About Blog: What shoud i write?

Quite beyond the technical questions of how to blog, one question that often gets asked by beginner bloggers is what they should write about.

While this will obviously depend on why you are blogging in the first place, one piece of advice you should definitely consider is trying to find yourself a niche. Unless you are writing for your family or a couple of friends, the best way to distinguish yourself and build a readership is to focus on a particular niche topic or interest.

Whether that's creating glove puppets or PHP programming, the way people will find your blog most commonly will be through a search engine, and they will be searching for something that they want to know more about. That's where you come in.

Answering the question of what to write about Matt DeAngelis of the Affiliate Blog writes:

"Why not start with yourself? Take a moment right now and list your interests. What do you search for on the web? Put that on the list. Think about all of the things that fill your day at work or at home. While you are living your life run stuff through the niche filter in your mind — there’s always something that you can add to the list.

If you don’t have something to write it down on, call yourself and leave a voice mail. I’ve done it many times. Everyone says I wish there was a [insert something here] on the Internet. Some of us say that a lot. Put it on the list."

It also pays to do a little research in the first instance, as Daniel Vukadinovic points out at Daily Blogging Tips:

"Ask yourself, does your blog have potential? Before making any moves go out and learn the competition. Visit as many blogs and websites as possible about the niche you’ve chosen and see if there’s any room left for you. You don’t want to get sucked into a net of gazillion sites about the same thing because chances are you’re going to fail. There’s no need for ten million blogs about soccer where there are only few of them about baskeball."

With that said, the key is to drill down further. Rather than writing a blog about football or basketball, why not write about your local team, about basketball sneakers, about the lifestyle of a particular football player. That way you are sure to find a niche that doesn't already have a million competitors.

Robin Good points out the role of the blogger as someone that helps their reader to navigate an infinite, ever growing sea of information:

"Bloggers sift through and edit the information for the readers, helping the readers find information from around the web in one place, at the same time bloggers become the “go to” expert.

The more people who value or trust what a blogger has to say, the more people will link to and recommend her blog.

A blogger navigates readers around the web to find information that is relevant to her niche audience."

There is bound to be something that you are passionate about, that really motivates you, and that is in some way unique to you. That's where to begin your blog from.