How I Choose A Topic For Blogging

Many times I have repeated in my blog posts about how important it is to select a good niche (preferably) or mass market topic for your blog. It can in many situation determine whether a blog is going to make money or not.
Choosing the wrong topic for blogging will only waste your time, money and effort and if you’re lucky it might pay off in the end. In case you don’t know, below are the definitions:

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market.
A mass market is an unsegmented market with a mass appeal.

In case you did not understand, here is an example:
If I start a blog about cell phones, then I will be targeting a mass market because it will involve all the categories of cell phones that are present in the market today. It is, as one can tell, very general in it’s audience. I will have apple fan boys, nokia fan boys and many others visiting my blog.
While this may seem as a very lucrative opportunity, of  having such a big audience visiting your blog, it is an extremely  difficult project to pull off, if not impossible. Your competition span  will simply roll out from other technology bloggers like you, to big  media blogs run by companies having multi-million dollar budgets.
Alternatively, if I start a blog about nokia 5800 xpressmusic, then I will be targeting a much narrower audience. That is, all the people will only be interested in things concerning the nokia 5800 xpressmusic, it’s features, it’s applications, etc.
So, you get the point. It’s much easier and safer to start off with a niche market. It will not only provide you the ease of sticking to a topic and then blogging about it, but it will also save you from the hassle of competing with the big dogs. Trust me, when I say “hassle of competing with the big dogs”, I really mean it. You keep competing with them and end up nowhere.
It does not always have to mean that you need to blog about something you’re passionate, although it helps a lot. If you feel a niche market is not crowded and is profitable, tap into it. Do some research, develop some interest into the topic, and make a niche blog around it.
Once you have the blog ready, start publishing some informational and unique articles. Remember, providing value is the key to making money on the internet. So whatever you do, make sure you’re providing value to the blog’s visitors.
Personally, I have used many different ways of picking a topic for blogging. Firstly, it is passion. I have a passion for basketball, and so I started a website for basketball fans. This is the most ideal type because:

1. You love what you do
2. You don’t need to work as hard for understanding complexities of the topic at hand
3. You’ll work excessively without losing interest

Another important thing to remember is that, the biggest role-player in the ‘make money online’ process is patience. Being impatient can literally cost you thousands of dollars of potential earnings due to immature decisions made.
Secondly, I look for a hot market. Internet marketers are always promoting new products and when a lot of them are promoting the same product, it means that the product converts well and pays off. That’s a hint I pick up and start promoting that product.
The key here is to jump into the bandwagon in the early stage. This whole scenario can be seen on the diagram on the right called the product life cycle (PLC).
This is a product model used in business studies to find the behavior of products in a specific market. Despite the fact that I love making analogies, this applies well to the internet market quite well.
In this case, you should always keep an eye open to any new product on the buzz. The ideal strategy is to catch it in the introduction phase. Work on it through out the growth phase and keep making money while you’re at it and stop near the maturity. Considering that you work hard and don’t have invincible competitors, you can usually make a lot of money with this strategy. At least, I’ve used it and it works.
I agree that the PLC is bookish, but the actual PLC for every product will differ. Some will have a very prolonged growth phase, some will never reach maturity, while the majority will have a very steep decline phase.
It is important to understand the nature of the products that we promote on the internet. Fads, trends and fashions come and go on the internet like a pop song. Majority of the products you’ll promote would have a very high maturity point, sales will break records and then all of a sudden it will disappear into thin air with a nose dive in the decline phase.
The ability to foresee can prove very helpful. For example, the people companies who predicted the growth in the weigh loss market 10 years ago have made millions of dollars in the market. Now, it is at the stage of maturity which will stay prolonged till the obesity problems of the internet population aren’t solved. I hope you can sense the irony in that statement.
However, entering the market at this point will be more or less of a time waste because you cannot compete with the companies who have a very strong stand in the market and they will be having a capital advantage over you because of the profits they’ve made in the past.
Know that every hobby might not pay off as well as others. There could  be some topics which could get you a lot of visitors, but it becomes hard  to make money off that traffic. So do some research to look for whether  you can make money with the topic or not. Mostly people would throw in  unrelated ads at such websites, but it would be better to funnel the traffic to some other related website to make money.
So there you are with two methods of choosing topics for blogging. I use them myself and know that they make money. If you’re a starter, go with the first one. Once you’re a little acquainted with blogging, go hit the second one. Get to work and look for some good topics to blog about and you’ll be making money in no time.