For my new blog this year, I chose “Backyard Chickens” as my topic. I chose this topic for several reasons:
- It is wildly popular on the internet with lots of people asking questions and looking for solutions to problems with their little flocks.
- There are several ways to monetize the blog content
- This is a topic that I have real experience with, that I think is really fun, and I have family members that have experience and can help in the effort.
Before taking the time and effort required to create a blog that will be wildly successful, it is critical to do some initial research to ensure you aren’t throwing your resources into a topic that just won’t ever deliver the results you are hoping for.
Here are the steps that I took to make sure my decision to start a blog about “Backyard Chickens” was going to be amazing. Before we get into the technical aspects of this tutorial, please take a few minutes to do the same for your topic. Then you will know you are off to a great start.
Popularity
I like to know how big of an audience I have to work with. The best gauge of popularity, IMHO, is to look at how much search engine traffic there is for that topic every month. A lot of the techniques I am going to show you are just estimates, but they are good still gauges.
Monthly Search Volume of 10,000-50,000
Go to UberSuggest and type in the main search terms in your topic:
Competition
I have a “No-Go Zone” for competing websites in the same topic. It is important to find a good balance between the amount of Search Volume (interest) and the SEO Difficulty (competition). If the competition is too high, then you will never have any traction. I won’t go into a topic if the SEO Difficulty of the main search phrase is over 35.
I am going to use both of these search terms to built my blog content around, but out of the gate, I will be focusing on getting ranked in Google for “Backyard Chickens.”
Your competition can also be a good gauge of what kind of traffic is available to blog owners who work hard and create good content. You can go to SimilarWeb and look at traffic estimates of existing websites and blogs.
Check this out, this is what got me excited about this topic:
Commerciality
The internet doesn’t run on free hugs anymore. 🙁
I like to know upfront if my new blog will generate income. At a bare minimum, there are costs for maintaining the blog, making the content look sharp, and growing the audience. Everything beyond that is gravy.
I chose “Backyard Chickens” as a topic because I knew there were products I could recommend to readers and receive a commission as an affiliate. Two of the biggest and most popular Affiliate Networks are Amazon and ClickBank.
Amazon
ClickBank
Longevity
I only select topics to start a blog around that are going to be here to stay for the long term. I want my content to be relevant and delivering me results for years after it is published. This is called “Evergreen Content.”
There is a fantastic way to forecast the staying power of a topic by looking at it in Google Trends.
You want to look more like this. Nice and steady, and predictable:
You don’t want to look like this. A “one-hit wonder!”
I like what I see for my topic:
