In the aggressive world of online entrepreneurship and especially in the world of blogging as business, what you have to say is sometimes all you have at your disposal to make money. This sounds simple, but not when you’re competing against millions of other voices vying for the same profit. There are, after all, only so many readers and fingers that can perform the holy task of clicking. The marketplace of ideas has never been so innumerable in options as it is in the Internet age. In order to make money, your ideas have to get heard, but more importantly people want to want to hear them.

Unfortunately very few of us lead the jet-setting lifestyles and execute the proper power plays and personal achievements to be considered worthy of being listened to. Instead we must strive to connect to the readers through an avenue of understanding that excites them as much as engages them, that doesn’t rely on us reiterating the inconsequential on goings of our daily lives. Most people simply don’t care about what you did today. Finding out what people care about and writing about that is the hardest part about making a profitable blog.

But for most of us churning content out that isn’t in part or entirely inspired by what we experience in our daily lives is difficult. This is why I suggest mining your recreational habits to seek out a subject people care about. See, it’s things like advice on how to hang-glide, or five suggestions of classic cars worth the investment of a restoration, that people want to read about. Consider Neil Patel, an online entrepreneur who took self-taught principles of online poker strategy and converted them into an e-book and poker tips blog. He basically took a pastime of his and talked about that, instead of, for example, relating to the reader his problems with a local diner not serving tuna salad. The difference being that, mathematically speaking, more people care to read an article on how to play poker better then they do to read about dissatisfaction at an establishment they’ll never visit.

You cannot monetize the mundane when you expect to profit from the written word. Perform a layman’s evaluation of a particular subject you wish to discuss. Think of twenty people in your personal life from work, home, and elsewhere, and count how many you think would ask you to tell that story and find it interesting. See, it’s the ask part that people forget about. Unless they exercise a miracle in chance online discovery, people will only find your blog if they search for the subject. Even if you really do have something interesting to say about the local diner being sans tuna salad, nobody is asking Google where such articles can be found. More people are asking Google how to get good at poker. Know what people are looking for, and see if you can find that kind of information in your own bank of life knowledge.

Blogs, and ideas propagated for profit in general, are like any other commodity in that some sell and some don’t. The difference between the two is simply a matter of mass appeal for a niche necessity versus niche appeal trying to find mass necessity. The only way to make sure your ideas are found in as big a marketplace as the Internet is by ensuring you know what your market is looking for.

 
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