The Word Corner

(I am using the verbs blog and write interchangeably in this post since these principles apply whether you’re an individual blogger or a freelance writer who creates content for multiple media outlets).

Unless you already have a product or service you wish to promote, as a beginning blogger, topic selection is one of the first decisions you’ll need to make.

You have two options:

1. Write About What you Already Know and are Passionate About

Pros: Much easier to generate content, less competition.
Cons: Harder to build traffic if only a small group of people are interested in your subject.

2. Write About a Popular Topic

Pros: Easier to build traffic and generate ad revenue from it.
Cons: It may be difficult for you to write about a topic, month after month, if you’re not really interested in it or if you lack expertise on the subject.

Between these two extremes there is a wide range of possibilities. I think you can take almost any topic and quickly come up with seven or more different angles.

Say you have a passion for: “Medieval Castles in Scotland“. What other themes can you think of that will allow you to produce fresh content on a regular basis?

I’ve never been to Scotland but without doing any Google searches I can think of a few right off the bat:

1. Historic Tours to Scotland
2. Hospitality (Scottish castles that provide accommodations to tourists)
3. Romantic, fairy-tale like weddings in Scottish Castles.
4. Architectural and Landscape Photography
5. History (Both Ancient and Modern. For instance, what role did medieval castles play in WWI and WWII?)
6. Online Games (I’m sure there are a few featuring Castles and Dragons)
7. Religion (Castles offering spiritual retreats to religious groups or the influence of pagan religion in Medieval Castles if any)
8. Movies (Which castles have been the setting of famous films?)
9. Real people (Scottish families who live in castles that have been passed down from generations)
10. Conservation and Restoration (Challenges of maintaining these fortresses)

You get the idea. As you can see, many of those sub-themes can further spawn additional threads and related topics.

Focus on a Niche

Once you’ve decided on a topic, try to make it as focused as possible. An argument can be made for choosing a broad topic, like Travel or Food to try to serve everyone’s needs and grab a larger audience. In practice though, it is much easier and efficient to start with a single niche site and then slowly expand into other areas. Attempting to provide all things to all people can become a daunting task specially if you’re a beginner maintaining and one-person blog.

You may think that if you pick a small niche you’ll soon run out of topic ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider these examples:

INeedCoffee (I thought I was obsessed with Coffee).
Cyprus44 (This site covers the North portion of the island of Cyprus).
MyWifeQuitHerJob (Unlimited potential. This is a blog about Personal Finance and Successful Entrepreneurship offering an infinite variety of topics).

What If I Run Out of Topic Ideas?

After blogging for a year or more, it is possible that you may start to run out of ideas. In this case, you can create another blog and link to your existing blog or expand your current blog to include related topics. Continuing with the previous example, you could add “Medieval Castles in Ireland” or another country or just write about “European Medieval Castles”. (It would take at least two lifetimes to cover that topic when you consider Eastern European countries).

One major advantage of choosing a niche is that over time, you can become an authority blogger on a specific topic since few people will be writing about the same subject.