Choosing the right Passion to Blog on and Profiting.

I spoke the other day of allowing your passion to dictate your niche. This is a highly rational approach to blogging.  Rather, let me clarify this by saying if you're using your blog to establish an audience and build a relationship, then following your passion is an effective course to take. The alternative is a heavy onslaught of hard sell tactics associated with what I like to call "quick sell" blogging that serves only to redirect the audience to a website and some product purchase. 


For the inexperienced or casual blogger, content marketing/blogging is a most effective way to establish your marketing brand/niche while communicating effectively with your growing audience. An effective way to approach this is from a personal strength or interest perspective. This begins with finding out what is most interesting to you and when you think about it, what other human, besides yourself has a better grasp of what motivates you and peeks your interest. So here are a few questions to ask yourself when choosing a topic to blog about.

1. What is it that I enjoy more than anything?

When I think in these terms I come up with, my Christian faith, music and music performance,
Internet marketing and helping people. My choice for blogging is a combination of Internet marketing and helping people. I have personal devotions that I share on Facebook and from time to time on Twitter, but I prefer to let my faith impact my ethical approach to blogging rather than directly proselytize with a blog. That's a personal choice, you might opt to go a different direction and that would be fine for you. 

2. What is it that I'm really good at?

This can be your chosen career field or simply a hobby of which you're quite knowledgeable. I stated in Blogging segment of "Internet Marketing, Still a Viable Economic Alternative!" that people choose any number of topics to blog about, me personal choice of Internet marketing was because I have an interest in that area and I enjoy writing which fits well with a content marketing approach.


3.  Do I want to blog simply for fun and entertainment or for profit?

If you want to blog for fun and entertainment the best course is to start a blog that connects to a self hosted website with your own domain. They're not that expensive depending upon which type of carrier you opt to go with. However, if you already have your own products and simply want to use your blog to present photos of the items that you're marketing, you can still make a profit with your blog even if you're not cashing in on SEO generated income. Say, for instance, that you make exceptional danish that you're able and willing to drop ship to purchasing customers. You can open a merchant account with PayPal and link to that account from your blog or place a PayPal button in the widget section of your blogger layout. WikiHow has a neat little tutorial on how to add PayPal to your blog as does More From Your Blog. Those who are better at visual learning can follow can follow Josh Summer's video series, "Adding PayPal Buttons to your Blog" (Shown below).

4. Do I want to run an ethically sound blog? 

This isn't meant to be preachy, however, there are plenty of opportunities to go with the flow and use your marketing experiences to "exploit others as you've had others exploit you". Of course that is the underlying premise behind most pyramid schemes. You get ripped off and "the next person in" is fair game as well. But since we're not going that route with our choice of blogging we're going to focus on insuring that your blogging experience is good for both your audience and your conscious,  It's always a good practice to check out any product or program before exposing family and friends to it to see if they operate on sound principles. It would be a pity to build a report with an audience based on trust and then have that shattered by individuals who only see your market as targets for exploitation.

5. Sound foundation

 If you're operating a business website to accompany a blog, you're going to want people to find your site. Before you invest a lot of time, energy and money in a Search Engine Optimization expert/software, I think it would help to review Google's Webmasters Guidelines so that you'll have an idea of what is acceptable and what will best help your site to be seen. There are a lot of automated schemes and tactics that will get your site removed completely from the Google listings and in the long run, a quick buck isn't worth that repeated hassle. If you're simply using your blog as a contact source to generate traffic and want it listed on Google, adding key words is the way to go and that's for a completely different module.