Todays Guest post is brought to you by Saphrym

There are a few ways to find out what you would be good at blogging about. Blogging takes time. Articles need to really express your knowledge. Good blogging comes from people who know their topics. But it’s not always easy to figure out what topics you know. Maybe you’re a jack-of-all-trades. Maybe you’ve specialized in one field all your life. If you’re the former, it can be tough to narrow down your experiences into what you really know, but it gives you multiple niches to work with. If you’re the latter, take advantage of it. You may be limited in the number of niches you can use, but you’ll be able to capitalize on the extreme knowledge you have. The following ways are not meant to be steps. You don’t do one then the other. Instead, pick one or more that help you determine what your niche is.

• Start with an eclectic blog. A lot of experts will tell you that a blog must be about one topic because it’s better to have multiple blogs and multiple streams of income. But what if you don’t know what topics you want to cover? If you start with a blog that covers many topics you can watch your stats. Use good statistics software and you can determine what posts you’ve made are the most popular or what posts have the most amount of comments. Whatever topic those posts are about are the topics you need to cover in separate niche blogs.
• See it as a magazine. Have you ever thought to yourself that you could easily start a magazine about your hobby or knowledge? If you were handed enough money to start a magazine but not enough to keep it going if it didn’t make a profit, what topic would you cover? Could you write 20 articles right now about your topic? Are there already a lot of magazines covering the same topic? Ask yourself those questions and you’ll come up with a niche you can handle.
• Listen to your friends. Parents and teachers would heed against this, but you should listen to your friends. This doesn’t mean to ask them for advice on what you should write about. Instead, listen to them as they ask you questions. Is there a subject area they are always questioning you about? If so, this means they trust your knowledge on the topic. If you’ve been able to present your knowledge in a trustworthy manner to your friends, then most likely you’ll be able to present the same knowledge in a trustworthy manner to your readers.
• Write about your passion. What are you most passionate about? Is it remote control planes? What about sailboats? What about family? If you are truly passionate about a topic, and you’ll know if you are, then that will show in your writing and will captivate your readers. The more you captivate your readers, the better chance of having more readers as word of mouth explodes. If you’re passionate about more than one thing, then take advantage and do several blogs.
• Write what you know. What is or was your best subject in school? Do you research it often and constantly keep up with the latest information about it? Then that is a topic you can focus on for a blog. “Write what you know,” is a quote used with any field of writing and it always stands true. People can tell when you don’t know your topic, and unless your niche is a blog about not knowing anything, it’s not a good idea to try and trick people into thinking you know something that you don’t. You will lose credibility.

You’ve decided on a topic or topics that you can write about. If you’ve chosen something specific, like “The Many uses of a Fan Motor from a ’67 Chevy,” then you’ve chosen a niche. Be happy. Go start a blog about it and do research on how to market that blog, as that aspect is beyond the scope of this article. However, you’ve probably chosen something more broad, like “Chevrolets.” Now you need to narrow down that subject. Here are some steps to narrowing down the topic for the purpose of creating a niche blog that will earn you some money.

1. Write down several subtopics. Think of every little thing that you know about, are passionate about, have friends ask you about, could write for a magazine, or that you covered successfully in an eclectic blog. Write them down. You’re going to use this list to narrow down your topic.
2. Do a search on Google for each of those topics and write down the number of results for each one. This will give you a very rough estimate of the kind of competition you’ll be facing. Make sure to try different searches. Try with quotes and without. Try different keywords. You need to make sure the search provides relevant results to your topic. And don’t be discouraged by the number of results. Some of them are false results and just because someone else may be covering the topic doesn’t mean you can’t do it better. Also, while at Google, make a note of any ads you see that show up based on your key words. Mark down if a lot of ads show up or only 2 or 3. This information will come in handy later.
3. Do a search on Technorati for each topic. This will give you a better idea of how that topic is covered in the blogging world. Write down the number of results for each of these searches also.
4. Repeat these searches at search engines of your choice.

Now that you’re armed with this information, look for the topics with the least number of search results at the different search engines. Those are your niche topics. As for the information on ads, if a lot of ads showed up for each keyword then it is likely that your blog can make decent money by utilizing ad income. If there were little to no ads for the keywords, you will have to find alternate forms of income for the niche. Don’t be discouraged though. If you can write a blog about your niche, you can also write an eBook that people will buy because no one else has done it. You can find affiliate programs that touch on your niche and sell other people’s products for a cut of the profit. “The possibilities are endless,” as they say. But now that you’ve gone through all of these steps, you at least know where to begin with your niche blog business.