In my article “ging-nobody-wants-to-say/" target="_blank">10 Secrets on How to Make Money Blogging Nobody Wans to Say” I wrote about the three types of Blogs out there. The “Pump and Dump” Blog, the “Personal Diary” Blog, and the “Blogging as a Business” Blog. For a thorough explanation of the differences between the three you can check out that article.

This article assumes you are interested in building a “Blogging as Business” Blog but aren’t too sure where to start as far as picking your topic and niche goes. The process I’m about to describe is the same process that I went through in picking this topic/niche of “Inspired Money Maker” after starting about half a dozen other blogs which mostly never made it past their first month.

Picking a topic and niche that you’re going to be able to stick with long term is of paramount importance if you’re looking to make money blogging. Blogging as a business is a long term strategy and it requires careful planning and research up front so that you don’t waste time later on.

This article assumes that you are going to be the person creating this Blog and writing the content for it. If you are thinking of doing a group Blog, you’re going to have to modify and adapt this process to a group setting as the process is meant for a single Blogger.

Let’s dive right into the process.

One of the first things we’re going to have to get really clear on is your personal mission and purpose in life. I cover this topic in more depth in my eBook “The Passion Project“, but I’m going to pull one of the exercises out of that eBook and go through it right now with you.

The first thing I need you to do is to select THREE verbs from the following list of verbs which you are most passionate about. I know this may sound like a strange exercise, but just try to do your best to pick the THREE verbs that really connect with you. For example, if you’re the kind of person who likes learning new things and teaching them to other people, perhaps one of the words you may be passionate about is the word TEACH or EDUCATE. Pay attention to the subtle difference between the words and pick THREE that you like the most.

Here is the list:

• Accomplish
• Acquire
• Adopt
• Advance
• Affect
• Affirm
• Alleviate
• Amplify
• Appreciate
• Ascend
• Associate
• Believe
• Bestow
• Brighten
• Build
• Call
• Cause
• Choose
• Claim
• Collect
• Combine
• Command
• Communicate
• Compel
• Compete
• Complete
• Compliment
• Compose
• Conceive
• Confirm
• Connect
• Consider
• Construct
• Contact
• Continue
• Counsel
• Create
• Decide
• Defend
• Delight
• Deliver
• Demonstrate
• Devise
• Direct
• Discover
• Discuss
• Distribute
• Draft
• Dream
• Drive
• Educate
• Elect
• Embrace
• Encourage
• Endow
• Engage
• Engineer
• Enhance
• Enlighten
• Enlist
• Enliven
• Entertain
• Enthuse
• Evaluate
• Excite
• Explore
• Express
• Extend
• Facilitate
• Finance
• Forgive
• Foster
• Franchise
• Further
• Gather
• Generate
• Give
• Grant
• Heal
• Hold
• Host
• Identify
• Illuminate
• Implement
• Improve
• Improvise
• Inspire
• Integrate
• Involve
• Keep
• Know
• Labor
• Launch
• Lead
• Light
• Live
• Love
• Make
• Manifest
• Master
• Mature
• Measure
• Mediate
• Model
• Mold
• Motivate
• Move
• Negotiate
• Nurture
• Open
• Organize
• Participate
• Pass
• Perform
• Persuade
• Play
• Possess
• Practice
• Praise
• Prepare
• Present
• Produce
• Progress
• Promise
• Promote
• Provide
• Pursue
• Realize
• Receive
• Reclaim
• Reduce
• Refine
• Reflect
• Reform
• Regard
• Relate
• Relax
• Release
• Rely
• Remember
• Renew
• Resonate
• Respect
• Restore
• Return
• Revise
• Sacrifice
• Safeguard
• Satisfy
• Save
• Sell
• Serve
• Share
• Speak
• Stand
• Summon
• Support
• Surrender
• Sustain
• Take
• Tap
• Teach
• Team
• Touch
• Trade
• Translate
• Travel
• Understand
• Use
• Utilize
• Validate
• Value
• Venture
• Verbalize
• Volunteer
• Work
• Worship
• Write
• Yield

I know it’s a long list. Maybe you’ll need to print it out in order to go through it properly, but just do your best to pick three words that you feel the most passionate about. Write them out on a piece of paper as your first three words:

1. ______________________________________
2. ______________________________________
3. ______________________________________

Next, we’re going to explore your most important values. Which of the following concepts do you value the most. Pick three words from below that are really important to you and then compare them to the other words to make sure you have picked the most important ones. For example, what’s more important to you “Creativity” or “Fame”? or is “Change” more important than “Security”?

• Achievement
• Advancement
• Adventure
• Affection
• Amazement
• Challenge
• Change
• Community
• Competence
• Competition
• Cooperation
• Creativity
• Decisiveness
• Democracy
• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Ethics
• Excellence
• Excitement
• Fame
• Friendliness
• Growth
• Honesty
• Independence
• Influence
• Integrity
• Intelligence
• Involvement
• Knowledge
• Leadership
• Loyalty
• Freedom
• Faith
• Power
• Privacy
• Purity
• Purpose
• Recognition
• Responsibility
• Security
• Self-Respect
• Serenity
• Simplicity
• Sophistication
• Speed
• Stability
• Status
• Truth
• Wealth
• Wisdom

When picking the three words, make sure that you are just picking the three that are most important to YOU being as honest with yourself as possible. Don’t worry about what others think SHOULD be important to you, simply stick to what actually IS important to you. If Competition is more important to you than Health, then so be it. Write down your three most important values:

1. _________________________________________
2. _________________________________________
3. _________________________________________

Now, re-write the three verbs from the first list and the three values from the second list you wrote above:

1. ________________________________, 2. __________________________, 3. ________________________ , 1._________________________________, 2. __________________________, 3. ________________________

So for example lets say the first three verbs you picked were TEACH, TRANSLATE and COMMUNICATE and the three values you chose were LOYALTY, AMAZEMENT and WISDOM.

Ok, so what these words tell us in this example is that you are a person who’s mission in life is to TEACH, TRANSLATE and COMMUNICATE the concepts of LOYALTY, AMAZEMENT and WISDOM. We haven’t identified who you’re going to be teaching, translating and communicating the concepts of loyalty, amazement and wisdom to yet, but before we dive into that, we need to go through another process first.

The next process is the process of identifying possible topics and niche markets you’re interested and passionate about.

The first step is to make a list of 25 things you are interested in. Don’t judge, just write. For example, the person above might have the following list of interests:

1. Watching Movies
2. Reading Books
3. Traveling
4. Dog Training
5. Scrapbooking
6. Playing Chess
7. Meditating
8. Religious Studies
9. Mountain Climbing
10. etc.

Once you have a list of 20-25 interests, write down which of these 10 interests you are most passionate about in order of importance. So for example the list might now look like this:

1. Reading Books
2. Dog Training
3. Scrapbooking
4. Mountain Climbing
5. Religious Studies
6. Meditating
7. Watching Movies
8. etc.

Now from the list above I want you to think about each passionate interest you have and think about the VALUE you could provide to a large audience of people in the world by having that interest. For example, the first item on the list is “Reading Books”. How does being interested in Reading Books translate into value for other people? Well, you could do book reviews for example, so maybe you could start a blog that reviews books.

While thinking about the first item on the list, I want you to think back to the first part of your mission statement which was to TEACH, TRANSLATE and COMMUNICATE the concepts of LOYALTY, AMAZEMENT and WISDOM to someone. So how does reading books allow you to TEACH, TRANSLATE and COMMUNICATE the three concepts you value? Think about it for a bit and then move onto the next one.

Let’s now look at “Dog Training”. What kind of value could you provide to people with your Dog Training experience? Well, lets say that you became a total expert in dog behavior and dog training, could you TEACH people how to train their dogs and TRANSLATE what their dog is trying to say or COMMUNICATE when he’s wagging his tail or has his ears back? Could you TEACH LOYALTY with dog training? Yes of course you could. Imagine if you started a Blog that focused on dog training tips, not just for basic dog obedience but to actually teach people how to understand their dogs (Translate) and to effectively speak to them (Communicate) so that they become loyal friends for life. Imagine if you could write articles about teaching your dog a new trick every couple of weeks that you can AMAZE your friends with.

Do you see how the interest/passion in this case fits right in with the words from the mission statement process we went through up top? Let’s stick with this Dog Training example for a bit longer here. Who is your audience? Veterinarians? Circus Trainers? Zoo Keepers? Kids? Teenagers? Dog Lovers? First time Dog Owners?

Let’s say that you simply identify your target audience as “Dog Lovers”. Now, of course you would go through the other items on the Interests / Passions list as well, not just the Dog Training one but let’s move onto the next step so you can see what to do next.

The next thing we do is to rewrite the whole thing we’ve come up with so far in a story format.

Think from this perspective. It is one year in the future. Your friend Jack pops by and you are catching up on the latest news since you haven’t seen him for over a year. He asks you what you’re doing and you say your story. The story goes as follows:

You’re probably going to think what I’m doing is quite strange Jack, but basically for about a year now I’ve been running a Dog Training Blog on the Internet that teaches dog lovers how to be able to communicate better with their dogs and also how to translate the signals their dogs are sending them day to day to build loyal, trusting relationships with their animals.

The wisdom I teach on the Blog comes from personal experience and I don’t just teach people the basic stuff like how to get the dog to sit or lie down. I actually teach them that once they learn how to properly communicate with their dogs they can teach the dogs to do fun tricks like getting their slippers or fetching the newspaper or doing really neat things with tennis balls. Most of my readers respond all excited about the look of amazement on their friends faces when they show them what their dog knows how to do.

So yeah that’s pretty much what I do now Jack. What are you doing nowadays?

See how the story all fits? You’ve got the most important values in there, you’ve got the action verbs you are most passionate about. You’ve got one of your most passionate interests in there. The story is almost complete.

Before you go and run off to start this Blog, I want you to do some research first. The research you need to do is to identify whether or not the topic and niche you picked (Dog Training) is a viable choice for starting a Blogging as a Business Blog.

These are the questions you want to ask yourself:

• Are there any Blogs already out there doing this? If so, how can I be different form them? If not, why not?
• What products are being sold online to this market of Dog Lovers? Are there books on Amazon? Are there items on eBay that are being sold?
• What information products, eBooks etc. are being sold to this target audience? Are there affiliate programs available?
• What does Wikipedia say about the topic. Who do they link to?
• Is there someone out there already running a similar Blog and making money with it?
• What forums and community sites are out there already communicating with my target audience?
• What types of advertising opportunities exist for me to gain exposure for my Blog?
• What products does ClickBank.com sell in this niche?
• etc.

This final step of doing research on your concept probably needs a whole article devoted to it, but the basic idea you want to get here is to make sure you pick the interest / passion on your list that would be easy to make money with by Blogging about it. For example, if the person above was to narrow down his list and he was going to choose from “Dog Training” to “Mountain Climbing”, which do you think would do better as a Blog?

Let’s say that there are 50 eBooks on “Dog Training” on ClickBank and 1 on “Mountain Climbing” and you look online and find 7 other “Dog Training” Blogs, but no “Mountain Climbing” Blogs, then that tells you something right? It tells you that the “Dog Training” niche / topic is already on the Internet in a healthy way and there are people who are actively looking for and buying information on this topic, whereas mountain climbers are probably out climbing mountains not sitting in front of a computer reading about it. Also, is it feasible to teach mountain climbing by writing articles about it?

Of course these are just examples but at the end of the day, the Blog topic and niche that you’ll want to work with will have the following criteria:

1. It is aligned with the three most important verbs you picked in the list above.
2. It is aligned with your three most important values.
3. It targets a group of people you are genuinely interested in helping.
4. You have a valid passionate interest in the topic.
5. You can imagine yourself one year from now being a successful blogger teaching the things you want to teach through your blog to that group of people you picked, and you can easily write it out in story format as described above.
6. It’s a topic or niche which has a really good possibility of success online because there are already people in similar niches online selling products, eBooks, etc. and it would be easy to both market yourself in the online community that already exists in this niche and to connect your readers to products or services which will help them.

I hope this helps you to identify and choose your Blog topic and niche. If you get stuck somewhere in the process, feel free to leave feedback and I’ll see if I can help you get “unstuck”.