Starting a Blog – Picking Your Topic

It seems everyone wants to create the ultimate pit stop on the information superhighway…. many with the hopes of fame and fortune. Throw up a few interesting and engaging blog posts, sprinkle in some advertisements and collect your cheques. People will care about what you have to say and will soon be hanging on your every keystroke.

Blogs are easy. Right?

A blog is a pretty simple thing to start… it’s that pesky content thing that often derails authors from becoming the blogosphere’s next big thing.

The internet is littered with abandoned blogs about the lives of regular people – what they think about on a daily basis, what they ate for lunch that day, a funny story they heard… you get the idea. Blogs were where people turned to share they boring lives before Facebook became all the rage. These people soon realized that no one was visiting their blog and walked away. Creating a blog with some longevity takes a lot of work but can be done.

So before you get writing, let’s talk about the topic of your blog.

Can you talk for hours and hours about your topic without becoming bored… and without boring others? If the answer is yes, you might be onto something.

The topic of my first blog was golf. I played golf, I watched golf on TV, I got a diploma in golf operations and I worked in the golf business. It was safe to say that I had a passion for my topic. That passion came in handy… I had to write about 20 posts before anyone discovered my little online golf hang out.

It was another 50 posts before I saw any sort of money from my ads… a nice bonus but dollar signs shouldn’t be your motivator for starting a blog.

It was another 100 posts before anyone really took the site seriously and over the past 8 years it’s been another 1300 or so posts to keep the site going.

I think it’s safe to say that passion thing is pretty important. You’re dead without it. Trust me.

Keep your topic somewhat broad. Instead of writing about top hats for purple elephants, write about hats for elephants in general. It might get tough to climb out of a pigeonhole so don’t put yourself there to begin with.

Take some time. Think of a blog topic that will interest both you and your reader. It’s way easier to change your mind now than wait until you’re a few hundred posts down the road.