What is niche blogging for profit? A niche is simply a specific area of interest in which your blog can focus. My blog, for example, concentrates on building an online business and personal development. I cover topics related to building an online business such as the title of this article “Niche Blogging for Profit”. So what topic should you choose before starting to build your own niche blog?
Niche Blogging For Profit – What Topic
Niche blogging for profit does work if you find a good niche and blog in a certain way. There are thousands of niches which you can choose from. Ideally though you should choose a niche area which you have a passion for and which will sustain your interest for the long term. Choosing something you have a burning fascination in and a knowledge of will make blogging in that area much easier.
There are a few reasons why you should choose a topic or niche which interests you:
- Blogging about something for the sake of making money from it will become tiring – If you choose a topic simply because you think it will make money, it will be much harder to sustain your interest for the long term.
- You can’t write about something with any depth if you don’t know the subject area.
- It will take much longer to write copy in an area in which you are unfamiliar – You will need to read and research the topic before you can write about it. This is harder if you have no interest in the topic!
- Writing about something in which you are passionate comes across to your readers. Conversely, writing about something which doesn’t interest you, is likely to translate into a boring read.
Niche Blogging For Profit – What Product To Sell on Your Blog
There are two main ways to monetize your blog – Adsense adverts and affiliate marketing. There are others but these are the main two ways most bloggers use to make money blogging.
Google Adsense
With Adsense you place code on your blog which Google translates into adverts which relate to your content. When your visitors click on the advert you make a small commission. It’s usually only pennies so you will need a huge amount of traffic to earn a living using this method. Join the Adsense program here.
Affiliate Products
Clickbank.com and JVzoo.com are two of the largest companies which deliver digital products for affiliates. You can also place your own products with them to get affiliates to market them for you. Affiliate products can be sold over your blog to your visitors and you can make up to 50% commission on each sale.
Finding Your Niche Affiliate Products
It’s important to choose the right product carefully which fits in with your particular niche. To find affiliate products in your niche you can do a quick Google search. Type in “your niche” affiliate products. For example if you have a blog on fishing accessories type in “fishing” affiliate products. Do you due research and make sure you test the products yourself and are happy with them.
High Ticket Products
Higher value items will obviously make you larger commissions for each sale too so choose items which are already selling and those which make you the best commissions. See high ticket affiliate products.
Niche Blogging For Profit – Writing Your Articles
Writing articles on your blog is time consuming. However it is a great way to use your time if you don’t have a huge budget for advertising; or, you would prefer to trade your time rather than your money. However, there’s plenty of bloggers who give up simply because they don’t get any visitors to their blog.
Part of this problem is because Google is so competitive with many more people starting a blog and creating content online. The niche you choose will partly determine how competitive your particular online market is. Some of the most competitive niches are online dating, weight loss and making money online. If you choose any of these niches be sure to find sub niches which you have more chance of ranking for in Google’s search results. Choose untapped niches for faster results.
Blog Sub Niches
Every niche has several sub niches. Ideally you should choose a niche which has a variety of topics which you can blog about. Otherwise you will leave yourself limited to only one topic.
Example
The Fishing niche has several sub niches: Fly fishing, Fishing equipment, Fishing books, etc. There are probably thousands of fishing related sub niches which you can write about if you have a passion for fishing.
Niche Blogging For Profit – How To Write Laser Targeted Articles
Tip#1
Writing articles is a great way to get targeted visitors to your website. Your articles need to be written with your audience in mind but also with Google’s results in mind. Use Google’s Keyword planner to find long tail keywords in your niche which also match the criteria for potential sales of your affiliate product. Tailor make your articles to bring in potential buyers and not just random visitors.
The key to this step is to ask yourself two question:
- “Does this keyword have the potential to turn a visitor into a buyer?”
- “Does this keyword relate closely to my affiliate products?”
Of course you can write about many topics on your blog and cover a lot more themes than simply your specific affiliate products. However, the articles which will make you the most sales will have two things in common:
- They will rank on Google
- They will have buyer keywords in them – keyword which imply an interest to buy
This means if you concentrate on these kinds of articles, your results will be better.
Many blogs concentrate on review blogs for exactly this reason. The people who are looking for reviews are already looking to buy a specific product. They are in the last step of the buying cycle. If you write good, honest reviews and get found on Google, you are likely to be able to refer customers to the end product. This lead us to:
Tip #2
Write for people in the last stage of their buying cycle. Many bloggers try and sell items to people by persuading them how good a product is. They get people to their website or blog and suggest an affiliate product and how it may help them. Instead write content for people who already have their credit card out and are just about to buy. They just want to read a final review or find a little piece of information about the product before they buy.
Niche Blogging For Profit – How To Get Found On Google’s Search Engine
Here’s the real challenge. With all those bloggers writing for Google’s search engine what kind of snowball in hell’s chance have you got with your tiny little blog?! While this is true for many keywords in your niche, this is the golden ticket to getting people to your blog. Unless you do this right your articles will never get listed on the first page of Google.
There are other ways to market your content of course – through social media and paid for advertising. But getting a ranking article on Google means you can have a flow of targeted customers browsing your blog for potentially years to come. Deliberately targeting keyword chains which haven’t been capitalized on, is a good strategy to build a steady growing stream of traffic to your blog.
Step#1
Use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords which meet the previous criteria for buying intent. Type in your main keywords for your niche area or topic of interest. Click on average monthly searches tab until you get the least monthly searches come up. Look through the list of long tail keywords to find a suitable one to title your article. The reason we don’t go for the keywords with the much higher monthly searches is because they will be much more difficult to rank for. 10 searches a month for an article you rank on the first page of Google for, is far better than 300 monthly searches for a keyword you have no chance of ranking for. See this video for more detail.
The keyword used in this video “best free keyword research tool” only has 30 monthly searches. However doing a “phrase” match in Google as per the video show than there are less than 10,000 competing pages for this phrase. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can rank an article for this phrase. Just that you have a greater chance than you would for a more competitive and/or shorter keyword phrase.
Step#2
So you’ve found a nice long tail keyword phrase to target in your article’s heading. The next step is to determine your chances of ranking a good article on Google. As you see in the video, you can type your keyword into Google in “quotes” and you get a number at the top of the page.
Target only keyword phrases with less than 10,000 competing pages
This will seem difficult at first but with practice you can find more of these phrases. Once you have found a keyword chain with less than this number of phrase matches, remove the quotes and see how many pages rank overall. If the overall number of pages is less than 1,000,000, you have a winner!
Choose only keyword phrases which have less than 1 million competing pages overall
Again you might find this difficult at first but it is worth the effort to find these little gems! Look also at the first few pages which rank without quotes for this title. Write a better article than the one at the top of the Google’s results page. This is the ‘nuts and bolt’s of successful niche blogging for profit. If you can find these little goldmines and write good articles, you’ll get traffic.
Step #3
These first two steps are definitely the hardest, particularly if you have chosen a competitive niche. If you have a nice untapped niche for your blog you can aim a little higher and go for more competitive keywords. Once you have your keyword use it to title your blog.
SEO – I use an SEO plugin on my wordpress blog called SEO by Yoast. It’s a free plugin for WordPress and allows you to target your keyword through your article. It will score you on your content and optimization.
Step#4
Find the top ranking article for your keywords and write a much better article. Write at least 500 words in your article and include pictures with alt descriptions in them- (use your keyword title). Also find some other keywords around your title using the keyword planner and use them for your tags. If you do the same research on them you will have more chance of ranking for those keywords too.
Step #5
Once you have completed your article publish it and share, share, share. Don’t expect Google to rank it on the first page. It might not do! However by following all these steps you are giving yourself the best possible chance. However, share your article on social media and with people you know. Back links from social media and other sharing sites give a good impression that your article is being shared organically. This will help to boost it in the searches. I use Buffer.com to share articles through many social media platforms in one single click.
Niche Blogging For Profit
Niche blogging for profit does work but it also takes time and effort. You must maintain consistent effort and continually ‘tweek’ your content so that you are targeting not only the right visitors but also delivering the right content for those particular visitors. If you find some content is ranking well and getting visitors go back and look at your content. Ask yourself:
- Is this content right for those visitors?
- How can I promote my products to those visitors in a better way?
- Are the keywords attracting the right kind of visits?
Knowledge and Action
I had this knowledge long before I put it into action. I was easily distracted and didn’t quite believe in it wholeheartedly. The steps laid out here do work to gather the right traffic to your website if followed carefully. However, choosing the right products is another matter entirely. Some products are better than others.
Best Affiliate Products To Promote
Niche blogging for profit is also about choosing the right products to promote on your website or blog. The best affiliate products to promote are the ones you believe in and which match your interests and passions. However, in order to make your internet business more viable it’s worth pointing out the products which I have found to be most successful for me. This education platform provides training and mentorship for affiliate marketers and a compensation structure which benefits from the following online affiliate model:
- Memberships – memberships offer more value and give you more opportunity to make monthly commissions rather than one-off sales.
- High Ticket Products – High ticket products allow you to off-set advertising costs and benefit from more leverage in your affiliate business
- Products with a community – Community based products offer more value and people are more likely to stay within a community if it helps them move forwards
- Sales team built in – A built in sales structure means you don’t have do to any selling personally
- Up-selling done for you – Choosing affiliate products with a built in up-sell means you can make more per single sale on the back-end and with existing customers.
Learn more about affiliate marketing and promoting high ticket items here.