Here’s the next post on how to identify your niche market before you start your blog (or even afterwards). I started to talk about this in my previous post on how to make money blogging with the right keywords, but now let’s talk some more.

Choosing a Niche

This is probably the most important step; choosing your niche.  There are two main considerations here. 

First, do you care about search engine traffic, or do you just want to express yourself?  If you’re writing a blog because you are passionate about a subject, but it doesn’t matter how many or few people read it, then write about it.  Don’t worry about choosing a niche; your subject will take care of itself.

On the other hand, if you do want search engine traffic, you need to be a little more careful in choosing your niche.  And that brings up two points.  Do you want people to read what you have to say, but don’t care about monetizing your blog…or do you want it to earn a regular (even if small) income?

If you’re wanting search engine traffic but don’t care about monetizing, choose the method I described in my last post.  Find words in the free WordTracker tool, then check the two supply numbers in Google.  As a very general rule, keep your in quotes keyword under 1,000.  Now you can go over this at times, but I wouldn’t normally look higher than 2,000 — just too hard to climb to the top of the heap (i.e., page 1 of the Google search results).

How to Identify Your Niche Market to Monetize

Most people wouldn’t mind making a bit of money from their blog, and some want it to earn a regular income.  Indeed, some want it to replace their current income!  Here are some tips for this for you, if it’s your ultimate goal.

Pick your niche carefully.  For example, maybe I wanted to be an affiliate for shoe sales.  Well, “shoes” is a mightly big topic.  So I’ll winnow it down some.  Do I want men’s shoes?  Women’s shoes?  Boots?  a specific brand?  Well, how about boots?

Put the word bootsinto WordTracker and see what comes up.  Hmmm, it’s a really big list, but maybe harley davidson boots?  Click on that, because we want to winnow it down even further.

As a very general rule, we want more words in the keyword phrase; less likely to find other pages that have all these words.  The phrase “harley davidson boots” (in quotes) turns up 157,000 for a supply — far too much.  Keep looking…

Whoa, here’s a term — “harley davidson megamotor harness boots”  In quotes that has a supply of just 6!  Now that could be a winner!  Especially because people searching on that term know exactly what they want, and are far more likely to have a credit card in hand (so to speak) before they get to your blog!

This post has gotten a bit longer than I wanted, so I’ll continue this topic of how to identify your niche market when blogging on the next post.  See you then!