What makes a successful (as defined by profitability) blog or mini site? I believe there are 4 components to your blogs to be successful, and the first key to the success of your blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, you must find a hungry crowd and plant yourself in front of them. I'm talking about the selection of your niche and the proper research to find what needs, questions, and burning desires your audience has in this niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets MUST have people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. If you don't have this element, then you will never succeed at marketing your solution if there is no need or problem that your product can solve. In a great niche, that "something" is usually a problem that causes pain or distress. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have that pain, are the people who will want to buy solutions to solve their problems for that pain, and hopefully from you.

If that sounds a bit twisted to you, then I invite you to pay close attention to television commercials. You see that what most people conceive as trying to exploit people with pain, is not what it actually is. This is simply called marketing. You've had marketers doing it to you your entire life! Whether you knew it or not, you've been exposed to marketing your whole life and probably never even knew about it. The thing about marketing is there is bad marketers and pushy car salesmen types, and there's those that are the heros and provide the answers to all our problems. Why not be the hero? The great part is you're actually going to provide these people with a real solution that solves their problem and be incredibly helpful! They will THANK you for providing the answers to their problems.

Anyhow, lets move on. So we've concluded that you are going to need a group of people with a problem; but that's not all. You need people with a problem that are easy enough to find. Before you can be successful at marketing your product, you have to first make sure if there is enough of these people for you to reach and make your efforts worthwhile.

How many is enough you ask?

Great question!

With most kinds of websites, all you need is 10 unique visitors a day that come to your website and those numbers may even be enough to turn a nice profit. Other niches however and the products you will promote might need thousands per day to make a nice profit. It all depends on the niche you're in, and the product your promoting. What you sell, and to whom you're selling it to, AND how much your commissions are.

The specific things you should be looking for is the search volume, as indicated by a free tool like Wordtracker, or Google's free Keyword finding tool. Here you're going to simply be looking at how many searches per day that a particular keyword gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche, and make a note of how many there are. This is your competition in this niche.

Contrary to what many people think, NO competition isn't necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it's not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition which shows indications the niche is profitable, but lousy or low end enough that will make it easy for you to destroy some competition and outrank with your own blogs and websites by providing better content and value to your customers.

The piece of the puzzle that makes finding a good niche, is whether that niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need a great product to sell to your "hungry crowd" that is going to provide quality, value, and the answer to their problems which they will be thankful for. A great marketer knows how to do this with ease and usually makes a decent living online doing exactly that.

This is of course assuming that you're looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog. What I suggest if you're looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be at least looking into the possibility of that and maybe even considering educating yourself about doing it correctly. There's a great deal of junk on cyberspace, but one school I recommend looking into for the purposes of Internet marketing is a place called The Wealthy Affiliate University. This "university" is a paid membership site that is more or less like a boot camp of Internet marketing where you can learn very quickly how to be successful with IM.

There are other ways to make money where you might want to think about some different factors in your niche selection. If you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you'll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. If you focus on using blog marketing methods for your business to earn an income online, then I would highly recommend checking out a new piece of software that can make the entire process virtually automated including the content creation and posting of your blog for niche marketing. Firepow is a blogging tool that does this and it's definitely a fantastic tool for the purposes of blog marketing for your niche blogs.