By Festus Dillon

Many successful blog owners have chosen a niche in which they know something about or have passion about. Rare is the blog owner who has jumped into a niche they knew nothing about and have been successful. Sure, we all have a passion for money, but that alone doesn't qualify any of us as experts. The successful blogger will search his or her interest to find a profitable niche and then dominate that niche for every penny it's worth!

What we'll be learning in this article is the process in which you'll use to find a profitable niche. There are a lot of niches out there. The problem is, most are not profitable or very difficult to monetize. Our goal here is to find the ones that are under utilized and have an income potential better than average.

Categorizing Your Interest

To get started, make a list of your interest. Now, before you put down something like Make Money Online, be aware that this niche is very competitive and abused. It seems like every blogger out there wants to start a blog about making money online. Forget it! There are other niches that will be just as profitable and far less competitive. It may take you years, if ever, to become profitable in this niche. Instead, search your interest. Do you like to cook? Play soccer? Travel? Perhaps you love woodworking? Believe it or not, once you dominate niches like these, they can be every bit as profitable as the make money online niche.

The interests of the blogger may run the gamut from subjects which are widely popular to subjects which are of interest to only a small subset of the population. However, there will likely be interested readers regardless of the subject of the blog. Therefore bloggers are not discouraged from opting to blog about even the most obscure subjects. However, bloggers who are seeking financial gain through high blog traffic should consider selecting a topic which appeals to a larger audience.

Sizing Up Your Competition

You should now have several specific ideas for a blog. Now you need to go out and see how much competition there is for each interest you have. Start by going to Google and searching for other blogs on your interest. See how many other websites and blogs there are about your interest. This will allow you to see who your competition is and whether or not the niche is saturated (like the make money online niche).

Considering the Purpose of the Blog

Blogs can be created for any number of purposes. Politicians use them to get their message out. Activist use them to recruit and energize members. Some of us use them to make our income from them. There are any number of reasons for starting a blog. Why is this important? Because if you're starting a blog to make money, you need to make sure there is enough interest in your subject to drive traffic to your blog. Traffic will be what makes you money. Without traffic, there will be no money coming in from your blog!

Now having said that, I can't tell you how important it is that you choose a niche that is capable of driving traffic to your blog. Don't think that just because a topic is popular, that you'll be successful. Many new bloggers in the make money online niche end up failing miserably because they never took into account the difficulty in getting their blogs ranked high enough to generate traffic. This is probably one of the most saturated niches on the Internet and I continually see new bloggers waste time and money on it when they could have already dominated a different niche and be making money from it.

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