How to Choose a Topic for Your Hub

The topic of your hub is the single most important element to making money on Hubpages. Overall volume does not and cannot make up for a series of poorly chosen topics. The key to writing successfully in any medium is to develop a repertoire of topics that will draw traffic and hold the attention of readers throughout the entire article.

A good topic selection will help to ensure your success on Hubpages or any platform where you've chosen to write, and knowing what to do with the topic that you've chosen will help you to earn and to keep visitors who want to know what you have to say about your chosen topic.

Fortunately, topic choice is relatively uncomplicated by comparison to other factors involved in hub creation. This article should help you to choose a topic for your hub(s) that will encourage your readers to read until the very last word and in the meantime, make purchases on your hub or click on your ads. By the time you're done reading this hub you should feel confident in creating hub topics that will do well on this platform.

Before we get into a discussion of topic creation, I wanted to take a moment to discuss with you the goals that are common to all hubbers. Some newer writers, however, may not be aware of these goals. While I've mentioned these specific goals in hubs that I've written in the past in this series, I feel that this is an appropriate time for me to repeat what I've already said, since all of these goals are significant to the selection of a good hub topic (and give you a good reason to choose the best topic that you can.

Once you've gotten people onto your page through optimizing your page for search engines, there are several things that you need to do in order to promote the success of your hub. These goals are significant to the way that you choose the topic of your hub, so we'll go over them now, and then talk about topic selection.

• Keep your readers on your page. The longer the reader stays on your page, the more likely they are to click on your ads or to purchase products from your page. For this reason, you need to keep the reader interested in what you have to say. If you bore the readers, they will not click. This is probably one of the reasons that Hubpages actively unpublishes overly-promotional hubs.
• Engage your readers. Ideally you've included some ways to engage readers on your hub, whether that engagement comes in the form of comments, polls or quizzes. Engaging readers brings them back again and creates the potential for more sales or ad clicks from returning users.
• Earn Clicks. Obviously you want your readers to click on the ads that you have on your pages! This is one of the most important goals that you have if you're hoping to make money on Hubpages, and you'll want to make sure that you spend time focusing on getting relevant ads on the page so that the readers are more likely to click!

With an awareness of these goals, let's talk about how to choose the best topic that you can in order to help you in meeting those goals. The process is deceptively simple.

The single best tip I can give you for writing hubs that get traffic, keep people on your site, engage readers and earn clicks are hubs that are written by people who know the topic about which they are writing. There's no point in getting involved in writing political commentary if you don't know a thing about politics, but if politics is your primary area of interest, then that series of hubs you want to consider writing about the first ten constitutional amendments might be a good idea, informative, and current! On the other hand, if your main interest is in baking, then it makes no sense to write about the state of the union!

There's nothing wrong with choosing several main niches to write about on Hubpages. I have written about Christianity, Marriage, Pregnancy and Writing, since these are all subjects with which I am plenty familiar. I could easily build a niche about each one of these topics, doing keyword research that would help me to build a portfolio and attain visitors who continue to return to my hubs for information on subjects they are interested in. If I'm going to become an authority on a subject, I want to make sure that I'm writing about a subject that I know very well and with which I can engage my readers.

You need to make sure that your primary niche is in a subject area that you know very well and about which you are comfortable writing a lot of hubs. If you wouldn't create a blog about it, don't choose it as a niche here on Hubpages. Be prepared to break down your main niche into several sub-components in which you can write additional niches that are related to the main niche. Example: I write about Christianity. Having been a Catholic, I can write about Catholicism. I can also write about protestantism, the Messianic belief system, and some forms of Judaism as they relate to Christianity. Then there is the possibility of talking about apologetics, my personal Christian faith, Miracles, and other topics. The selection is endless, and there are a lot of areas related to Christianity that I know quite a bit about. This is a good niche for me as a result.

I also highly recommend making your primary niche at least partially fact-based. Creating a niche that focuses on nothing but your personal opinion is going to get old to viewers who are may be looking for factual information about a subject. Even if you review products or services, it's very important to include factual information in your hubs! If you can't write facts and only opinions, you are likely to be less successful on Hubpages because your followers will eventually get tired of your bloviating.

Remember to narrow your Niche down! No matter what you've chosen as your main niche, you need to remember that your hubs should be written about long-tail topics and not about broader topics that make it more difficult to attract attention to your hub.

If you write about politics (following my first example) you may write about conservative politics, progressive politics, or current events. From there you can narrow your niche down further. For example, as a conservative, I'm more inclined to write about conservative topics, so I might tackle a smaller niche covering the constitution of the United States (from the conservative point of view) and I can make an entire niche just around that topic. But I can get smaller than that, making a niche about the Bill of Rights. Going further, I can write about Progressive attacks on the Bill of Rights in Washington. If I really want to break it down, I can talk about impediments to the expression of any one of these rights individually, such as the fact that big government is in direct violation of the tenth amendment, which indicates that any authority not given explicitly to the Federal Government is the responsibility of the States. And that is not a title; that's still a niche, because there's further I can go with that as well!

I like to do this by making one main hub for my primary niche (in this example, "Conservative Politics") and then to use that hub as a dropping off place for links to the other hubs that I write in a series of informative hubs. Depending on how far these niches break down, this can turn into a whole web of hubs. This works even better if you don't put all of your eggs in one basket and you interlink everything that you write on Hubpages and other platforms (including a blog).

Once you've found your main niche, finding your narrower niches can be easy or difficult, depending on the perspective that you take and how good you are at keyword research. I personally like to use mind maps to help me break down my topics and come up with good ideas. I make a map for each of my primary niches and then work them down from there. I will be doing a future hub on how to use Mind Maps in order to plan out your hubs and I hope that you will find it useful!