How to Check Popularity of Your Blog Topic Ideas?

In one of my articles titled, How to decide what to blog about, I mentioned how you should decide and confirm the popularity of your blog’s topic before you starting blogging about it. However, before finalizing the blog topic, you’d need to check if your niche is indeed popular and will be able to attract good numbers of readers. Hence, you’d need to check the popularity of your blog’s topic idea.

There are few bloggers who created their own niche. A niche that was never there before but they somehow, through their dedication and quality content, were able to create a whole new niche out of thin air.

So if you plan to follow that path, then you’re most welcome. The pros are that the competition is close to none. However, on the other hand, the major downside is that you will have to convince people that this is something you need.

And that needs considerable amount of efforts.

Convincing people of something that they don’t even know it exists.

So if you possess that grit and the necessary passion required to do what I mentioned above, then you may definitely take the road less traveled. In case otherwise, you’d need to confirm if your blog topic idea is popular enough to woo and appeal large numbers of audiences. After all, nobody hears a tree falling in the forest.

Blogging for passion is admirable. Paying no heed towards traffic just because you want to blog your heart out and don’t really care if anybody reads it or not is honorable and praiseworthy but sooner or later (in most cases), that “passion” fuel is going to burn out and you’d need some external motivation to keep you going.

Or in other case, you’d prefer your blog managing your keep if you want to dedicate your life to it. In simple terms it means that you decide to become a full time blogger.

Even if the motive is not monetary, having as much readers as possible is far better than having none.

So having good readership also keeps your blogging spirits high. Encourages you to keep going on.

It’s quite obvious that the popularity of your blog’s niche will play a significant role in attracting readers. There’s no rocket science in it if I say that the number of readers is directly proportional the popularity of your blog’s topic. So choosing a blog topic about which the masses want to read about is a worthy target to strive for. Fitness, for example, is always a popular choice, and there are sites like http://www.cadeauidee.org/ that can give you some inspiration about popular topics to write about within that niche in order to get maximum reach and interaction.

One additional note that I want to make is that the tips mentioned below are not only good for deciding the niche of your blog but you can also apply them to come up with new blog post ideas as to a great extent both are same with just some minor differences.

However, I will discuss this in detail later in some other article.

So here are 5 simple, free and yet effective techniques to check the popularity of your blog topic ideas.

Google Search Results

First step you can take to check popularity of your blog’s niche is by simply typing the niche in google. See how many search result Google comes up with.

Now there’s no hard number to say what constitutes a popular niche but this technique can be a good starting point. It can give you a good subjective idea to decide. Obviously, any topic with millions of search results would mean that it definitely has some traction that you might want to tap in.

So even though the criteria is too subjective, using google search results can provide you with some useful guidance in finding yourself a popular blog niche idea.

Use Google Trends

Second tip to check popularity of your blog’s niche is to use Google Trends.

Google trends is a great tool that provides you with valuable insights such as what’s the popular topic right now, what people are searching for around the web using Google, the underlying trends, cyclical or seasonal variations etc.

It does not only show you the current trends but you can go back as far as 2004 and have a look at that how the interest of the people has developed or declined over the time pertaining to your niche. Is it rising or people are generally losing interest in it. If any spike is the reason of seasonal trend etc.

In short, it’s the best tool to assess the popularity of your blog topic ideas but it comes with one problem.

It does not show you a hard figure of the popularity of any keyword.

In fact, it gives you a relative score. This means that you enter a particular keyword and hit enter and Google Trends shows you the result of the past one year (by default but you can change it). The peak demand or point when the number of google searches were at a maximum has a score of 100. From that peak point you can go ahead and estimate how popular your given keyword was at a particular time by checking its score relative to the score at its peak. Which is 100.

I have plans to write a complete guide of how you can use Google Trends to check popularity of any given keyword.

Just keep following The Usual Stuff

Google Keyword Planner

Again, another tip to check out the popularity of your blog topic relates to one of the many google products.

This time, it’s Google Keyword Planner.

Primarily, Google Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool for Google Adwords users. Those who want to assess the the popularity of the keyword they want to target in their adwords ad campaigns. But as a side benefit, those who want to measure the popularity of the blog’s niche or see if they should target a particular keyword in their upcoming blog post etc.

Just enter the keyword and you will see how many people all around the globe search for that keyword.

Again, Google Keyword Planner does not provide you an exact figure. Instead, it gives you a (monthly) range using which you can very easily reach to your conclusion. There is a very good google keyword planner alternative that provides you with a lot more information but it is something you pay a little bit for.

The details of How the Google Keyword Planner Tool is used requires its own spot as the topic is a bit lengthy. So I will be writing the guide soon on this blog.

In order to keep track of it, just follow the usual stuff’s facebook or Twitter page. Or simply subscribe to our email list.

Check out Social Media Pages

Another effective tip to check the popularity of your blog’s niche is by checking out the social media pages about your topic.

Just go in Facebook or Twitter or any other popular social media website and enter your niche in the search bar.

For e.g. if we take Facebook, see if there are pages or groups about your blog’s topic? If yes, then how many? See how many followers does the most popular or top 3 pages or groups in the same niche have.

Of course, more followers or likes mean that more popular the topic is.

Additionally, look out for the engagement ratio of the post. See if the social media updates receive good amount of likes, thumbs ups, comments, retweets or other engagement criteria for respective social media websites. Of course, those wanting to drive the engagement of their posts may want to buy Instagram likes in order to be treated favorably by the Instagram algorithm.

More engagement means that people, in general are taking interest in the topic so make sure that you check out the engagement metrics as well instead of relying on the total numbers of followers. If you’re looking to get more instagram followers, then, you should do your research into the most cost effective way to see results fast.

See if there are Books Published Around your Blog Topic Ideas

I have to admit, I haven’t tried this one out yet. In fact, the idea is not even my own. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I read about this. Whether I read it on other blog, forum or any social media platform but it sort of clung to me.

The reason this suggestion appealed to me is because, blogging is mainly about “reading”. Those who have a knack of reading visit different blogs in search of a solution of a problem they’re facing or even just for fun.

Whatever the reason is, it’s an undeniable fact that only those who have appetite for reading will visit your blog.

Granted, there are many blogs which have videos, memes etc. in them but majority of the blogs are “text based”. So it’s useless to target those who don’t enjoy reading at all. At least in majority of the cases.

Therefore, if you are able to find books that are linked with your blog’s niche and those books have been sold in good numbers, then you can safely assume that there is a good market for the topic that you’re going to blog about.

Or in other words, people in that particular niche love to read about it so you can go ahead and start a blog on that topic. With enough marketing it’s highly probable that people would love to read your blog.

Obviously, this is not a deal breaker but if you are able to verify the demand just by looking at the sales of the books in your niche it’d be a great metric and will provide you a strong basis to start.

So go ahead and do let me know if this works out for you in the comments section.

Final Word

Let’s wrap it up. I hope that the above suggestions will give you a good helping hand in deciding if you really want to blog about a particular topic.

However, I would love to know more about this particular topic from you. Do let me know if you tried anything else and it helped massively. I would love to hear about it.