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The other day I have discussed the meaning of blog and explained why you should use WordPress as your blogging platform. Today I will discussing on how to start your own blog.

This is the first step to focus on especially if you are planning to create your own blog. In order for your blog to be successful make sure you are passionate on the topic that you write about. You should have an extensive learning and working knowledge on the subject that you are going to blog on.

Follow these steps to come up with a topic:

Step #1: Pick 5 major subjects you really like and enjoy. If you are having a hard time choosing the right niche for your blog, select from these 99 Niche Blog Topics to help you find the right one. Make use of these Top Web Searches in 2007 to give you also an idea in choosing your niche.

* Let’s use these topics to help us choose the right niche for us. College Life, US Travel, How to Play Guitar, Nutrician, web 2.0.

Step #2: Sort out 3 topics that are popular in the blogosphere. You don’t want to blog about something that no one is interested to read it. It will turn out talking to a wall. You wont get traffic. Sooner or later you’ll get bored because there’s no interaction between the writer and the reader. You can use these tools to help you pick the top searches people are looking for. In this way you are sure the that you’ll get traffic right away because they are hot searches on the web.

• Google Trends - Allows you to tap into Google’s database of searches, to determine what’s popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.
• Yahoo Buzz Index - Shows you what’s hot and what’s not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.
• MSN Search Insider - Top 200 queries on MSN Search.
• AOL Top Searches - Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
• Lycos50 - showing top searches at Lycos each week.
• Dogpile SearchSpy - Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service.

» I used Google Trends to sorted out my 5 subjects to 3.

» Results of Google Trends.

* if you clicked on the image you’ll find out that the top 3 searches based on my topics are web 2.0 , how to play guitar , and us travel

Step #3: Cast your vote to 2 niches that you are confident that you wont be running out of words when you blog about it. In the long run your readers will notice that you lack knowledge on your said niche. This will also result not able to update your blog because of insufficient ideas.

* Let’s just say I’m familiar with how to play guitar and us travel.

Step #4: Choose the niche that can attract advertise. We need to make a decision to come-up with the appropriate topic for your blog. This time we want to know if our chosen topics has monetization and profit potential. We all know that Google Adsense are reliable indicators of advertising with the use of Google Adwords Traffic Estimator they can tell us which topic can monetize our blog.

Click the image below to know the results of Google adwords traffic estimator. As you can see, US travel has more potential when it comes to the estimated clicks and cost per day.

Step #5: You thought we are done selecting our right topic, but we have one more step to know the exact name of our subject. Choose the right name for your chosen niche. Use these tools Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool to help you finalized the right word for your blog niche.

» Results from Google Adwords Keyword Tool

¤ Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool will help your blog get search engine optimize. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features. Offers rough suggested monthly search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

* After following the 5 Easy Steps To Choose The Right Blog Niche. We come-up with this new topic. California US Travel, aside from the top average search it help us focus on California travelling. It’s easy right?

Now that we have a niche, our next step in creating our own blog is to acquire a domain. Tomorrow, i’ll help you how to buy a domain name.