There is no sure way to choose a profitable niche. Even professional bloggers admit that sometimes they choose a niche that doesn’t get enough traffic or make enough money to make it worthwhile. So don’t worry if the first blog you start fails. Try again. Perseverance is the key to success.

Here are 7 simple steps to choosing a niche that’s right for you:

1. Make a list of your passions

Write down all the things you are passionate about. If you’re not passionate about the topic you’re writing about, it will show! Passion is one of the most important keys to keeping people interested in your blog (including yourself). This is the most important step in choosing a niche. If you don’t follow any of the other steps in this post, be sure to write about something you are passionate about.

Here’s an example of what your passion list might look like:

1.Basketball

2. Play video games

3. Arbitration of tennis matches

4. Internet Marketing

5. American Idol

6. Reality TV

7. Being a good father

8. Rocket model

9. UFOs

10. Bird watching

11. Woodworking

12. Rid the world of ants

13. …

2. Make a list of the things you do well

Write down all the things you do well. It is advisable to ask other people for their opinion on this. Find out what other people think you are good at. They might mention things you haven’t thought of. You can also show the final list to your friends and family to learn more about the list.

A sample list of things you do well might look like this:

1.Basketball

2. Arbitration of tennis matches

3. Cook

4. Teaching

5. Running marathons

6. Open heart surgery

7. Being a good father

8. Rocket model

9. Calculation

10. Bird watching

11. Navigation

12. …

3. Merge the first two lists

Take the lists you made in steps 1 and 2. Write down all the things that are on both list 1 and list 2. This will give you a good idea of ​​what you can blog about as an expert. However, you don’t have to be an expert to blog about something. If you’re really passionate about something, but you’re not good at it or just learning about it, you can still blog about that topic from the perspective of someone trying to improve in that area.

For example, if we merge the sample lists from step 1 and step 2, the list would look like this:

1.Basketball

2. Arbitration of tennis matches

3. Being a good father

4. Rocket model

5. Bird watching

…

4. Pick your 3-5 favorite niches

From the list you compiled in step 3 (above), which ones are you MOST interested in writing a blog about? It doesn’t matter if other people write about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s extremely competitive. Just write down the top 3-5 things YOU want to blog about. It’s fine if you only have 1 niche left at this point, but 3-5 would be better.

NOTE: At this point, you have at least one niche you could start writing about. However, if you want to make money from your blog, you need to do more research.

From our example, let’s say you’d like to blog about the following three things from your merged list:

1.Basketball

2. Being a good father

3. Bird watching

5. Determine Traffic Potential

There are many ways to do keyword research and determine the traffic potential for a niche. To keep things simple, you’re not going to worry about competition, you’re only going to worry about demand.

Go to Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool (which seems to be working again). Type in the top keywords for the niches you selected in step 4. You’ll then get a list of keyword phrases and their search numbers for the past month on Yahoo-owned search engines.

Note: If Overture doesn’t work, try the free Wordtracker keyword tool.

In my opinion, you really want to see 10,000+ searches a month on Overture for your main keyword, otherwise it’s going to be very difficult to get decent traffic to your blog.

Let’s go back to the example and convert your list to a list of top keywords, with a list of search engine traffic. Now it would look like this:

1. Basketball – 37845

2. Parenting – 33457

3. Bird watching – 5500

At this point, you might think birding is out of the question, but what if you wanted to write about birds in general? What if you wanted to write about your favorite bird, the hummingbird (which had 17,354 searches last month)? It is still possible to drive a lot of traffic to a birding blog, but for the purpose of this post I am just covering a quick and easy method of analyzing potential traffic. You can extend your traffic analysis by looking at other related keywords if you wish.

6. Determine the moneymaking potential of the blog

Common sense might suggest that there are products to sell to people looking for each of the things in our example, but is there a way to be sure?

Here’s a quick and easy method you can use to help determine the money-making potential of a blog. Go to Google or Yahoo and do a search for your main keywords. The more advertisers you see paying for sponsored results (pay-per-click ads), the better. If you don’t see anyone bidding on those keywords, then it may be more difficult to monetize your blog, but not necessarily impossible.

Sponsored results are the ads that are displayed by Google and Yahoo at the top and right side of search engine results, under the heading “Sponsored Links” on Google and “Sponsored Results” on Yahoo.

So for our example, I went to Yahoo and did searches for each keyword and noted the number of ads I saw:

1.Basketball – 10

2. Parenting – 10

3. Bird watching – 10

Based on our quick test, it looks like all three niches can be monetized. Sometimes you’ll type a word and there won’t be any sponsored results. For example, go to Yahoo or Google and type “underwater basketry.” When I tried it, there were no paid ads on any of the search engines. This is probably a good sign that there is not much money to be made in the underwater basket weaving market.

7. Make sure you have time for the niche

Is the topic so broad that you just don’t have time to blog about it? For example, if you choose basketball as your niche, do you really have enough time to cover ALL basketball news on your blog? If not, then you need:

A. Start a group blog with enough people to cover the topic.

B. Narrow the focus of your blog. In our example, maybe basketball is too wide for you to cover. If so, you can choose to cover your favorite basketball team or write about funny basketball moments, etc.

There you have it, 7 steps to choosing the perfect niche for your blog.