Introduction
I am currently reading PROBLOGGER by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett and just completed the chapter on niche blogging. This made me consider my experience with blogging and how our decisions have impacted us at Cape Cod Branding. This article will outline my advice on blog topic selection based upon my experience as well as some interesting insights that I have received from PROBLOGGER regarding tools to aid in this process.

Selecting A Blog Topic
Conventional advice is that you should thoroughly research a topic, determine if the trends for a given topic are gaining or shrinking and develop backup content for the material by brainstorming topics to ensure there is enough material will be able to be generated to sustain the blog over time. Although this advice is useful, I find it too be a bit too conservative and constraining. As an action oriented person I need to see results, and the only way to see results is by doing something. My thought is that the best way to  determine if you have a suitable topic is to write an article and post it to a blog and see what happens.

I consider blogging to be like entrepreneurship in that conditions are never ideal – just do it. Pick a topic of interest, write an article, and then post it to a pre-made blogging service such as WordPress. Once posted, review the traffic after one day and post a second article relating to the same topic. Repeat this process while noting daily traffic levels. It may be easiest to liken this process to dipping your toe in the pool to test the water.

You may ask, what if I run out of ideas for a given blog topic? My recommendation is to change focus. You will likely lose some readers as a result of the change, but it has been my experience that many will stick around, and you will gain more by experimenting with new material and therefore gain access to a new market segment which in turn means more traffic. One key aspect to understand is that you will receive and likely gain some traffic just by occupying space on the Internet. Now what you do with that space determines how much or how little traffic you will receive.

The main point is this – action is better than inaction. You can analyze blog topics for days, weeks, months, or even years – all the while the Internet is changing. Quickly selecting a topic, monitoring the results, and then correcting course ensures that you are at least out there and gaining real experience. Analyzing and carefully considering topics may increase chances of success if you are lucky, however things change so rapidly that today’s information is likely already outdated. Heck, you may not even like blogging, or then again you may love it. The only way to find out is to give it a try.