Almost every day I see some n00b posting on the web developer sites, "What should I write about? Give me a topic that I can make lots of money with!" Conversely, on the writing sites, I see writers who are certain they know what they want to write about -- but they don't know how to get the blog part started. This series of articles is about the nuts and bolts of starting that blog, ranging from picking a good subject to choosing domain names to building the site, and finally to monetizing the sucker once it starts to grow.

Over the course of this series of articles I'm going to develop a blog from the ground up, and we'll start with picking that all-important topic. No topic? No blog.

There are three basic types of blogs: personal, informational, and entertaining.

Personal blogs are about the blogger's life. If you have an interesting life, you might find success telling everyone else about it. Personal blogs can also be promotional, if you're a celebrity (author, actor, musician, etc.) trying to sell your work. I've purchased books, for example, because I liked the author's blog. (Cory Doctorow, I'm looking at you.)  And if you're a snarky famous author who can make taping bacon to a cat funny? You're golden.

Here's some examples of personal blogs, with writers from all walks of life:

Homesteading Housewife
Baghdad Burning
Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
WWdN: In Exile

The second type of blog is informational. Here are some examples of informational blogs, across a broad spectrum of topics:

Miss Snark, Literary Agent
Domain Name Journal
TMZ.com
LEGO Blog: The Brothers Brick

The common denominator here is that they're giving information on a specific topic -- they're full of reviews, instructions, education and data.  Name any subject at all, and I can guarantee that somewhere on the internet, somebody's talking about it in an informational blog. Being funny, and giving the blog a personal touch, helps gain readers. However, writing coherently and with sufficient detail to interest your readers is most important.

The third type of blog is pure entertainment. Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures of Cats is a classic example. So is Cute Overload. Entertainment blogs exist purely to amuse. And many are wildly successful; there's just something about funny cat pictures that attract lots of people. I'll confess to looking for new LOLcats at least three times a day.

My personal advice for picking a topic to blog about is to chose something you're very familiar with and that you're good at. Select a topic that you can put your heart and soul into, be it a blog that is entirely jokes or a blog talking about the literary world. You need to be able to write with authority, and with a confident voice. Your blog will be much better if you know the in-jokes and the pitfalls and the little finicky details that only an expert can grasp, and you also need to be able to be accurate and reliable with your information.

(We once accidentally confused the superheroes Firestorm and Firestar in a news article and a famous Eisner-award winning comic book writer working on a Spider-Man project noticed. And then he mocked us on his high-traffic site, after we had fixed the error. There are risks to covering news on subject you're not 100% familiar with -- and neither my assistant nor I are all that good with Marvel superheroes. Ah, well, it was a free link from a highly ranked site.)
 
Despite the pitfalls, it is not at all unusual for a would-be blogger who wants to Get Rich Quick at writing (ha!) to pick a topic they're not familiar with. There's generally one of two reasons for them to do this.

•  The blogger has heard that a topic makes lots of ad revenue. Ads about the lung cancer mesothelioma on Google Adsense, for example, are reputed to have clicks in the $100 each range because of law firms competing for patients. It's a cancer caused by asbestos, and there's lots of litigation involved. I personally suspect that these high-dollar clicks are more of an urban legend than anything else, but there are lots of mesothelioma blogs created by people chasing those famed dollars.

• The writer is copying a popular blog. They want to be the next TMZ or Boing!Boing! and they try to match the format. Surely, they think, to be the next TMZ, all they have to do is read the news that TMZ posts, rewrite a few articles, and voila -- they'll start attracting the traffic that TMZ has.