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With the ever-expanding reach of the Internet and an audience of web surfers that continues to grow on a minute-by-minute basis, you can still easily make money by niche blogging. You don’t have to start with a huge following or be famous to attain a reasonable, money-making digital reach.
There are only three things that are required. The three Ps of blogging:
1. Passion
2. Patience
3. Perseverance
Passion: Don’t pick a blog topic on the basis of profitability alone. Select an appropriate niche for you. What do you love? What consumes your thoughts? What topic do you annoy your friends with the most? If you find a niche involving your passion, you’ll never run out of topics to write about.
Patience: Realizing profit from blogging takes time. It will never be instantaneous. It takes time and effort to develop an audience and organic traffic through a healthy relationship with search engines, otherwise known as SEO.
Perseverance: Haven’t made a dime after a month? Don’t give up! Keep developing content, keep to a regular schedule, and have fun while doing it. If you build it, ‘they’ will come.
So what is a blog ‘niche’, anyway?
A blog niche is a smaller, more defined category or market segment.
Examples:
Main category: Dogs
Niche category: Dog training
Main category: Book Reviews
Niche category: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
Main category: Hollywood Gossip
Niche category: Arrested A-listers
The perfect niche for you could be absolutely anything – the possibilities are endless! Think about what you love, where your passion is. Then take that idea, and narrow it down a little further. You could whittle it down based on geography or to a subcategory within your passion, or both.
If you think there wouldn’t be any interest in your field of choice, you would be wrong. No matter how prosaic or boring you think your passion might be to others, there will be a surplus of web surfers out there who will manage to find your musings. And you, in your little corner of the massive World Wide Web, may just be the one to inspire and engage on this front.
There are also ways to organically capture and drive traffic to your blog with surfers who wouldn’t have ended up there ordinarily – but we’ll get into that later.
The 10 Most Profitable Blog Topics
Naturally, there are blog categories that are more profitable than others. This doesn’t mean that you should jump into one of these categories. However, if your passion involves any of these ‘biggies’, you might want to consider using a part of that theme in your niche selection.
Each of these categories has a number of topics that can be extrapolated and developed.
1. How to Make Money Online
This is the obvious number one money-making blog category, aptly and hilariously so. This article serves as a niche in this very category: making money from home by niche blogging.
Successful Niche Example: Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse teaches people how to run a successful money-making blog on his site ProBlogger, and rakes in an estimated $40,000 per month in doing so.
Darren Rowse took the main theme of making money online and turned it into a niche by showing people how to earn an income online through blogging. His success is stunning and only proves that niche blogging certainly does pad the bank account.
2. Personal Finance
This category isn’t about making money, but about money and asset management. It can be broken down further into investing, currency, budgeting, saving, and other aspects of personal finance.
Successful Niche Example: Rosemarie Groner
Rosemarie Groner’s successful money and household budgeting blog called Busy Budgeter brings in an estimated $86,000 per month, give or take.
Groner took the main category of personal finance and helmed a niche blog on family budgeting geared toward disorganized people. It was the perfect gap filler that she now dominates.
3. Health and Fitness
New fitness and diet fads, healthy living, and online weight loss venues are all the rage.
Successful Niche Example: Jessica Castaneda
Jessica’s fitness blog Easy Living Today is positively attractive, and she’s bringing in a reported $20,000 per month by staying active in life and on the keyboard.
She began a blog within the main category of health and fitness and narrowed it down to her niche of meal planning, especially for busy moms. It was a home run of an idea.
4. Recipes
How many times have you looked up recipes online? A recipe site along with its numerous recipe and food niches can bring in plenty of traffic.
Successful Niche Example: Jennifer Debth
Jennifer Debth’s website and blog called Show Me the Yummy pulls in a whopping $46,000 per month.
Jennifer began a blog in the main category of recipes, and then made a niche for herself by creating and posting “easy” recipes. Because of this strategy, she dominates the search engine results with listings for easy recipes.
5. Beauty and Fashion
Again, the possibilities are endless. From make-up tutorials to hairstyle directions to before-and-afters, to clothes design or reviews, anything goes!
Successful Niche Example: Chiara Ferragni
Chiara’s fashion blog The Blonde Salad has been running for ten years and has turned into a monster. Her own fashion brand and website brings in an estimated $200,000 per month.
Chiara began a beauty and fashion blog with a high emphasis on making her own identity and brand stick out. By doing so, she became a top influencer in fashion years ago.
6. Personal Development
Otherwise known as life coaching, this category draws in the crowds. I’m sure you can already think of a few people off the top of your head who are life coaches or gurus dedicated to self-improvement and achieving happiness.
Successful Niche Example: Gina Trapani
A simple site dedicated to life hacks, Gina Trapani’s site Life Hacker is reported to bring in $110,000 per month.
This personal development site filled a great niche with simple, fun life hacks. These tidbits of wisdom are perfect for sharing, and she went viral.
7. Arts and Crafts
Widely-searched and investigated, DIY arts and crafts sites score a ton of traffic.
Successful Niche Example: Abby Lawson
Abby Lawson’s site is a mix of home organization and decorating that people have come to know and love. Her site brings in an estimated $41,000 per month.
Abby began a blog in the arts and crafts category but truly narrowed it down to focus on organization and home decorating crafts for families and moms. She owns the area now!
8. Parenting
As the population grows, so do the number of people entering parenthood. First-timers gravitate toward parenting wisdom in droves.
Successful Niche Example: Heather B. Armstrong
This personal blog isn’t so much about parenting but involves motherhood with some snark and comical attitude. Heather Armstrong’s blog Dooce brings in an estimated $50,000 per month.
Armstrong began a blog in the parenting category and infused it with her own brand of humor, distinguishing herself from other mommy blogs easily.
9. Travel
Travel blogs capture traffic from all types of users. People do their research before taking a vacation or traveling to a location for work. They might just find your content!
Successful Niche Example: Heather and Pete Reese
Mr. and Mrs. Reese run a family travel blog called It’s a Lovely Life. The money they make from the blog supports their traveling lifestyle. Imagine making around $170,000 per month just from a blog – because they do!
The Reeses ventured into the travel blogging category, and emerged with their own particular niche of traveling with the family and with kids.
10. Marketing
Advertising has primarily moved from paper to digital, with the latter offering a larger variety of ways to market a business such as email marketing, website design, landing pages, pay-per-click ads, and more.
Successful Niche Example: Neil Patel
Neil Patel is one of the most prolific and successful bloggers in the history of blogging and he focuses on website marketing. He’s publicized his own earnings of over $350,000 per month.
Mr. Patel began a blog in the marketing category and owned his own niche with online marketing. A very successful move.
How Can You Find a Great Niche?
If you’re looking to make money online, which you surely are, the blog niche should be profitable. You want to find a niche that has the potential for making money. At the same time, this niche should be something you know a lot about, something you’re passionate about and be within an area where you would contribute to the community through depth of knowledge.
It might seem like a tall order, but we have some steps you can take to help find your perfect blog niche.
Pick something you love to talk about
If you love to talk about it, you probably know a lot about the subject. It is fundamentally imperative that your chosen subject is something you love to discuss because you’ll be writing up articles on the subject on a regular basis, hopefully daily. When people are out of fresh ideas, that’s when they drop the ball and stop posting on their blog. And if they’re not posting, they’re not making any money.
You don’t have to be an absolute expert by any means. The passion you imbue into your posts is what makes the real difference. Each topic should be something you’re absolutely excited about. Your excitement will be contagious and your post will stimulate dialogue. That’s what you want!
Do Market Research
The subject you pick should have a steady amount of interest and there are a few ways to determine online interest level.
Visit Google Trends and search for your term using a five-year analysis. For example, let’s say you wanted to enter the recipe category and narrow it down to healthy dessert recipes. Running a check on ‘Healthy Desserts’ yields the type of chart you want to see.
The numbers on the left are not the number of searches completed, but the interest level on a scale of 0-100. What you want to see for interest is a steady interest in the middle. In this case, ‘Healthy Desserts’ provides a great opportunity for a niche blog.
If you receive a chart that appears to be declining over time, you’ll want to try another topic. Another type of chart to avoid is one the varies wildly and often hits zero.
As you can see, the subject peaks regularly during the holidays but spends most of its time near the bottom. A term yielding these results would be difficult to monetize.
Take a look at the competition
You can get a great idea of the competition you’ll face with a Google search. Conduct a search and see what results come up. Once again, we’ll use the ‘Healthy Desserts’ key term.
There are a couple of things you’ll want to take into consideration on the search results.
The first is the number of results pulled at the very top. This example shows 570 million results. That’s your competition and it’s quite a large number. This doesn’t mean there are 570 million website competitors, but rather pages, many belonging to the same website.
If you scroll down to look at the top results, we find that most of the results reveal an article based on this topic, but not a website itself. So if you were to start a blog called Healthy Desserts, there is potential to run the search engine results because keywords in a domain name have more search engine power than in an article title.
So far, ‘Healthy Desserts’ is looking good.
However, if you find too much direct competition, you can break this topic down even further by doing a related search. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results, and you’ll find searches related to ‘Healthy Desserts’.
“Easy Healthy Desserts’ or ‘Healthy Desserts for Kids’ are possible contenders.
The next step is to see how many monthly searches are conducted for your search term. Head on over to Google’s Keyword Planner and navigate to ‘Keyword Ideas’.
Conduct a search for your niche idea’s key term. Again, we will try ‘Healthy Desserts’.
Perfect results. This is what you’re looking for. I think we may have inadvertently discovered a blog niche with amazing potential.
The results show high monthly searches of 10k – 100k. This is an enormous amount of potential traffic. Better yet, the competition is low. This competition relates to PPC advertising.
Try a few different variations to find your best possible niche.
Test Profitability
The goal is to make money. You can easily see if your niche idea is profitable by investigating ads placed for your key terms. If companies are shelling out money to advertise on Google, the site is making money from the placement of these ads.
Your main term may be too broad for PPC ads, but if you find ads placed under related searches, your niche is likely profitable. Otherwise, companies wouldn’t be paying for ads based on those key terms.
If companies are paying for ads within your niche subject, they’ll pay for ads on your site. That’s how you monetize. That’s the end game. You can use Amazon Adsense or profit with affiliate marketing or a combination of both.
Common Mistakes Made by New Bloggers Looking for a Topic
There are a few common pitfalls many first-time bloggers fall into while trying to find the perfect blog niche.
Forcing or searching for your passion
Let’s face it, not everyone has something they are absolutely and utterly devoted to. If you are not sure what your passion is, don’t force it. Because that’s not passion.
Being passionate about something happens over the years. That yearning and burning about a particular topic is a drive that is developed over time, and not suddenly discovered.
While you may not have this devoted passion, you likely have a deep interest in something. Maybe many things. Starting a blog and blogging about that topic will help develop that passion we’re talking about.
But the wrong thing to do is go searching for it. As I said before, it’s not something to be discovered or awakened within. It is something you cultivate over time.
Choosing a category that is too broad
If your category is far too broad, fewer searches will find your blog posts. You’ll be drowned in a sea of competitors and related searches. And there will be nothing to set you apart.
If your subject material is too broad, you’ll fail to motivate a large enough crowd. Without motivation, you won’t gather a regular audience. This is why it is truly important to whittle down your blogging idea into a smaller, more profitable niche.
Shying away from competition
Healthy competition is great in a free market society. Competition keeps prices low, improves quality, provides choice, inspires innovation, and encourages all participants to do better in general.
Don’t be frightened of the competition. If you discover a great niche with plenty of traffic and there is another blogging competitor out there, don’t toss the idea simply because you think, “Oh, I’ll never capture traffic with that competitor.” If the search traffic is there, you will capture your fair share.
You can also learn from your competition. By studying your competitor, you can see what works and possibly improve upon the idea. This is how competition generally makes us better.
Not blogging regularly
A profitable blog niche doesn’t pick up and fall off over and over with days and weeks between posts. A successful blogger makes an editorial calendar and sticks with it. You should post daily, Monday through Friday.
If you find yourself lapsing between posts and going longer and longer between each one, your blog is going to fail. It can be difficult to find new and interesting topics to post, but do your best. Each piece doesn’t need to be worthy of a Pulitzer. You can throw in some light-hearted and quick posts. Just as long as you keep blogging!
Choosing a blog niche based on profitability alone
While you want to be profitable, if you know absolutely nothing about the topic but jump right on in for the profit potential, it’s not going to work. For many reasons.
Your articles and blog posts need to be good. They need to be passionate. If you know squat about the subject, it won’t do very well at all. Readers will know that you’re a poseur.
You’ll also find it incredibly difficult to come up with topics to write about. If you’re not knowledgable or passionate about the subject, you won’t be inspired to write. Your blog posts will drop off and you’ll eventually give up.
Not defining your Unique Selling Point
Your USP (Unique Selling Point) is what defines you and sets you apart from the competition. What makes you different? What makes you special? Why should your audience pay attention to you instead of that other guy?
Your USP can be based on a number of things. It can be based on your credentials, your personality, your humor or lack thereof, your knowledge, and your style.
Also, the way you deliver your information and blog posts is a large slice of the USP pie. What’s your style?
Summary
Remember the three Ps of blogging:
1. Passion
2. Patience
3. Perseverance
Definition: A blog niche is a smaller subcategory within a larger, broad category. It could be a subcategory or a subcategory.
The ten most profitable blog categories:
1) How to make money online
2) Personal Finance
3) Health and Fitness
4) recipes
5) Beauty and Fashion
6) Personal Development
7) Arts and Crafts
8) Parenting
9) Travel
10) Marketing
To find a great niche, you should pick a top you’re genuinely excited about, one you love to discuss. Do the market research and check for keyword trends, competition, and search volume. Also, make sure that your niche has profit potential!
Common mistakes:
1) Forcing a passion
2) Choosing a category that is too broad
3) Shying away from competition
4) Not sticking to a regular blogging schedule
5) Choosing a niche based on profitability alone
6) Not defining your Unique Selling Point
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