Not all bloggers choose profitable blog niches. Some of them get a tonne of traffic and don’t monetise. Some bloggers work really hard but get nowhere. So what are the best niches to blog in?
Profitable blog niches can range from craftwork hobbies to lifestyle businesses, parenting to frugal living and even to the “evergreen” niches of dating, romance and relationships health, fitness and money making blogs too.
An ‘evergreen’ niche is one which can be profitable all year round. These are topics such as health, wealth and romance. They’re very popular so there’s a tonne of competition. But that doesn’t mean you can join the party! It just means you’ll need to work hard to get the traffic you need to make your blog profitable.
Un-Profitable Blog Niches
To define profitable blog niches, it’s a good idea to look at what makes a blog fail! Many blogs don’t get the traffic they need to start generating sales from any kind of monetisation tactic. Whether you use affiliate marketing or Google Adsense, you need traffic to make anything!
One of the least successful blogs I created while learning about blogging was in the “off-track” niche of growing vegetables. I had a website about mushroom harvesting. I knew nothing about this when I started either, I just found a ‘gap’ in the market and realised I could rank my website quite easily. I did rank number 1 on Google for “when to harvest mushrooms”! However there were a few problems with this strategy:
- Harvesting mushrooms is a topic which doesn’t convert to sales very well! I mean, what do people need to buy when they are looking for this information? Maybe some mushrooms, fertiliser, or seeds. Or maybe a book on the topic? This isn’t a good topic for monetising with affiliate products. I struggled finding products which would sell.
- There’s a limited number of people searching in this topic. Even if I started making sales, their would be limited to the small number of monthly searches I could find from Google and other sources.
- I wasn’t interested in harvesting mushrooms! This is probably the biggest of the three reasons why my site didn’t work! I had no interest. If I was passionate about my topic, I’d still be writing about it, and creating new content today. But I just didn’t care about it! I just wanted the ‘result’.
What Makes A Blog Profitable?
I learned from the experience of building a website in this un-profitable blog niche! This niche could still be profitable for someone. But for me it wasn’t because I didn’t stick the course! It took a huge amount of effort to keep creating content for my mushroom blog!
I had to research every post I created. There was no passion or love for what I was doing, so my articles no doubt resonated this to the readers. Before long, some other blogger took first place on Google and my website slowly dropped off. I got rid of the website after it eventually disappeared from the rankings altogether!
What was missing was passion!
Write About Your Passion/Interest
There’s a few reasons why you should choose a niche in a topic you have an interest or passion for.
Firstly, it’s much easier to write about something you know about. You can enjoy building your blog, rather than it become a chore. Even in a topic you love, some days are going to be ‘down’ days where you just don’t feel like doing much.
In a topic you’re indifferent to, guess what!: this is going to be a lot more frequently! You need to put the effort into a blog in the early days to generate any kind of meaningful traffic to it. Without traffic you don’t have a chance! So, in the beginning, you need to concentrate on building your traffic by creating some awesome content, and marketing as much as possible.
It can take 6 months to a year to build up enough content on a blog to maintain a reasonable level of traffic. Here’s another reason you want to pick a topic you know about. imagine having to research everything before you write any content on it.
The other thing about writing in your passion or area of interest is that you’ll come across as more authentic. Your blog is more likely to stand out, and stand the test of time if you’re writing from knowledge and passion. Remember those teachers in school who were totally indifferent at their subjects?
They were just going through the motions for their pay at the end of the month? Were they the most inspiring ones you remember? Probably not. It was the new teachers fresh out of their training who still had passion and enthusiasm for their interest – before life killed their spirit! Be like them!
Content Is King
You may have hear the phrase “content is king”. It’s true. Your content is the start of everything. The ‘nucleus’ of your business, if you will. If you content is good, it will ‘work for you’ much better then if it’s just average or even bad! People will like and share it. They will read it through to the end too. All this signals to Google that your content is worthy of their ranking algorithm.
They look for visitors paths, time on page, social media signals and back links. They look at your SEO (search engine optimisation), keyword density and headings and image alt tags. There’s an algorithm which is like a super computer reading not only your content, but also how people view your content. If you content isn’t worth reading, sharing and linking to, Google will know soon enough.
With a greater ranking, you get more shares, likes and visitors. The cycle continues. Without any rankings the opposite happens; you drop from the rankings, people don’t see your content, you don’t get shares likes and views. You want your content to be on the upwards spiral of this pattern, not the downwards one!
Content Marketing Is ‘Queen’
For a long time I created content and just published it. I ‘hoped’ it would eventually get found by someone, or by Google. Oh what I didn’t know! I later realised that I had to be both content creator and marketer, if my blog was going to be successful.
Content marketing can take many forms. Initially, create the best content you can. You should be proud to share and link to your content. If a part of your mind doesn’t think enough of your content, you’ll subtly sabotage yourself and be more reticent at sharing it.
You can link back to your content via:
- Article marketing websites like ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com
- YouTube – create videos to go with your content and upload to YouTube
- Social media websites – share your personal profile.
- Blog commenting – find blog similar to yours.
- Forum discussion groups
- Question and Answer websites – like Quora.com
- guest posting on similar blogs to your own
You can also share your content automatically throughout your social media profiles with a content syndication plugin which connects to your profiles. You can use social share plugins which make it easy for others to do the same as they visit your blogs.
Profitable Blog Niches – Competitive/Not Competitive?
A good blog niche should have a good monetisation strategy behind it. Obscure blog topics can rank very well on Google, but they can also struggle to become profitable. Those topics with very few competing websites are uncompetitive for a reason in some cases – they won’t make money! Like my mushroom site!
If you’re looking for a very niche topic which you can rank a website for, make sure you can monetise it somehow, before you start. Those ‘evergreen’ markets which are very competitive are so for a reason too. Evergreen markets earn money all year round because of the topics they cover. Romance/relationships, health and wealth are evergreen topics. They make money all year round because people are interested in those topics all year round.
Some topics are not evergreen. My mushroom website for example, was busy at mushroom planting time, or harvesting time. The rest of the year it was really quiet. So although some topics might look good because they have less competition, you should also consider the other factors such as monetisation too and whether you can sustain the content creation process for long enough. See How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing.
Turning A Blog Into Cash
Depending on your blog topic, monetising a blog can be straight forward or fairly difficult. With Google Adsense, you just place adverts on your blog. When people click on them, you earn advertising revenue. This is good for obscure topics which don’t have obvious affiliate products to promote from them.
Any topic can be monetised with affiliate marketing if you can find the right products. If not, turning those visitors into customer can be a chore! Ideally, you should find products you would buy yourself. Then you’re being congruent with your audience. Why would they buy something you’re not prepared to? After all, you will attract like minded people to your blog. If you’re blog content attracts people who like you, they will often be like you too – and like the kinds of products you would choose yourself.
Content For Cash
One of the best ways to create content with sales in mind is though review websites. With reviews you can target customers who are in the last step of the buying cycle. They’re not looking for titbits or information, or freebies; they’re actually looking to buy something already. Your review should be the last thing they read before buying!
Even without a review site, you can still blog with this in mind. Write and create content which will lead visitors towards products. Don’t create content without this in mind. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time writing content which has nothing to do with your monetisation strategy.
This is find if you’re monetising with Google Adsense. However, you’ll need a huge amount of traffic to make this strategy a viable income. Affiliate marketing is a better strategy, even with a small amount of targeted traffic. See why target marketing is important.
Email Marketing
Most bloggers have figured out that they need to build an email list in order to build longer term relationships with their visitors. This extends the time period with which they can encourage their website visitors to make purchasing decisions. Bloggers offer something to give to their visitors on their blogs. In exchange, their subscriber gives them their email address which is used for follow up marketing.
Top bloggers build email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. One email sent to their list can earn them a nice big payday, if they build a good relationship over time by giving value to their subscribers.
See also 100 Blog Niches for some ideas of profitable blog niches.