You might think that you have plenty to share with the world, but once you have created a blog you find yourself staring at the blank Word page struggling to come up with any topic possible. Scared this might happen to you? Well, many bloggers fear it. Creating a blog is easy, but it has to be updated regularly and that’s a completely another thing.
However, if you are scared, that’s good. It is actually okay to be afraid of such things and to think about this before you start a blog. Some bloggers do come up with a few amazing ideas, rush to start blogging… only to find out they’ve run out of ideas a month later.
To avoid repeating their mistakes, try to formulate the main idea of your blog before you actually start looking for a hosting, thinking about design and so on. Sometimes this can be hard too, especially for those, who are interested in so many things: it is tempting to start writing about all of them, but would it look okay in the end? Maybe it would and maybe your readers would consider your blog too unstructured and so boring.
You can take a risk or you can focus on one idea only.
Choosing the main theme of a blog
Think about how you see your future blog. Would it be informal or businesslike, funny or serious? Do you want to tell personal stories or are willing to avoid it? Things like your writing style and the way you want to communicate with the audience matter a lot: for example, if you want to have a serious blog, you could choose something related to your work and areas of knowledge as the main theme. And if you want to be more personal, you can start a lifestyle blog and tell readers about your life.
I have some good tips for those, who struggle with choosing a theme. For example, you can:
Read: How to Write Awesome and SEO friendly Blog Posts (A Step by Step Guide)
1. Start learning something.
Let’s imagine you want to become a web designer, but you’ve never opened a Photoshop in your life. You can try learning it quietly on your own or you can make a whole blog out of it. There are so many people out there willing to learn and try new things. They could use some inspiration and you can become a source of this inspiration.
Do not worry that you are unprofessional at something, don’t be afraid to show off your first awkward works. Remember that learning is a process and that it is interesting for many of us to observe such process. Soon your works will get better; you’ll understand more and will be able to give your advice to the readers.
2. Share your impressions.
If you are passionate about something, be it books, cosmetics, video games and so on, share your passion with the others. Write reviews, make your own Top 5 or Top 10 lists, etc. The only important thing here is to be really passionate: for example, if you want to start a book blog, be sure that you’ll have enough time to read a lot and to update regularly.
Of course, this does not mean that you have to settle with reviews only: write about something related to your passion too. For example, you can write a post about book cover design or discuss the best apps for reading, and so on.
3. Become a teacher.
If you have been doing something for a long time, you can teach others with the help of your blog. Businessmen write about business and money, give professional tips and advice. Those, who are into handmade create DIY tutorials, and makeup artists make the ones about makeup. Why cannot you try doing something like that too? Of course, you have to be very familiar with a certain field to do so; otherwise, point 1 might suit you better.
4. Be personal.
Some people don’t seem to have any special talents or hobbies, yet they write about their lives in a manner that makes it impossible to stop reading. While you might be afraid that writing about your life will require you sharing literally everything, it doesn’t have to be like that. Your blog is not a reality show that is directed by someone else: only you choose what you want to share in your articles and what you want to keep private.
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Some bloggers don’t write about their private lives at all while being open and personal at the same time. Their share their thoughts and their opinion on the different subjects, being sincere but not too exposed. The others write about some parts of their private lives in details while successfully keeping the most important things in private. For example, a blogger who leads a healthy lifestyle can show their audience their food basket in details and post photos in a sports underwear, but this could hardly be considered as something too exposed: after all, that’s the specifics of their chosen niche.
Choosing the right topics
After you choose the main theme, everything will be much easier: you might even come up with a few topics right away. However, keep in mind that they have to be not only interesting but different too (unless your blog specializes in reviews, for example). If you write about your process of mastering new skills, simply sharing the result would be not enough. Moreover, it would probably be hard for you to find time to make such kind of posts every week.
Instead, try sharing not only the results of your work but the things you use for mastering a certain skill (like art supplies or textbooks), some tutorials you consider useful, some things that inspire you, etc.
Choose your prioritized topics, create a content plan using that knowledge, work on making your blog user-friendly – and everything will be awesome!
Niche Research Tools:
Here is a list of free and paid niche research tools.
Free niche research tools
Google Keyword Planner (free) – this is part of Google AdWords which allows you to do keyword research on the fly. The only reason for it being so popular is it’s free and is directly integrated with Google AdWords.
Google Trends (free) – seeing historic trends for particular keywords is important to get an idea of whether or not your niche is on the decline, or increasing in popularity.
Premium niche research tools
SEMrush – this is the first tool I turn to for niche research. I also use it a lot for coming up with blog post ideas too. SEMrush allows me to learn more about my competitors, find out which they are ranking for. Here you just need to add your competitor’s URL and it will show you all of the keywords that are ranking for that site. Recently, I shared a SEMrush coupon code worth $100, find out more here.
I wish you good luck, tons of followers and lot of inspiration! Hope you’ll make the best out of your blog!
