to your own LinkedIn page.

Pay attention to the topics that bring about heated and lively conversations. When you identify these and track original links to industry articles and blog posts that spur these conversations, you have the material you require to make a blog post that addresses the concerns of the niche market you are in.

Google Plus

Just with LinkedIn, if you have not created a Google+ page, now is the time. Besides having ties to Google search results, making a robust Google+ community will provide you with the material you need for blog posts, just like LinkedIn.

To fully utilize this platform, you have to share not only your own content but also updates that are useful to your target audience. This makes your Google+ page less about you and more about the readers, which pays bonuses in the long run in terms of creating credibility and authority, as well as driving readers to the site.

Facebook

The organic reach of Facebook might be next to nothing, but if you’re mostly a business to customer or client based blog, you need to start and foster a Facebook page. Just like with Google+, posting links that are useful to your customers, whether they’re from your own blogs or a noncompetitive blog, will spur discussion that informs you about your blogging tactic. You can reply to some questions, provide some useful follow-ups, and write more about a topic that’s driving a discussion.

Twitter

Twitter Trends is a list this social platform provides that has breaking news and some real-time trending topics. Twitter’s Trends are created by an algorithm that tries to identify topics that are being talked about this moment more than they were in the past.

Obviously, not all of these topics are going to prove relevant to your target audience. If you’re in the search marketing industry, #SEO might be your target niche.

Keeping an eye on the developments on Twitter is an excellent way to stay a step ahead with blog posts that capture the latest and greatest topics that are being discussed on this social media platform.

SlideShare

This is another social media platform that you might want to include in your monitoring efforts. If you have not used SlideShare for presentations, you might want to consider it. This PPT presentation site drives industry interest and awareness. For the presentation uploads that are popular, consider repurposing the content into a post.

Step Two: Industry Forum and News

If your blog topic is represented in a professional industry association or organization that publishes regular newsletters and articles, then you might want to pay attention to them and subscribe to them. The topics of these articles can be great topics for blog posts, or a series of articles, depending on how thorough the original content is.

Try to look for angles on timely issues or news items that are introduced to the forum or newsletter, and elaborate on subjects’ others in the professional might appreciate.

Step Three: Blog Post Questions and Comments

While it might seem a bit obvious, your own blog post will provide interesting post ideas through your reader questions and comments. Pay attention to the posts that create a lot of reader interest by gauging the amount of social sharing, questions, and comments you see. Then make follow-up posts that elaborate on the initial post and address some specific questions and common.

Don’t forget to look at your competition’s blog questions and comments, too!

Step Four: Help Section

Contact the Customer Service Department and create a ranked list of what topics and questions have come up the most in e-mails, online forums, and on the phone. The Customer Service knowledge base is used to answer questions that might give you significant content to use in your posts. Writing blog posts that pertain to Customer Service questions has the additional benefit of providing a lot more exposure to the answer and how to solve the problem, which helps lower customer Service costs and calls. This pertains to blog posts that are created for businesses, but you can also take a look at reviews on products on sites such as Amazon and Newegg to see what else people are asking.

Step Five: Utilize BrightEdge Platform

A second source of excellent post ideas can be obtained from competitor’s blogs. See what topics are driving the interest in the way of social sharing and discussions, and then beat them to the punch with some of your own answers that readers would like to see.

BrightEdge customers have a very powerful resource known as the Data Cube. This can provide an extensive list of keyword topics that rank on pages one, two, and three that point toward the pages on your competitor’s website that pertain to these keywords.

In the following chapter, we’ll explore some more comprehensive tools and apps bloggers can use to increase their followers.

7. Chapter Seven - Tools and Apps for Bloggers

Chapter Seven - Tools and Apps for Bloggers

In this chapter, we’re going to explore tools and applications for research, social media management, traffic, marketing, and other essentials you should consider.

Research

The greatest tool when it comes to research is BuzzSumo. This is the go-to tool for bloggers when it comes to search engine research. Just put in a keyword or a URL that you’d like analyzed, and it gives you insight into the most popular content for it and the influencers who are sharing it.

Social Media

If you’d like to turn social activity into something that’s better for your blog, try out Rignite. You can schedule new social media posts and monitor keyword search streams from a single area.

What sets this tool apart is the Campaigns feature. These are guided social media strategies where you can make a series of posts over many platforms on social media. For example, you can make a campaign to share a blog post three times a week for six months.

Research has shown that re-sharing old posts work magic for your blog when it comes to traffic. Every post in the campaign can be tweaked a bit so it doesn’t annoy your followers. These can be targeted to schedule a series of posts, host contests for fans, grow your list, and promote discounts.

With their analytics, you get to see if your campaigns are working or not.

Traffic and Marketing

If you’re serious about creating a blog, sooner or later, you’ll be paying attention to SEO. If your content is optimized, then search engines such as Bing and Google will send visitors to your site by putting your posts in the search engine results, which increase your conversions.

WordPress SEO by Yoast will make optimization much easier, and you can do a lot with it. Just the parameters and it’ll be taken care of forever.

MailChimp is another excellent tool that will allow you to create e-mail marketing campaigns. It’s used by more than seven million people, and one of the reasons is the low cost to entry barrier with an entrepreneur plan. You can send twelve thousand e-mails to two thousand subscribers for free forever. As the list grows, you can start upgrading to a paid account.

Other Tools

Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 is a backup and archiving service that’s secure and can be accessed anywhere on the web. You can offload all critical content to their cloud and pay for only the storage that you use. There is no minimum setup fee involved.

If you have a huge blog site, then they can help you scale it without putting too much load on your servers or eating up your bandwidth.

In the following chapter, we’ll discuss how to promote your blog the proper way to obtain followers.

8. Chapter Eight - Promoting Your Blog the Right Way

Chapter Eight - Promoting Your Blog the Right Way

First and foremost, you need to go into your blogging adventure with an idea of what you’d like to achieve. Don’t go into it blind, hoping you will be successful. After all, what does that mean? You might want to share your ideas with the world. Or you might want 100,000 unique visitors each month to feel you’ve accomplished something. Perhaps you want to concentrate on generating income, and your main concern is making $100,000 next year. That’s doable. You just need to be specific about your goal with your blog.

You can and will achieve the blogging goals you have if you’re willing to do the work and make it happen. Success in the blogging industry is not a mystical process. It’s manageable and predictable that happens as a result of doing what has to be done over a period of time.

The following are the steps you need to take in order to promote your blog the right way, and how to make it into something that’s more than just a few ragged posts that don’t attract much attention.

Step One: Daily Action Plan

Every promotion plan requires regular action. The size of your goals and how quickly you want to achieve them is going to weigh heavily on what daily activities you’d like to write into your plan. However, it’s very important to have this plan written down and have it be something you can commit to on a daily basis. Daily action is the key element here.

Your daily action plan has to contain tasks that will produce results that’ll grow your business. Checking your AdSense revenues and reviewing analytics are important, but they don’t count here. These are administrative tasks that will not directly produce growth. The point of your daily action plan is to create a specific plan that will perform specific actions every day.

For example, make 100 personal contacts daily and write three pages of content. Do this every day. It’s simple in theory, but it can be difficult and sometimes you might not get it all done in a day. However, it’s the gauge you should use to measure success on a daily basis. This gives you something to go for that you can achieve most days. It should be a little challenging but difficult. It should also contain actions that will make your blog audience grow.

Step Two: Go 60 Days without Changing Your Site

After you have your first design done, and the site is up, you are going to be constantly tempted to change it over and over again. Resist that urge. Make a pledge to introduce the blog and then do zilch but promote it for sixty days. The design is imperative, but constantly tweaking the site will be a distraction. In the beginning, there isn’t a community. You’ll be getting up to thirty visitors a day, so get out there and network yourself.

These things are a lot more important than getting your logo just right. The ultimate design will make itself apparent as you obtain followers. If you fail to build up your audience first, no one will care either way.

Step Three: Refuse Ads

Put away the pitchforks, please! Here’s the thing, advertising revenue is amazing, but when you first launch the blog, you have a lot of work you need to do. Tweaking out modules and trying to optimize ads for a blog is going to make you a few dollars a month and waste a lot of your time. We’re talking about making a winning business blog, right? Skip over the advertising for now. Yes, you could make a few dollars, but the most valuable asset right now is your time. Don’t waste it on something that will make you a lousy $10.

Put up ads later if you begin to get a lot of traffic. This is when it will be worth your time.

Step Four: Pillar Content

When you launch a blog site, you should have an inventory of twenty to thirty amazing article ideas all ready to go. Fill your blog up with excellent content that drives home the focus of the blog as this will attract your target audience and show your expertise. You’re laying down the foundation of the business. Take some time to create your pillar content. It’ll attract readers for a long time, and it’ll show your new readers what your blog is about.

Step Five: Network

Networking is one of the key business activities for anyone who is looking to start up something that needs an audience or customers. It always has been, and it always will be. Internet business is a people-oriented business. Find the top twenty to thirty blogs in your chosen topic and become acquainted with them. Read those blogs and get to know the authors of them. Build a relationship with them.

This will take time and persistence, but it’s worth it. One word of caution here is don’t blast them with spam asking them to help you. You should just get to know them a little. You can learn a lot by hanging out with people who are successful in your chosen field.

Step Six: Blog and Forum Commenting

Anyone who knows blogs is familiar with leaving comments on them. This is an essential activity for someone who is trying to build an online presence. Blogs and forums will give you a lot of opportunities to join in on conversations. Don’t wreck it by being promotional. Just use your name, leave some helpful comments, and participate in a genuine manner.

Step Seven: Respond to Readers

It’s surprising how many business owners on the internet don’t respond to posts or personally reply to a comment. If it’s not a priority, why isn’t it? There’s a lot to be said about following basics. In other words, check e-mail! Be response and appreciative to your audience. Every minute you spend with them interacting on a personal level is a well spent minute. They will return because of it.

Step Eight: Begin Building an E-mail List

From the first day, you need to have an opt-in box to encourage visitors to sign up for an e-mail list. There is an argument for waiting until there’s more traffic, but an e-mail list of ten people is a lot more exciting than you realize. Think about how nice it would be to know there are people who find value in what you’re doing. Open the door to communication right away. Never wait. The sooner you start conversing with people through e-mail, the more comments and criticism you will receive that will give you helpful insight into what you’re doing.

Step Nine: Use the Power of 100 Rule

You should make 100 personal contacts every day. Sending a personal e-mail, not a bulk one, responding to a message, a phone call, and leaving a blog comment are all ways to make contacts. If often forces you to not watch television because you have a few more contacts to make before you go to bed, which really helps you stay on track. It’s a mechanism that helps you get your priorities straight without you having to think about it.

Practiced over time, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much business comes your way due to the power of 100. The bottom line is to be social. The internet business is a people business.

9. Conclusion

Thank you again for downloading this book!

I hope this book was able to help you to choose a profitable blog topic for your new blog! 

The next step is to do your market research and find a topic that you both are passionate about and will be profitable.

Finally, if you enjoyed this book, please take the time to share your thoughts and post a review on Amazon.  It’d be greatly appreciated!

Thank you and good luck!

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