I planned on running a blogging class at my local community club awhile back (ours allows people to do so and you can charge for it) but the truth is I’m better at doing unstructured things so I thought I would, well, blog about it!  What better place to talk about bloggin than on your blogs.

If you’ve already got a blog this likely isn’t for you.  This is more for people that have no experience blogging but would like to learn about it.  And what better place to start than with the basics?

Finding a Niche

The first thing you should do is decide on a niche.  What’s a niche you ask?  It’s basically a subject that you’ll focus on.  You don’t always have to stay right on focus but it is likely the reason that people will come to read your blog.  You could go with just a general blog about life but you’ll find it much easier to promote a blog that is niche-focused (more about promoting will come later).

How to Decide on a Niche

A niche should not be too difficult to come up with.  Why?  Because it should be something you already are interested in and something that is part of your life.  Ask yourself a few questions:

• What are things in my everyday life that I could write about?
• What topics interest me?
• What topics would I like to know more about?
• What topics would I be able to research?
• What topics would I enjoy thinking about and researching everyday?

Once you think about these questions, start doing some brainstorming.  Write down every topic that comes to mind.  Cooking, parenting, running, exercising, diet, school…write down ideas until you can’t think about anymore.  The more ideas you have the better.  Even write down the ones you don’t think you’ll use.

Now some of those ideas are going to stand out.  So let’s choose 5 of them.  Break these ideas into sub-topics but general ones.  Diet – trends, healthy, unhealthy, life-long, short term, etc.  These are potential sub-niches.  If you chose to do a blog about dieting you should choose a sub-niche because there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs on the topic of diet but less on the topic of short term diets.  By focusing on a sub-niche people will have an easier time finding you when they search for topics on a search engine.

The next step for choosing a niche is to write down 10 potential blog titles for each niche/sub-niche that you’ve chosen.  If you can’t think of at least 10 titles you’re going to have a hard time writing an entire blog on the topic!

By the time you’re done this at least one or two are going to stand out.  Go back to those original questions and consider them again with the brainstorming you’ve done in mind.  You should now be able to settle on a blog topic and a niche.

Next to come…Naming Your Blog