Before you do any technical work, like setting up the blog database, trying to pull in traffic or getting new readers, you have to choose your niche. There are so many topics in the world that you could potentially talk about, however if you had a generalised blog which had so many different areas to it, then your site would be spreading itself thin, and would appeal to too broad a market. As such, your site would find it difficult to rank highly in search engines.

But what is a niche?

According to Wikipedia, the correct definition is, “a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.” Examples of niches could include a blog about Golf, Tennis, MP3 Players, Entrepreneurship and even knitting! By choosing your niche carefully you will hopefully be appealing to this select group of people who will be enthusiastic about the topic of your blog, and so will want to return to it regularly – which in effect will help the growth of the site.

How do I choose my niche?

This is the tricky part. At first you should make a list of all your hobbies and interests, then you should pick one of these interests and define a narrow category within this topic. In this way you will be able to talk about a subject that you love and that you have great passion for. This passion in itself will be a motivating factor in growing your blog and making it get to new highs.

Before you finalise your intended topic for the blog you should also do a bit of research. These are some steps that I regularly use to help me find the niche with the most potential growth and profit (because we all want to make money out of our forums!):

1) Go to WordTrackers Free Keyword Tool and type in your chosen niche. This tool will tell you how many times the search for your keyword has been done with the MSN (US) search engine. Their paid full version of the tool will show you the results of all major search engines though.Try and find keywords which have been searched for roughly 1000 times. Anymore than this and you will find yourself bogged down with fighting against huge competitors. Any number much less than 1000, and you will find it hard to retain a large amount of traffic to your blog, as the target market will be too small for you to be able to pull any type of profit from the site.

2) Once you have finalized your keywords and niche for the forum, head on over to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool. In effect this does the same as WordTrackers tool, however, and most importantly, it includes information upon the type of money you could be earning if you were to place Google Adsense Ads on your forum.

- Once you have entered the page, click on the “Keyword Variations” tab. Then type your chosen keyword.

- Where it says “Choose data to display”, use the drop-down box to display “Cost and ad position estimates”.

- In the next drop-down box choose US Dollars and enter in the amount $100. This is simply a maximum value and has no real effect on the search.

- Click “Get More Keywords” and sort by “Estimated Avg. CPC” (Cost per Click) which will show you how much you can expect to be paid, if a visitor clicks an ad on your forum!

3) Finally go to Google.com and perform a search with your chosen keyword. If there are a few popular forums within your chosen niche, then you should maybe consider changing topics or you could fight for the top rankings by using SEO which I will cover in another article. If there are no major blogs which rank highly with your keywords then you are safe and can begin dominating Google with your niche blog!