Blog Your Way To A Better Life… Part 2

The Subject of Your Blog

From the beginning any good blog should be built around a good subject, and if you’re building a blog to make an income you want to first think about what your monetization model is.

Choosing a subject can be critical to a blog and a bloggers success

For me I always start with a product in mind… For this series we’re going to use the example of a blog that I built from the ground up, that now gets about 40,000 uniques a month and has made over a thousand dollars a month from advertising.Now how to choose what product to try and blog about; first you want it to be commonly used, mid-level priced, something that people often will search for more information about, and finally isn’t filled with too much competition. Also, I personally try to stay away from the technology scene, mostly because what’s hot and what not changes so quickly that your site can quickly become outdated, and more importantly it is a very saturated market.
So once we find a product that we want to look into we’ll start doing our quick research to see if it’s worth going into, in this case it will be weedeaters.
Yes, weedeaters; it’s a good product, goes for anywhere from $120 to $500. But how do we find out about the other requirements on our list?
First we go to YouTube and look up “weedeater” when we do this there are over 36,000 videos, but there turns out to be a band called Weedeater also, so we have to start whittling these results down so I had to type in: ”weedeater”  -band -album -music -live -hammerhandle -wizard -bull -dragon. Now by doing that it cleaned up a lot of the band videos and gets us to 2100 videos, but we still have videos about making remote control planes and weedeater powered bikes, so now we add -rc and -bike to the search string.
That search leaves us with 1400 videos, this is good, because for this search I am generally looking for over 1000 videos. This shows that people have an actual interest in sharing information with each other about weedeaters.
Next we go to http://www.google.ca/advanced_search here we type in the “all these words:” section  ”weedeater ” then we scroll down to the “Then narrow your results by…” area and in the “site or domain:” blank put in http://answers.yahoo.com/ From there scroll all the way down and push advanced search. I find that searching through Google Advanced search easier for me than using Yahoo Answers itself.
By doing this we see that there are almost 8500 results (once again I look for this to be over 1000), and scrolling down we see that they are all related to the actual weedeater string trimmers, exactly the product we want to blog about and monetize. So this shows that people are not just hungry for answers but they are voracious for answers about weedeaters.
Now we go to Ebay.com and type in weedeater and we see there are over 4000 weedeaters and weedeater related products! This is great because it means there is a large market for purchasing these products.
Now that we know we have a subject that has people interested in sharing information (You Tube); we have a subject that people are asking for help with (Yahoo Answers); and we have a readily available market with lots of products in a range of prices, its time to look at what the competition looks like…
This will be done in part 3 of our series…
So keep checking back and I’ll see you in the next post: Blog Your Way To A Better Life… Part 3

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