How to Find Money Making Blog Ideas – Part 3

Coming up with creative and profitable Ideas for blogs sometimes feels more about luck than anything else. But in my experience there is a number of steps you can do to better your chances. This is the third and final part of a series on finding Money making blog ideas. Also see part 1 and part 2 for the full picture.



5. Collaborate – Blogging doesn’t have to be a lonely introspective task – in fact I’ve found that when you share your ideas and passions with other bloggers it can come alive. Pick a few trusted bloggers to run your ideas past. You may just use them as a sounding board to critique and give ideas or you may actually open your idea up and invite them to become a partner in your blog project. This is especially worthwhile if you’ve picked a topic that is big or outside of your expertise. The wonderful thing about collaboration is that if you choose your partners carefully you’ll end up with a blog that is so much better than what you could have done alone. I’ve seen this happen on a number of occasions in the past year, starting mainly with the Olympics Blog which I involved a number of others in. Had I kept the idea to myself I doubt it would have been anything near the success that it was – the topic was just too big and my technical expertise with databases and other aspects of that blog were well beyond me.

So grab a partner and see what comes together when you put your heads together.

6. Respond (quickly) – It is all very well to have an idea, to predict a trend or to know what every man and his dog is going to be searching for on the internet in a month’s time – but getting the idea up and into a blog quickly and looking professional is another thing. At Breaking News Blogs we now have the ability to have a basic, well designed and optimized blog up and running in less than 15 minutes. I know that if an idea hits or a news story breaks that I wish to cover with a completely new blog that I can have a professional and unique looking blog up and running within minutes.

This is crucial in many instances because if you don’t do it someone else will and the space that existed for a blog or two to cover the niche will be gone. This was illustrated by the many blogs that rose up overnight to cover the Tsunami story a month or two ago. The niche to cover that tragedy was filled within hours of the event by a few quick thinking bloggers.

So think ahead about how you’ll respond quickly if you need to. Will you start a blogger blog? (they take minutes too – but won’t be as uniquely designed unless you have some templates ready) – will you start a Typepad blog? (quick to start but cost a few dollars) – will you have some templates ready to go on your own domain? Of course responding quickly is not always important – with some blogs (non breaking story ones) its better to take your time and think it all through – but its good to have the option of a quick launch blog.

7. Blog – This is where the starting point of this series began with the main thrust of my post on Researching a Profitable Blog Topic. Just do it! Of course having read all the above you might be too worn out to start a blog, seeing it all written out like that is a little overwhelming – however its not a specific process that I follow – rather it is a way of blogging, a rhythm that I’ve gotten myself into over a couple of years of blogging this way. I don’t put set time aside to ‘observe’ and then have a period of ‘predicting’ etc – it has just become a part of who I am as a blogger and a part of my daily rhythm of life.

I could (and probably will) write much more on the topic – this series has only scratched the surface and I’m aware could be expanded in many directions (many of which I’ve covered in the 500 or so posts in my archives). If you have any ideas or suggestions to add to please do so in comments below so we can learn together.