Anyone can start a blog on any topic.  The problem is, if you actually want to make money with your blog, then you need to select a topic that will have an enthusiastic audience from day one.  That means you need to do your niche research. 

Your first step is to brainstorm topics you might enjoy writing about.  You can look at your own personal interests, or you keep your eyes open for topics on TV, in print publications, and online.   

Once you’ve lined up several potential topics, it’s time to determine if there’s a market.  One way to do it is to go to Wordtracker.com (or your favorite keyword tool) and enter the search words your market might use to find you. 

For example, your keywords might be something along the lines of “how to lose weight” or “how to housebreak a puppy” or “how to crochet.” 

While each individual keyword might not get a lot of traffic, ideally you’re looking for a niche that gets at least a few thousand searches per month across all those keywords. 

For example, one keyword may get a couple hundred searches per month, another might get a few thousand, and dozens might only a few dozen.  But collectively you have a niche that’s being searched for thousands of times per month. 

Once you’ve determined there’s an audience, your next step is to check if people are willing and able to spend money in the niche.  Go to Google and Yahoo and enter some of your keywords.  Are other marketers buying pay per click ads?  If so, good – that likely means there’s a market buying goods and services. 

Finally, you can confirm the profitability by going to Clickbank.com, Amazon.com, CJ.com and similar.  Are their products and services catering to this market?  If other people are selling to the niche, then the niche must be buying.   

If no one is selling to the niche, don’t assume it’s an unexploited niche.  Quite possibly no one’s selling because there’s not a market buying anything, and thus not worth a marketer’s time. 

The most important part of building a niche site is choosing the right niche. You really wouldn’t want to compete with a lot of sites. That is why you on the first place need to find a niche with good amount of searches everyday and very low competition.

There are many keyword tools on the internet, but I’m going to give you the two I use instead of giving them all

http://www.checkrankings.com/keywordsuggestion/
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Lets create a niche membership site together.

We have to find a niche that people are having problems about, need an answer for their problem or a product which will help them to solve their problem. There are several sites to find the problems people are facing with today. Here are some of them

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace/ - You may see what other marketers are offering. No one would offer something which is not on demand

www.netmagazines.com – You may also use magazines to find what is hot today.

http://www.mygoals.com/ - People pay to reach their goals ;

After doing some search, I decided to create a site about Paypal and how to make money using Paypal. That is a problem and people actually try to find a solution for this and I can offer them my help on a website. So I go to http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php and write Paypal in the box and hit on submit

Results are interesting. According to their tool, “make Money using Paypal” is searched over 300 times a day only in Google! That means you’ll receive around 250 unique visitors only from Google if you can make up to #1.

Okay; looks like I’ve found my niche to build a site around, but I have to do a bit more research on this before I start building my website

I now go to www.Google.com and type “make Money using Paypal” to see the number of actual competitors. 

http://www.Google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22make+money+using+Paypal%2

Yes there are only 18.000 actual competitors which is really great. I will be on the first page with doing basic SEO actually

To give you an idea, for keywords that are searched under 1000 times a day, 100.000 actual competitors and below are good to start with and 18.000 is great to start

So I move to next step and buy myself a good domain name. I use www.idotz.net as my domain company but you can use any of the registrars to register your domains.

I type in the first domain name that I think will help me with the search engine rankings and that is make-money-using-Paypal.com. It is always better to use the keywords you target in the domain name so with this domain name, I use all of my keywords in the same order and I’m 100 % sure that I’ll have very good rankings! So I register the domain name and move to the next step.