There are literally 2-3 new blogs being created every second. Everywhere you turn you are hearing about a blog, whether it’s a personal blog, a group blog, or a business blog.

So why, if there are so many blogs on the internet, do we only hear about a small group of them being very succesful?

Because most bloggers who are interested in being successful or making a ton of money with their blogs, aren’t doing it right.

Reading Between The Lines

Many of those blogger’s who are successful are giving everyone the same answer when asked what is the best topic to blog about.  I even catch myself doing it over and over again, without thinking.

The answer is correct, but it’s not a full explanation of what we really mean.

Like the many religious views that are taken out of context, rather than seeing the big picture, just as many bloggers are taking the “blog about your passion” answer out of context.

Do I think it’s on purpose?  Absolutely not.  It’s a mere ignorance of the real meaning.  And I think those of us who are successful at blogging should start explaining ourselves in better detail when we answer a question of such importance.

Find The Demand

The best thing I can say to you before choosing a blog topic, is to forget about your passion!  I know, you’re probably thinking I’ve gone and lost my mind, but just hear me out.

There are other steps you need to take before choosing what you’re passionate about, and demand is the first.

Is there a demand?

Just like in any business, if what you supply isn’t what the consumers demand, you will not succeed.

Blogging isn’t any different.  So when choosing a topic make sure there is a demand for the information you’re giving.  The topic doesn’t have to have the highest demand.  There are millions of internet users on the web each day and even a demand from a small percentage of them can yield great results.

Is the demand shrinking or growing?

If the demand for a specific topic is on it’s way out, then you probably shouldn’t choose that particular topic either.

The best way to go around this stumbling block is to blog about something that is timeless.  If you are blogging to make money or be successful, then you probably plan on blogging for many years.  If you choose a fad topic that will be gone by next summer, then your long term plan will fail.

If you’re interested in blogging about fads, then create a blog about fads as a big picture.  Don’t focus on one specific fad, but on all fads, as they come and go.

Much like the stock market, if you can predict the next big thing that everyone will be searching for, then you will be a winner.

Overcome Over-Saturation

I often find that new bloggers like to choose a topic that covers something a large majority of bloggers already cover.  They’re thinking is that if “what’s his name” is making money on that topic, then I can too.

That is the wrong way of thinking when you’re choosing a topic, and more often than not the chosen topic was one that was already over-saturated.

Over-saturation of the market for a particular topic actually means there is less demand.  Not physically, as in lower numbers, but mentally, as in “I’m not looking somewhere else when I can find it here”.

Think about where you go when you’re interested in buying a specific book online.  You’re first thought was probably Amazon.  Would it make sense to start an online book store when there is already a huge contender in the market?

When looking for something online that is in the niche of a particularly famous blogger, or a group of bloggers that have already super-saturated the market, most internet users no longer use Google to search for that particular topic.  They know the website address and will type it instead.

If you’re stubborn and you still want to blog about an over-saturated topic, then try to find something not covered within that topic and blog about it.  This is called creating a “sub-niche”.  Many bloggers have become successful in an over-saturated market by focusing on a specific point that no one was covering.

Create A Monetization Strategy

In a nutshell, the problem of monetization simply means, if you cannot monetize your particular topic and your end goals are to make money, then you should probably choose another topic.

So before you begin your blog, choose two or three topics you’re interested in, do your research and find any and all ways to monetize that topic, compare the two or three topics, then decide which ones offer the better payouts and monetization sources.

Choose Your Topic

Now that I’ve utterly confused you about the topic you should choose for your blog, it’s time to take your first steps:

1. Generate a massive list of topics that have a high demand.  I’d try to list at least 100 or more of them.
2. Mark out all topics that are over-saturated, unless you can narrow it down to a specific area that isn’t being covered.
3. Research the various methods of monetization each topic remaining has, and cross out the ones that offer little to no monetization.
4. Of the remaining topics, find two or three you’re really passionate about and write them on piece of paper to stash away somewhere.
5. Choose one of those topics and begin your blog.

The other topics you chose that you were passionate about are your backup topics should you realize later that you may not have been as interested as you thought.

Remember not everyone can be successful blogging, but taking the right approach and using the right steps, anyone can increase their chances for success.

How did you choose your blog topic?

You can probably remember back to when you started blogging.  The excitement you felt at getting your thoughts out on your own website, or the nervousness of beginning a long journey to making money from your content.

While that excitement is great, and you hope it lasts the rest of your life, you don’t want to let it cause you to lose control of your blog, especially if you are interested in running it as a business.

Losing control can be one of the most dangerous things you encounter when blogging, and if you’re not careful, you lose control without even realizing it.

Here are 5 tips to help you maintain control of your blog, and keep you on the pathway to becoming successful:

1. Stay Calm

Just because the top bloggers in your niche are kicking out a post 2-3 times a day, it doesn’t mean you have to do the same to become successful. In fact, many very successful bloggers sometimes only post 1 article per week. Yaro Starak, for example, skips many days at a time on occasion.

As long as you’re putting out great content and building your community effectively, it really doesn’t matter how often you post, as long as it’s consistent.

So stay calm.

It doesn’t matter that you’re running behind on getting a post out at exactly 8:00 am.  Your readers will still see the post.  It also doesn’t matter that some of your Twitter followers didn’t see that tweet about your latest blog post. You don’t have to tweet it 5 times to make sure.  In fact, sending that many tweets about the same thing could actually have a negative effect on you and the trust others have in you.

2. Limit Yourself

Don’t think you have to spend 24 hours a day writing content, marketing it, or building your community.  If you’re spending that much time on your blog, your time management skills need to change.

Everything you need to do in a day for building your blog can be done in a short amount of time with the correct time management methods.

Spending too much time on your blog can also burn you out.  Then before you realize it, you’ve stopped blogging altogether, and that doesn’t make for a very effective business model.

3. Get Rid of Distractions

Those distractions you experience when writing an article, like answering emails, responding to someone on Facebook, or retweeting a great Twitter message, effect not only your quality of work, but also delay the time it takes you to get an article published.

The best thing you can do is to focus on one thing at a time, and make sure you’re completely finished with the task at hand before moving onto another.  Make a list in order of importance if you have to.

Making a list also helps keep you on track with what you need to get done.  Whereas working haphazardly with no real direction can cause you to focus on things that have absolutely nothing to do with your blog.

4. Incorporate One Affiliate Program At A Time

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen among other bloggers interested in making money online is signing up for every affiliate network they can find all at one time and trying to implement them.

The best advice I can give you is to pick one affiliate network you want to work with, and really take the time to maximize it’s effectiveness to fit you and your blog.  Then move on to another.

Taking this approach keeps you from being overwhelmed, which is a major factor in many bloggers giving up altogether.

5. You Decide

Now, it’s your turn.  I’d like to hear your experiences that have caused you to either temporarily or permanently lose control.  Leave me a comment, letting me know.

I live in what seems like one of the least technologically savvy places in the world.  Western Kentucky.  While there are many that are technologically savvy, there are just as many, if not more, that probably don’t even own a computer.  And if they do it’s only to send and receive email.

So it’s no surprise that when I tell others I’m a professional blogger, they ask me, “What’s a blog?”  I think I get asked this at least once or twice a day.  But I find myself stumbling for an answer each and every time.

When you start blogging and interacting with the blogging community, you tend to not really worry about the basics, like what blogging even is, so when you’re asked, it may be a little hard to give a good answer.

What is Blogging?

I often go back to the answer that blogging is basically an online journal, except it’s not anymore, it can be whatever you want it to be.  But this only serves to confuse those who ask me that much more.

Some of them actually stop listening and start looking around, trying to get out of the conversation just as quickly as they got into it.

To put it simply, blogging is nothing more than a website where you write articles and they display in a reverse chronological order.  It’s a new form of news media that is controlled by anyone that has something to say, rather than a college educated journalist.

A Little Help From Common Craft

The next time you find yourself stammering for an answer about what blogging really is, send those asking the question to this post.  Tell them to watch this video by the Common Craft Show, then if they have further questions, feel free to make an attempt at answering them.

Much of the focus put on Wordpress plugins revolves around those that are most popular.  Those that you use just because everyone else is.

While most of the popular plugins are very worth having on your blog, there are some plugins that aren’t talked about as often, but they help give character to your blog and put focus on the all of the small details.

Here is a list of the 7 Wordpress plugins you didn’t know you needed:

1. Exclude Pages From Navigation

This plugin allows you to choose whether each page you create is included in your navigation with the simple click of a checkbox.

Some blog designs allow for only a limited number of page links and if you create more pages than there is a spot for links, you can cause the layout to mess up and look very amateur.

Click here for the Exclude Pages From Navigation plugin.

2. Feed Footer

When we think of monetizing our blogs, we often overlook a big part of the blog.  The RSS Feed.  Focus up until now has always been on how to monetize your blog for those visiting it, but little has ever been done about monetizing your RSS feed, so those that don’t visit your blog can still see your ads.

Feed Footer does just this.  It allows you to include any type of ads you want below each of your posts in your feed.  And it even offers the option to rotate ads, so you aren’t showing the same ones every time.

Click here to get the Feed Footer plugin.

3. iConnect Social Media Bar

The iConnect bar is very important for those of you wanting to offer your readers a way to connect with you on your social media profiles, or any other website or blog you choose.

The iConnect bar is viewable by your readers no matter where they are on your blog.  It is attached at the top of the page and scrolls as the page is scrolled, so it’s alway in view.

Since using this plugin, I’ve had a very large increase in my readers connecting with me on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Click here to get the iConnect Social Media Bar plugin.

4. No Self Pings

By default, Wordpress pings any post you link back to from another post in your blog.  This posts a trackback in the comments section from yourself, and can look very unprofessional, as well as get in the way of legitimate comments and trackbacks from your community.

The No Self Pings plugin stops your deeplinking from causing trackbacks to appear on each of your posts comments sections.

Click here to get the No Self Pings plugin.

5. Parallel Load

When your blog loads javascripts, it loads them one at a time.  That is why your blog loads slower the more javascripts your are running.

To keep your blog from running slower, you can load the javascripts at the same time by using the Parallel Load plugin.

It decreases the load time on your blog, and also includes the option to load javascripts last, which means your visitors can read your post while your javascripts are still loading.

Click here to get the Parallel Load plugin.

6. SEO Super Comments

For each user comment this plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but will be created dynamically using the SEO Super Comments plugin.

What you instantly get in this way is a big jump in your blog’s index visibility to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.

The old author link in the comments will now lead to the newly generated page. The author’s URL will still be displayed (and you can do-follow it now as it will be only one external link on the page).

The concept relies around optimizing the target page using title and H1 tag using the context of the comment. So basically it will take the excerpt of the comment and use it to create the page title and H1 tag and in the body it will hold the content of the comment as well as the commentators previous comments on your blog, causing internal deep-linking as well.

Since now all comments normally drain page rank even when nofollowed (bad for your site) the whole idea of using them to generate links back to your site instead and get free indexable content along the way, looks just much more appealing.

Click here to get the SEO Super Comments plugin.

7. WP-Optimize

For every blog post you write, you are really creating multiple posts saved into your blog’s database tables. And when your post is loaded into your reader’s browser, your blog has to sort through and pull out the correct version of your blog post.

Everytime your blog post is auto-saved, or you go back and edit the post, you are creating a new revision and placing it into your database tables.

In order to get Wordpress to work faster and the page to load faster for your readers, you need to clear all post revision saved in your database and only keep the most current one.

You can do this manually if you know anything about MySQL, but if you don’t, WP-Optimize is a plugin that can make doing it easy on you.

This plugin shows you how many unnessesary post revisions you have in your database as well as those database tables that need to be optimized, and with the click of a couple of checkboxes and one button, will clear it all out for you.

Click here to get the WP-Optimize plugin.

What other plugins do you use that are unique and offer an attention to the small details of a blog?