How to Pick the Topics for Your Blog

This sounds like it would be a relatively easy task. I mean, how many things can you actually write about? In truth, when we decide to start blogging we oftentimes come to find that this is one of the most difficult tasks for us to accomplish.

Why? Because we actually know a lot! We just can’t or shouldn’t write about most of it!

What should I blog about?

A lot of professional bloggers that I follow have addressed this very question before in their own blogs.  Most of them have always said that you need to start with something that you’re passionate and know something about and work from there. In reality, this only partially works for us.  Why? Because what we are passionate about is not a topic that always align with our goals for our blog.

Their passion is that they love blogging. They love sharing information on how to blog, and the goal for their blog – to earn a living or to promote their company’s services – is supported by writing about how to blog. So the goal of the blog has much more affect on determining what to write about than simply what we’re passionate about.

This very question is something I ran into when I recently decided to launch a separate blog for myself personally rather than keeping all my personal content on my consulting practice’s corporate blog over at mPower Consulting.  My goal was to allow myself to talk about any and all subjects that appeal to me individually and to create connections and relationships with individuals and organizations that may not have benefited being connected to mPower Consulting.  Sure, I may tell them that my practice could help them better utilize the tools out there such as social media to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, but I wouldn’t tell them about “all the things I hate about people who sell on Twitter” next to an article about “how the use of social media can wow your customers into buying your products!” That just doesn’t make sense (which is why I haven’t written those two articles… yet.)

So, I had to come up with some ways to determine how I was going to pick my topic.  What I ended up with was 5 ways NOT to pick my topics (through trial and error) to find the 5 ways that did work for me!

Five Ways NOT to Pick Your Topics

1. Don’t try to become someone else. In other words, don’t write about a topic you know little about simply because you want to be. That person usually has spent years developing their audiences, building their expertise, and that has generated their success, which is all you really want! Be yourself, because sometimes that stands out more when everyone else is trying to be the same!
2. Don’t write about something that no one else is talking about… unless you can tell the future!  Creating a blog around a topic that no one else is talking about means that you are starting with an audience of none.  That can be extremely discouraging as you may not see anyone dropping by to even say, “Hello, your site stinks.”  The only time to do this is if you think you have a complete “game-changing” idea or topic that no one is talking about. Typically though, your idea builds off of an already established and highly talked about topic.
3. Don’t perform a query of “The top searched topics” on Google, then pick one of those. It’s likely you will have no clue what you’re talking about, which will generate little if any success… unless you’re lucky!
4. Don’t copycat someone else. This is much like the first “don’t” only that if it is a topic you want to talk about and can, don’t just copy the leaders in the field!  You audience will soon figure it out and hate you for it. Stand on your own expertise and opinion.
5. Don’t use a list and “Eeny, meeny, miny,moe.” This is the worst idea and yet I bet is used often (I’ve heard it used a few times.) With this, you never know what you’ll get (which might be fun) and makes it difficult to plan how you’re going to sustain it!

Five Ways TO Pick Your Topics

1. Determine what you want to accomplish with your blog, then pick topics that support that effort. This usually will pull from your expertise.
2. Write down everything you are passionate about, then circle the ones you know the most about.
3. Post questions out on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites regarding ideas you have and let the world tell you what they want to know
4. Keep an eye on the news and on social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. These sites give a good cross-section of what’s going on in many categories of topics. See which ones you’re drawn to!
5. If all else fails, just start writing about your life.  No one may care and you may not build an audience, but it will get your mind thinking and alert to what is going on in all areas of your life. That will help you both come up with ideas for blog topics, plus will give you the experience and familiarity with writing blog posts!

How Do You Pick Your Topics?

I want to know: How do you pick the topics you write about?