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What To Blog About, If You’re A Beginner

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If you’re planning to start a blog and make money online, I know what the most pressing question on your mind will be – “What to blog about, when I am starting out”.

There are a lot of niches out there, and finding a profitable one for blogging can make all the difference between success and failure.

Even though profitability of the niche you choose is very important, the primary deciding factor should be your interest in the topic. You may know very less about the topic right now. But the real question is…

Are you willing to spend time to learn about that topic?

If you’re willing to learn about that topic, even if you have very less knowledge on the topic right now, as time goes on, you will have a lot of knowledge on that topic and can share it with others who are willing to gain that knowledge. So, interest in the topic you want to blog about, is very important.

Now, let’s get into some methods to help you find out what to blog about.

How to find out what to blog about?

1. Use Google Adwords

Before you start blogging, you’ve to make sure that there are people searching for what you want to write about. You have to make sure, that you can solve other’s problems.
Sell the problem you solve, not the product.― Unknown Click To Tweet

Google Adwords can help you find out what to blog about. I will explain the procedure below:

i) Search for ‘Google Ads‘ on Google search.

ii) Now select the menu item ‘Tools’ (1). In the screen that appears next, click on ‘Keyword planner‘ (2). Now click on ‘Start using Keyword planner’ (3).

iii) Now, click on ‘Get search volume and forecasts’.

iv) In the next window that appears, enter your keyword that signifies what you want to blog about (your blog idea) and click on ‘Get Started‘.

v) For example, if I had several blog ideas (For example, Vegan recipes, car repair ideas, Basketball techniques, Learning computer languages, Travel tips and Money saving hacks), but not sure on which one to blog about, I will enter one of these here and click on ‘Get started’.

vi) In the next screen that appears, click on the tab ‘Keyword ideas‘ in the left part of the screen and enter a blog idea here. Google will then find related ideas and list them all in a table. From all the ideas, I would go for the blog idea that has high average monthly searches. I will now come to ‘Keyword’ tab on the left and also look at the average CPC (Cost Per Click) and CTR (Click-Through-Rate).

Your blog ideas should ideally have high average monthly searches, high CPC and high CTR.

Why?

High monthly searches indicates that there are a lot of people searching for what you want to blog about.

High CPC indicates that people have buying intentions. CPC is the amount of money that Google charges an advertiser for a click on an advertisement.

High CTR means, that a large portion of the people reading at your content are willing to take action. Competition should not be a point of concern, if you’re not going to focus on SEO at the beginning. You always want to start focusing on SEO as you start building your Blog Authority, but don’t focus on it at the beginning.

vii) To find out which blog ideas are profitable, I have come up with 2 formulas you can use.

1. Average visitor value = CTR x CPC/100 (This is the amount of money, a visitor to your website is worth, to Google. If you apply to Google Ads and get approved, Google will pay you a part of this, say 60%).

2. Gross monthly worth of the blog idea = Monthly searches x Average visitor value
   Simply put, higher the Gross monthly worth of the blog idea, the higher the chances of you making money from it.

viii) Now lets compare all the blog ideas we have chosen till now.

As you can see from the comparison table above, vegan recipes with a gross monthly worth of $21,801 is ideally the best blogging niche to get into.

But please remember that this is only a very rough estimate of how much profitable a niche is, to give you an idea of what could work and what wouldn’t. These are by no means exact figures, for example, your CTR could vary from the figures given here and that would change everything.

You can also click on ‘Grouped ideas’ to get an list of all related ideas you can use as categories in your blog.

2. Use Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an awesome tool to find out the social value of your blog ideas. When you type in a keyword in the text box and click on search, Buzzsumo lists the blog posts with the number of social shares they have.

The blog ideas that bring up the most number of blog posts are the ones you should go for. Why? Because, so many other people are writing about it, only because people want to read about it. So, by writing about it and making your blog post better than others, you can get those people to read and/or share your blog posts too.

I have listed the important metrics for our selected keywords below:

As you can see from the comparison table above, vegan recipes is ideally the best blogging niche to get into, since 16,572 blog posts in the same niche have been shared in several social media platforms.

You can also use this list to find out which social media platform you should focus on.

For example, when I type in ‘Vegan recipes’ in the search bar and click on search, I find that almost 99% of the shares for each of the top 10 blog posts came from Pinterest. This tells me that, if I start a blog on ‘vegan recipes’, I should focus on Pinterest to get social traffic.

Similarly, when I search for ‘money saving hacks’, I find that for 8 of the top 10 blog posts, Facebook was the primary referrer, responsible for more than 95% of all social shares. So, if I wanted to start a blog on saving money, sharing on Facebook will be my best bet.

3. Search for forums

If your blog ideas can be monetized, you are bound to find several forums on the topic.

Why?

Because, forums are one of the places where people with problems hang out, hoping to find solutions to their problems, as well as to find like-minded people. You can just do a Google search by searching for the blog idea + ‘forum’ to find some forums on your topic.

You can also check the number of active people in such forums. This will help you decide if you can start a blog on that topic or not.

4. Search in Quora

Just like forums, Quora is another place where people hang out, in search of solutions to their problems.

For example, by searching in Quora for the topic ‘Money saving hacks’, I found at least 70 questions that had the words money, saving and hacks in them.

The number of followers and answers to a question and the number of views to each answer to the question are good indicators of how good the blog topic you have chosen is. Simply put, the higher these three variables are, the higher your chances of attracting targeted visitors to your website.

As a rule of thumb, you should be able to find at least a handful of questions with more than 100 answers. For example, the question ‘What are your money saving tips?’ has over 260 answers and some answers have 94,000+ views.

By searching in Quora for your blog topic, you can not only find if your blog topic is worth investing in, but can also find other relevant sub-topics to write about.

For example, by searching for the term ‘Money saving hacks’, I also found some ideas for blog posts in the topic.

1. Money saving hacks – answers have 94,000+ views
2. Money saving hacks in London – answers have 3,300+ views
3. Money saving hacks while remodeling your home – answers have 200+ views
4. Money saving hacks in student life – answers have 300+ views
5. Money saving hacks while traveling alone – answers have 12,000+ views
6. Money saving hacks that are not commonly known – answers have 60,000+ views
7. Money saving tips for saving money on wedding – answers have 6,800+ views
8. Money saving hacks for shopping in Amazon – answers have 300+ views
9. Money saving hacks for Christmas – answers have 300+ views
10. Money saving hacks for eating out – answers have 75 views
11. Money saving hacks for Uber – answers have 4,100 + views
12. Money saving hacks when renewing insurance policies

5. Search for social media groups

Search for your blog ideas in social media like Facbook, Twitter and Pinterest. If you can find several groups on that topic, then it is a good sign that your blog can attract qualified traffic.

If you have validated your blog ideas, it is now time to learn the different aspects of blogging. If you are a beginner, and want insights from trusted experts, read my blog post on 15 best marketing blogs to follow, if you are serious about making money by blogging.


These are some of the methods to find out if your blog ideas are worth investing in. Did you use any of these methods? Or do you have some other method which you would like to share with us? If so, mention those in the comments below.

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