How Doing a ‘Feasibility Study’ Makes You An Effective Blogger

Before any good government goes ahead with a major project involving millions of dollars, it always conducts what’s called a feasibility study before going ahead with the project. You, as a blogger, should too, before advancing with a new idea you have in mind.

What is a ‘Feasibility Study’?

Image: dj-squared

A feasibility study is research and investigation into the benefits, costs, and possible consequences of conducting a particular project. As Wikipedia states,

A feasibility study, therefore, is carried out to determine whether going ahead with a particular project would really be wise or not. Kind of like a simulation, where you get to know the possible effects and results of a particular project.

The other benefit is that I can weigh the demand of one idea, and then put effort and resources and time accordingly.

As you may imagine, feasibility studies can save government and who ever does them a LOT of time, money, and resources, because they can avoid building projects that are disasters, if the feasibility study deems it unwise to go ahead with the project.

Such studies are also done by professionals in many niches. For example, a systems analyst would first conduct a feasibility study to determine whether a new system is really needed and what are the prerequisites and so on.

Feasibility studies can be detailed or very vague. They have many different forms too. For example, just asking questions around concerning a looming project could be deemed a feasibility study.

How Can It Help Bloggers?

Let me give you my own example.

Before starting any new post or ebook, I conduct a simple feasibility study. I ask all my friends on Twitter, Plurk, and other social networks whether they want to learn about what I’m planning to write. I don’t tell them outright what I’m writing about, just a general question suffices.

As a result, I can judge whether writing that post would really be worthwhile or not. That way,m I’ve saved LOADS of time, that I’d otherwise have spent writing something that’s not really of value to anyone.

The other benefit is that I can weigh the demand of one idea, and then put effort and resources and time accordingly. If I know that a particular idea has been approved by many of the people I ask, and that it’s in great demand, I can put lots of effort and time and resources into it, knowing that it’ll be worthwhile. If the idea doesn’t have that much demand, I’d put lesser effort into it, but enough to make it a quality one.

The best advantage of conducting feasibility studies is that I can pinpoint the EXACT pieces of information that people want. For example, some time back I had an idea to write a series of tutorials on Gmail. Before working on that, I recently asked around how much people exploit Gmail. A majority of those which answered said they didn’t use it extensively, especially Gmail filters. That told me that a tutorial (including one on filters) would be well accepted and appreciated.. And what do you know, the tutorial on filters was popular!

Another big advantage of feasibility studies is that you can get ideas to write about. When people answer your questions, they’ll also add in what they would like to know about the most, and things even you did not think of. So, they give targeted ideas that you know will be a hit!

I know, I know. It takes up time, but then, it’s worth it.

Have you ever conducted a feasibility study before you start a project or a post? How did it work out for you?

Thanks to Phil Romans for the cover image of this post.