Choosing the right niche for your blog can be a tricky thing. You have to pick a topic that’s popular and potentially monetizable. You should be able to write a great deal on the topic as well, so it’s necessary to pick a topic with which you feel totally comfortable. This can be a taxing job for anyone, which is why we’ve provided 10 steps that’ll help you choose the perfect niche for your blog.

1. Make A List Of Topics You Know Well

Niche bloggers need to earn subject matter expertise in their chosen area and have the ability to research information. It’s important therefore to blog only on topics with which they are comfortable. Dig through your knowledge base, your hobbies, interests and pursuits and come up with a list of 15 topics for your niche blog.

2. Test The Topics For Longevity

Trendy topics such as current politics, policies and so on will not hold user interest over time. If you plan on monetizing your blog and building a name for yourself, you need a niche that will stand the test of time. Review your list of 15 topics and shortlist 10 or 8.

3. Perform Keyword Research To Check Niche Viability

Search engines index your site based on a number of factors, but primarily, they look for targeted keywords. Locate specific keywords that pertain to your niche topic shortlist using Wordtracker’s Keyword Universe tool.

4. Check If The Niches Are Popular Or Not

You need to know if people are going to like your blog once you’re up and ready. Run the keywords you isolated through Google Analytics to find out exactly how many people are searching for related topics. You can use this method to compare different topics and gauge the popularity of each one.

5. Check Out The Competition

Search for the most popular keywords from your isolated keyword list and check out the blogs that correspond to them. By doing this, you can find out 2 things; the popularity of certain niches, and the presence and density of competition in each area.

6. Fine-Tune Your Shortlist

Set aside those niche-specific keywords for which there are fewer competitors. Fine tune your shortlist of topics based on these results; at this point you should have no more than 5 topics on hand. You know that your final shortlist of topics will work in the blogosphere. There are few competitors, but the niches are popular and there’s scope for interest.

7. Check If The Markets Are Buying Markets

After your keyword research comes market research. Find out if the topics you’ve shortlisted are part of the buying market. Many bloggers who started blogging years ago started their blogs on a whim but found that it takes hard cash to sustain their blogs over time. There’s no point in doing all this research if your niche is not part of the buying market. Who knows, doing this exercise might even open up a few new ideas of niches for you.

8. Check Out Market Segmentation

If you have a number of popular keywords for your shortlisted topics, find out how segmented the market is. One of the most important steps in marketing is to divide your audience based on their interests. You can then craft a customized, targeted message to grab more eyeballs.

For example, if you want to blog about movies, find out how many people are searching for “top movies 2011”, or “download movies 2011”. If more people are interested in watching movies and talking about them than downloading them for free, a blog targeting movie fans will probably get you more traffic.

9. Further Fine Tune Your Short List

Review all your research up to this point. At this point, we suggest that you create a worksheet with the following columns: Niche Topic, Popularity (out of 10), Competition, Keywords, Audience Segmentation, and Monetizability Scope. Bring your shortlist down to 3 or 2 from 5. Make sure you document every aspect of your process in your worksheet. You never know when you might need to start another blog or take up a different niche.

10. Follow Chosen Niche Blogs ON Social Media Sites

Make a list of the blogs that correspond to your shortlist of 3 and follow them via social media. Find out how each blog is faring. Study their posts regularly and subscribe to their feeds. Take a few days time and pick the niche that’s most successful out of your list of three. Now you’ve done everything you could to pick the best niche. You know your niche is popular, the competition is bearable, you know your audience, you know the keywords to target, you know who your biggest competitors are and therefore who to network with. In short, you have all the info you need to start the blog.

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In blogging, back links simply mean tons of traffic going to your site. Some bloggers implement a plethora of strategies in order to get as many links possible to their site. But number is not the only factor when it comes to link building. There are great strategies and ineffective ones. Below are a few tips on how to make your link building efforts more effective.

The Do’s of Link Building

Build good relationships with other bloggers in your niche by visiting their site and leaving helpful comments. Your comments should be helpful, informative, and relevant. This is a great way of establishing yourself as an expert in your niche while getting some quality links for your site.

Submit articles to Web 2.0 sites like Hubpages and Squidoo. These sites allow you to submit content and create backlinks for your site. When writing articles; make it a conscious effort to constantly create quality content. Also consider other article directories such as Ezine and Goarticles. These may not have the same clout as popular sites but they are an easier source of links.

Consider submitting guest posts for popular websites in your niche. Simply contact the site’s webmaster and inform them of your desire to submit content.

Be an active member in web forums within your niche. Utilize effectively your forum signature by placing a link to your blog. You should also make use of answer communities like WikiAnswers or Yahoo Answers. This method allows you to create hundreds of links which could go a long way in boosting your backlinking efforts.

Submit videos to Youtube and utilize your social media accounts. A simple information or how-to video could get you a multitude of views that could turn out to be potential visitors to your site. Spending a few hours polishing your video is the best way of turning your videos viral hence, more traffic for your site.

Write high-quality content. This is quite simply the best way to get back links. Writing quality content makes it easier for people to tag your content creating backlinks in the process. Readers will gladly share your work though their own social networks or blog pages.

The Big Don’ts in Link Building

Avoid link farms and link exchange communities. Search engines, especially Google, consider those sites as junks: not a lot (if there are at all) quality links could come from them. So your effort in joining those kinds of sites is simply useless.

Don’t just jump into any article submission directory. Some of them are marked by search engines as low-quality so you won’t really get any visibility increase from them.

Don’t buy your way into popularity. Choose carefully what paid directories you submit your site to. If you don’t, you end up wasting resources that could have been used in other areas.

Don’t be over zealous in promoting your site over other people’s sites. People hate useless and irrelevant comments. They hate it even more if those kinds of comments are posted too often. You could end up being blocked from a site or alienating your followers.

Don’t get frustrated if you are not able to receive a response right away. It takes time to get a back link from a high PR site. Just like you, there are hundreds of bloggers waiting for a backlink from the same site. One request and a simple follow-up a week after is all that’s needed.

Don’t be too “salesy.” People want information. Let your readers be judge of your content.

If you have any type of business, chances are you need a website. Even if you are not buying or selling a product or a service, there are all kinds of reasons you may want a website of your own – a place to talk about current events, a site dedication to movies you like, you want to show off your pet, whatever. Most of you probably want a site that sells something though, so we’re going to help you get one.

The design of your site has a lot to do with how successful your online business ventures are. Overwhelmingly consumers want a couple things from a website, in this order: 1. Easy to use, 2. A site that is clear and concise. Pretty simple, and that’s the point. There are a lot of blogs and articles about how to create an effective site, so let’s just start with the “how”.

HTML

Unless you are a computer programmer you will not need to know that much. Knowing some basics can be helpful though, even if you use a website builder (which you probably will). Some basics are:

<h1>Large heading</h1>

<h2>Medium heading</h2>

<h3>Small heading</h3>

<p>You begin a paragraph this way, then end it this way.</p>

<a href=”http://www.this-would-be-some-website-address”>These are the actual words you click on to go to that website</a>

<img src=”this-is-an-image-saved-on-your-computer-and-as-you-can-see-you-determine-the-size.jpg” width=”104″ height=”142″ /> Copying and pasting the name is recommended, because the can get long just like that sentence. Left click the image saved than hit “properties” and it will be there

Other tags are <b></b> for bold text <i></i> for italic text and <u></u> to underline something. You begin every piece of html with <> and end it with </>, that is how computers know to go on to the next thing.

CSS Basics

CSS is another language you may use, like HTML. This is a bit more complex and not completely necessary. The primary advantage is that it allows you to separate your HTML content—which is a determining factor in your web ranking—from the style of your site. While too complex to go into here, there are many advantages to using this style, more control over content and images without damage to SEO factors and more. Simply Google “CSS Basics” and you will find a cornucopia of sources.

Free Website Builders

A website builder is basically a program that takes care of the HTML and other coding for you and also hosts your site address. Usually will choose a general template, then can insert text, graphics, links and other available items as you see fit. The trade of is, these free builders will post ads of their choice on your site. This is great for personal websites but not for a business. Some popular free website builders are:

Google Sites

Windows Live Spaces

Wix

Google Knol

Jimdo

AngelFire

Edicy

Squidoo

Yola

Tripod

There are many more, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Commercial Website Builders

These are the same as the free ones, except you pay. Often however they will have more and better options, and more importantly there are no ads. Dreamweaver is one of the more popular commercial builders, however there are many others.

WordPress

WordPress is technically a blogging platform, whereby similar to a website builder, you can build a blog with little or no knowledge of HTML or any coding (though there are some areas where this knowledge will allow you more freedom of design). It is the single most popular blogging platform, and has been downloaded over 30 million times since its introduction in 2003. WordPress is a great tool for any business that wants a blog, and the platform allows enough freedom that many choose to build their website based on this platform. It is free initially but some of the more advanced options come with a fee.

Career? Do we even need one? Well, yes you do. There is a life which needs you to earn and make a living out of something. Although blogging is a great resource to share your mind and knowledge with everyone, there is also a great opportunity to make a good sound career out of it. Would you like to work for someone or work for yourself? I take the latter and most people will take that. Blogging gives you that opportunity to be your own boss. This article of mine will concentrate on 5 things which will be more than essential as well as useful for shaping your career in blogging.

Create a Good Blogger Image:

Well this is a key for making an entry into the blogging career. You need to build a good image of yourself in the blogging community and stand out as a different personality from others which will better help you get recognized. You may ask why is this even essential? The simple answer to it is that, for any successful career you need people to recognize you and your work, so that you are in a better position to connect with them as well as create an opportunity to receive work orders for yourself.

Lets consider a scenario , You have one client who is looking out for a good professional PHP developer ! What will you do ? Unless you are good at it, you will always try recommending a good friend/ known person to him who is good at it. The same implies in blogging as well , others will certainly recommend you to someone if you are good and connected with them.

Develop a Professional Blog:

To achieve greatness you need a foundation. Blog is a foundation for you achieving the Point I mentioned above. Develop a blog which is professional and one which you are aware of what you are writing on. People start writing on topics which they are not good at just for the sake of pouring in traffic from search engines and other sources. This may be looking good but actually it is not good enough to build a better community.

You should also concentrate on the looks of your blog and keep in mind making things look attractive. The first impression to your blog comes from the look and people may be turned off if you have quite a lame look.

Create Multiple Source of Earning:

One of the biggest mistakes that a blogger can do is to limit his earnings to a single source like advertising i.e. selling and putting ad-networks on blogs. Although it is a good way of making money but it is certainly never going to be enough unless you have super-popular blog with very high traffic.

You can even look out for promoting Affiliate products on your blog which helps you get a lot of money and in addition expose some really good products for your readers as well.

Although Advertising and Affiliate marketing is quite a popular choices, you may also be interested in learning more ways to earn money from blogging.

You may also check this article on different ways to make money from blogging

Own Multiple Blogs:

Business always is up for expansion! Blogging is no different. Not only will building multiple blogs help you earn efficiently more but also gives you stability as well. It is like building new products once your former one has got quite a success.

I only recommend building multiple blogs after you have succeeded in making you first one quite big else you may end up in a mess. That  is why my 2^nd point “ Develop a professional blog” becomes a very important point.

Never Back Down:

This point of mine is not a tip but may be a lesson for some of them. You may not succeed in the initial stage even after putting in a lot of hard work ! That is bound to happen. Never give up on blogging and be patient all the time. Hard work will always reap sweet fruits , its just can you wait ? Try it and you will never regret it.

Sandeep Singh writes at Techfreak Blog which is a hot-spot to the latest in technology and also tips on blogging.

After a struggle of more than 4 years against cancer, a few hours ago Apple to announce the death of Steve Jobs . Given the sad news of the tech world has been revolutionized and that Jobs was more than a businessman, was a true visionary who contributed greatly to the evolution of the technology sector, with all that that implies, and not go down in history only products but also devised his major phases and events which have served as a true inspiration to many.

Make a collection of famous quotations and phrases from Steve Jobs , which is the purpose of this post, it is not easy since virtually all are famous in a similar but even so I finally ventured and here’s the collection. Of course any contribution in the comments are very welcome.

• In his legendary 2005 speech at Stanford University : Remember that you will die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow his heart. [..] Your time is limited, do not waste it living the lives of others .
• Taken from a 1989 interview in Inc. Magazine: You can not ask consumers what they want and then pretend to give. At the time I’ve been making, they will want something new .
• Robust and accurate prediction in 1996 in an interview with Wired : The computer industry is dead desktop. There is virtually no innovation. Microsoft dominates the market with little innovation. It’s over. Apple lost. The market for desktop computers has entered a dark period and will remain there for the next ten years or at least for the rest of the decade .
• With this sentence Jobs convinced John Sculley to leave his post of president at Pepsi and pass to Apple: Do you want to sell sugar water the rest of your life, or want to make history? .
• That at some unspecified time and place: Innovation is what distinguishes a leader of others .
• During the epic keynote of 2010 Steve Jobs said that among many things: We are not the first, but will be the best .
• In 2003, coinciding with the introduction of the third generation iPod, the New York Times embodied in an article about the gadget from Jobs, the following sentence: The design is not only the appearance, design is how it works .
• That at some unspecified time and place: I am so proud of what we do as we do .
• Another innovation published by Fortune on November 9, 1998: Innovation has nothing to do with how many dollars you have invested in R & D. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It is a matter of numbers, but people you have, how they guide and how much you get .
• The most recent and famous mainly because it is his farewell to the world of technology.Specifically belongs to Jobs’ statement announcing that left Apple released August 24, 2011: I’ve always said that if ever the day came that he could no longer fulfill my duties and expectations as CEO of Apple, I would be the first to do so know. Unfortunately, that day has come .

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