How to choose a subject area or niche for your WordPress blog

Choosing a subject area or niche for your new blog can be trickier than it seems.

So you have decided to start a blog and maybe you’re doing this to make a little passive income on the side.

Have you thought about what you are going to write about?  This is probably the most important decision you will make with your blog, so think carefully about it.

Do you have an interest or a passion in something that you want to share with the world?  Are you knowledgeable about the subject area?  Can you express an opinion about the subject?

What is the competition like for your subject area?  Can you write better quality, interesting articles about your subject than others you have found?

If you are genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about your chosen subject, you are much more likely to keep going with your blog and write interesting articles from a unique perspective.  There are countless blogs out there that were started but abandoned because the writer wasn’t really that into the topic and they just ran out of ideas or interest.

Think about the type of site you want to run.  Do you want to write articles mostly about about one specific subject?  Perhaps something related to health, sports, a hobby, financial advice, etc.

Do you want to write product reviews about specific retail products?  Some options might be books, DVD players, camping goods, etc.

Or do you have a flair for writing but you don’t want to be cornered into one specific niche area.  In this case, you could maybe setup two or three different blogs about separate subject areas, or you could just create one larger general articles blog.

Is your chosen subject easily monitised?  Of course, you can put Google AdSense on pretty much any articles, regardless of the subject matter, but are your visitors likely to click on your ads?

For example, if you write articles of a detailed, highly technical nature, you are likely to attract technically competent visitors who are looking for specific answers to specific questions.  However, those types of visitors are much less likely to click on random ads in the middle of your post.  They are more interested in staying on your website and reading your high quality content to find an answer than clicking off into the unknown.  Likewise, office workers looking for answers to specific questions on the web may not want to click on ads.

But on the flip side, people browsing the internet from home tend to be much less constrained by time and focus.  They are more likely to be browsing casually and if an ad seems interesting then there is a good chance they will click on it and just see what happens.

If you need help thinking of a subject area for your WordPress blog, here is a simple exercise you can try.  Keep a piece of paper beside your computer for a week.  Every time you use a search engine, write down the query you typed in to Google or Bing or whatever site you used.  If you have some helpful friends, ask them to do the same and give you the piece of paper at the end of the week.  When you analyse the queries, it might give you some inspiration for blog topics.