Choosing a topic to blog about
One of the first thing you need to do is to choose a topic to blog about. It is possible to keep a general blog that features information about a little bit of everything and where you can write about whatever is on your mind. This is however usually not a good idea if you want to make money from your blog. General blogs are hard to rank in the search engines as well as being hard to make a lot of money from. Niche blogs are usually better money makers. A common advice is to blog about something you are interested in and know a lot about. Although this advice can sound like good advice to start with I think it is horrible advice and something you should look past. It is true that it is good to know something about the topic you write about and that it is easier to motivate yourself to write about something you like. It is however not that hard to become knowledgeable in a new field by study it as you create your blog and this approach can often be quite profitable.
The reason that it is a bad idea to blog about your interest is that most people do not have an interest that make a suitable blog. Either you a field of interest that it too wide and hence too competitive or something that is to narrow and perhaps not of enough interest to be commercial viable. Lets look at a couple of examples.
Lets say that you are interested in cars. Than you have loads of potential readers but you are also about to enter a very competitive business where there already are a lot of high quality players that have established themselves in the field. Breaking into a niche like this can be very profitable and it can be worth trying but it is seldom a good first blog simply because you will have to wait so long until you start seeing results. When you first get started you want to start seeing some results within a couple of months, not a couple of years or you risk losing focus and start working on something else (Preventing you from ever becoming successful) or you give up altogether.- On the other hand you might be interested in Russian sock puppets. This would be a niche with very little competition and you could likely create the best blog in the world on the topic but that would still earn you next to no money as the potential readership would simply be too small. The potential advertise base would also be small.
Some topics such as CFD trading and options will pay you very high referral fees but are also highly competitive. Other topics have almost no competition but pay you very low referral fees. Your goal should be something that pays as good as possible with moderate competition.
The ideal topic should interest a decent amount of readers and has a good potential for making you money. A lot of hobbies simply do not fall into theses categories. Most are to wide and would put you up against too strong competition. The majority of the rest is too narrow and will never earn you any money. There are of course exception from this rule and if you are lucky enough to be one of those exceptions that has a hobby that fits the suitable criteria in that case I definitely think you should choose to blog about your topic. Otherwise you might have to choose another topic. Either by choosing something completely different or by narrowing the blog down further to a particular small part of your hobby.
I do recommend that you consider if you would enjoy reading about the topic when you decide you want to blog about. Do not just look at the money you can earn as that seldom is a good way to go as you will lose interest and your blogging job will be more boring that it has to be. You do not need to love the topic, but avoid topics you truly hate.
If you want to know more about choosing topic i recommend you read my, How to evaluate topic ideas.