A good way to assess how much demand there is for a particular subject, is to look at the popularity of blog posts on that topic. If posts are consistently popular, then you'll know that there's a solid market for the subject.
While you are browsing blogs to find potential competitors, search for posts on the specific topics that you think would work particularly well. Look to see how many comments appear on these posts versus posts on other topics on the same blog. Also, read the comments themselves to see what people are saying.
You should quickly get a feel for how ambivalent readers are to the types of topics you want to blog about. Try to look at a wide range of blogs from small to large so you get a good sample of readers. On some blogs, readers just don't comment much, and on others the community may simply be a bit negative or nasty, so if you take just a couple of blogs as your sample size then you may get distorted results. Look through enough, however, and you'll get a good idea of how your blog and subject matter is likely to be received.
Searching through sites like Digg, Reddit, Tweetmeme, and Delicious is a good way to gauge interest in a particular topic. If you find lots of posts that have appeared on the Digg and Reddit homepages that have accumulated a lot of Delicious bookmarks, or that have been tweeted a lot on Twitter, chances are good that the subject matter is in demand.
If you don't find much social media popularity, this could be simply to do with the audience group and how they use, or more precisely don't use, social media. So don't be disheartened and read too much in an absence of social media engagement. Conversely, searching social media sites, can be a good way to find popular content and learn what types of topics people love hearing about.
Aside from the big social media sites there are plenty of smaller niche sites like Sphinn for search engine news, Tipd for stock market posts, Showhype for entertainment, DesignMoo for web design, DZone for development, and Hacker News for entrepreneurship. If a niche social media site exists for the topic you are going to be blogging in, then you'll find an invaluable amount of information on what your market is interested in.
An obvious way to figure out if a subject is popular, is to simply look at how many blogs and posts there are on that topic. The more popular it is and the broader the niche is, the more likely it becomes that you'll find lots and lots of content, implying that there is a market there.
The best way to do this is to look through blog directories to see what tags and categories are the fullest. Keep in mind, however, that niches with a lot of volume are also going to be much harder to crack since audiences already have a wealth of places to get popular posts.
Demand comes in different forms. The best type of demand is unmet demand. That is, to find that there aren't many blogs or posts on a topic, but that when they do appear they are really popular. This is a sign that you have found a relatively untapped niche. Look for topics with high concentrations of popular posts but few, if any, dedicated sites. Although this gets harder with every passing year, there are still many areas of unmet demand.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Martin Hughes at 02142011
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