So, that is the big question, what makes a successful and profitable blog or mini site? I believe that there are 4 absolute necessities when considering this question.

One of the most basic keys to the success of a blog or mini site is that you must target a group of people who are ravenous for information on a specific topic. In other words, selecting the right niche.

The people that you target have to be a group of people who have problems, in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, or looking to improve something. Furthermore, in an ideal niche, that something causes pain.

The pain can be financial, physical, emotional, in fact, any sort of pain. The reasoning behind this is that people in pain have a real need, sometimes a desperate need, for a solution. A problem enveloped in pain gives a sense of urgency to finding a solution. These are the people who will hopefully want to buy a solution from your website.

If you think that trying to exploit people who have pain is wrong, think about it from a different angle. We call it marketing. You have had marketers practicing their craft on you throughout your entire life, and you probably are not even aware of it. So what is wrong with you doing it too? The advantage that you have is that you are actually going to be providing these people with a real solution, so you are helping them out!

So firstly, we are looking for a group of people with a problem, but that is by no means the end of the story.

Your next requirement is whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their pain online. How many searchers do you need? A good question.

With certain kinds of websites, all you would need to turn a decent profit would be 10 visitors a day. Other niches and products that you may wish to promote could need thousands of visitors per day. It depends entirely on what you sell, who you sell it to, and what you are making as a profit from each sale.

One of the best ways to research is to look at the search volume, which you can find by using a tool such as Wordtracker. Here you are simply looking at the number of searches per day a particular keyword, or keyphrase gets in the search engines. Once you see some favorable results, you then need to look at how many other websites or blogs are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not necessarily a good thing to have no competition. No competition could and often means that it is not a profitable niche. What you ideally want is some competition, but really bad competition so that you can take the lead by producing a better website that provides better content and in a better way.

Last, but by no means least, you need to look for a niche that has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to your people that is of high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a good commission.

This of course presumes that you are looking to use the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog or mini site. My advice would be, if you are looking to be able to someday give up your job and earn a full time passive income online, then that is the model you should be looking at. There are of course other ways to make money with your blog, and those may be better suited to the niche you have chosen.

So if you pay attention to these points when selecting your niche, you will be giving yourself and your new blog or mini site the best possible chance of profitability and success.