Before you get a domain, before you get hosting, before you start selecting a theme that you’d like to use for your blog, you’ll have to decide on a topic, one that you will stick to and blog about. Choose a topic that is too narrow may mean that you run out of post ideas after less than a week, while choosing a topic that is too broad may see you struggle to compete with the giants dominating your niche. Although bloggers often start out with a lot of enthusiasm, this may die out soon if they do not start with a blogging topic that suits them best - what should you look at when deciding upon what will be your blog’s main focus?

Topics You Like

This is pretty simple, really - choosing topics you like will see you most eager to keep on blogging, as nearly everyone loves expressing their opinion about the topics they love. Be it football, ballet or even how quickly the Earth rotates around the Sun, writing about something you love (and thus know a decent amount about) can help you, blogging as a newbie retain the beginner’s joy that you have when you start out.

You writing about something you love to write about will not just make things easier for you, but it will also for your readers; everyone that stumbles across your blog will see your posts and realise the passion you have, and who knows - they might even come back once or twice after that to see what you’re up to and become regular readers.

Topics that are easy to talk about

Conventional wisdom says that trying to break into a saturated niche like making money online or politics is near impossible as there is no way you will be able to compete with the top dogs unless you have a) a lot of funding or b) a lot of luck. However, what if you don’t want to compete with the elite of your industry? Picking a broad topic means that there will be plenty of readers constantly on the look for new blogs, new content and new viewpoints to read, and all you have to do is aim at securing a small proportion of the population online that are interested in your topic - for example, get 1% of those that follow football to visit your blog and make a comment, and you’re in business.

Topics that are personal

If you have an interesting, dynamic personality you might want to not focus on a topic at all and just run a personal online diary where you talk about everything and anything in particular; although people do not like ramblings on a niche blog, they somewhat even expect it on a personal blog. Depending on how charismatic and innovative you are there is no reason you cannot make it big running a personal blog - there are personal blogs out there with millions of readers monthly and with the right attitude there is no reason you can’t do the same.

The great thing about a personal blog is that you can get family and friends involved; in the previous two instances, they may not be likely to follow what you’re talking about as no matter how big a soap opera fan you are, it is pretty likely that those in your family would not like to read about you drone on about it for days and days; with a personal blog however, you are writing about what happens in your life, and your family and friends should be interested to finding out more about you - there’s always things that you don’t know about people, even those that are close to you, and reading a blog written by them is a great way to learn more.

Remember, you can change at any time during the startup of a blog if you realise that you don’t like your topic and would rather write about something different - I’d advise that you make the change as soon as possible though, as you don’t want to develop a blog with hundreds of subscribers and then suddenly up sticks. Good luck!