Day Twenty Six - Deciding on a Subject for a New Niche Blog

Sundays are also good, although not as good as Saturdays. The reason is that Sunday is only one day removed from getting back to work (and the problems we currently have there) and Saturday is two whole days away.

My wife and I both got up early on day 25, and set to work on the niche blog we have recently started. I like the early mornings - sitting there in our dressing gowns, one dog each at our laps, and working hard for our future. The niche blog is really doing well - it's already full of content, so it proves the old adage that content drives traffic. We had two benefits with that blog - firstly we started with lots of content as we had been writing it for ourselves for some time, and secondly, both of us work on it, so we have double the manpower of this one!

After a few hours at the keyboards, we again headed into the garden to carry on our clearing up of the old building there. I've had some trouble with a sore shoulder lately, but strangely the hard work, lifting rocks, wheeling the barrow and shifting soil actually seems to help rather than make it worse, so I guess the answer is to keep at it.

In the afternoon I spent a lot of time thinking about blog number three for our little stable, and it's worth recounting the process that I went through here for anyone who is contemplating adding further blogs. As a bit of background, I decided that I wanted to launch a third blog sooner, rather than later - I've tested my writing skills, the two current blogs are achieving their objectives and I want all three to be earning some decent money by the end of this year.

I began by writing a list of all the things I felt I could write a blog about. They had to be on a subject of interest to me and something I knew at least a little about. The list contained 8 ideas initially, and I then set about trying to select one, on the basis that I wanted this blog to be a seriously commercial one. There was one that I really was interested in doing, as it involves a particular hobby of mine, but I was determined to be business like in my approach!

I started by seeing what the traffic potential was likely to be for each site. I went to Adwords and typed in the keywords I felt people might use to access the content of my sites. This is a brilliant tool! Let me give you an example - if you are thinking about writing a blog about Snowboarding, you can type in that word. Google will then tell you how many times that word has been searched on in the last month, and also an average monthly figure (to take out seasonal anomalies). It will also give you other words people have used, and combinations of words that they have used. So to use my snowboarding example again, I can see that 1.5 million people a month use that word, but Google tells me that 2.8 million use Snowboard, so in that case, it would be a better word - "Snowboard World" would be a better title than "Snowboarding World". Reading down the page shows the other words people have used - again in my example I can see that "Burton Snowboard" attracts 250,000 searches per month, so it would be good to have an affiliation with that company, or at least to do some reviews on their product.

Anyway, back to my own ideas - by using Adwords, I quickly determined which two of my list was generating the highest number of searches, and therefore the highest potential traffic. Deciding between them was simple - I researched the quantity and quality of other sites out there already, and it soon became clear that for one of my topics, there weren't many sites, and they were poor quality, out of date and messy. I had found a high traffic niche with little competition, and better still, it was the topic I had hoped would come out on top! So, mind made up, I started work on the brand and logo, and had an enjoyable few hours playing around with designs. Following Darren Rowse's advice on Problogger here I decided that the new blog won't launch until there are five posts on it, five more in the bag and ready to go, and twenty post ideas in my Moleskin notebook.

To Summarize:

1/ Write a list of all the topics you would enjoy covering, have a passion for and know at least a little about.

2/ Key likely search phrases into Google Adwords and see how often people are searching for the terms relating to each idea. Based on the results, shortlist two or three.

3/ Visit every site that comes up in the first three pages of your search engine, using the previous keywords. At this point you'll have to make a subjective decision, based on what you see in terms of the sites' quality and value.

4/ Start work on planning the site and writing some posts!

That took me up to bedtime and the usual sleepless night before a Monday - although we do have some money now, it's not enough to go around everybody, so Monday will be about paying some bills and making those difficult calls to the people we can't pay.

It was a great weekend, but I went to bed thinking I was about to pay for it.