Are you thinking of starting a blog? Well, the first thing you need to do is to select a niche you want to blog on.
Table of Contents
Why blog?
There are many reasons to start a blog and the most common reason why people want to start a blog is to achieve financial freedom. Imagine being able to escape the rat race. You’d quit your job, travel, spend more time with family and friends, and do anything else you desire while only working 10 hours or less a week on blogging. You’re location-independent. You can be anywhere in the world as long as there is an internet connection.
Blogging is the lowest cost business to start with the greatest return. This explains why so many people want to start a blog.
Can you make a living blogging?
You can certainly make a living blogging. You should give it at least 1–2 years. Most people fail at blogging because they quit too soon.
Michelle from Makingsenseofcents.com makes 100k per month blogging with her personal finance blog.
Anatasia from anatasiablogger.com make 30k per month blogging with her blog that focuses on teaching others to become a blogger.
Many people are not only able to make a living blogging but are also able to completely transform their life with the kind of money that their blogs are able to bring in.
You should aim to produce at least 200–500 high-quality articles if you want to have a chance of making a living blogging.
What is a niche?
A niche is the category of articles that you’ll write for your blog. Personal finance is a niche. Pet is a niche. Food is a niche. Health is a niche. You need to select your niche instead of blogging about whatever comes to your mind.
Your articles could be about anything if you don’t have a niche. Having a niche allows you to build up authority within the niche you chose faster. That way, when someone types in “100 ways to save money this year” Google may recommend your article because your niche is in personal finance. Someone else who wrote an article on saving money may not get recommended by Google because their site covers all sorts of things and specializes in nothing.
Just like how if you want someone to fix your hearing loss, you wouldn’t go to a general doctor because they aren’t specialized in that. You’ll go to a doctor who specializes in hearing loss. For the same reason, you should choose a niche to blog on.
Niching down allows you to state that you’re an authority figure in the subject so when someone needs something solved, they’ll come to you.
What is a sub-niche?
A sub-niche is the sub-category of niches under a particular niche. Let’s say you decide to start a personal finance blog. Instead of covering everything from investing, retirement, making money, saving money, etc, you pick one sub-niche to focus writing all your articles on.
Why would someone create a blog on a sub-niche?
Creating a blog on a sub-niche allows one to build up authority on the subject faster than if they were to select a broad niche.
They may have to write a lot more articles to cover all sub-niches in a broad niche and it may take them a long time to establish authority in the subject. This is the reason why a lot of people may decide to begin with a sub-niche and then expand to other sub-niches until they cover all the sub-niches within a broad niche.
Are lucrative blogging niches too competitive?
One reason why a lot of people wouldn’t start blogging is because they think it’s too competitive. Some people would actively avoid a popular niche because they think there’s too much competition in the space and their content would never get seen.
There’s is enough pie for everyone. If you were to write an article on “what is money” in the personal finance niche, you probably won’t get too many clicks because too many articles have already been written about “what is money”. Your article is just one of many.
However, if you were to write an article on “Why does my German Shepherd shed so much” in the dog niche, you would probably get quite a bit of click because not a lot of articles have been written about the subject matter. Even if some people have already written some articles on the matter, you can still rank really high on Google if your article is better.
You need to give your blog article at least 8 months since you first released it to fully rank on Google. You may not see the result right away but if you’re writing high-quality content that not a lot of people have written about, you can still make quite a bit of money and drive quite of bit of traffic.
You’ll have to do your research on what to write your articles on. Articles that not a lot of people have written about and/or the information isn’t too complete on the first page of Google. If you can find missing gaps in the niche you’re in, and you’re there to fill it in, you can still make good money in a competitive niche.
Should I start blogging in a lucrative niche?
Even though most lucrative niches are more competitive, it’s worth getting into a lucrative niche because there is still money to be made if you can find gaps in the niche.
Should I start blogging in a niche that nobody blogs in?
This is kind of a tricky question because there could be golden niches that not a lot of people are in but enough people are actively searching for. You need to do your research to determine if there are enough people searching for the content in your niche. If there is, you should totally jump in and do it.
Where do bloggers make their money from?
There are many ways to make money as a blogger. For most bloggers, they make most of their money from these sources:
(According to Rankiq) The below figure is of bloggers who make between $7500 — $25k / month from their blog.
- Affiliate marketing (42.2%)
- Ads (33.3%)
- Post sponsors (12.2%)
- Courses (11.1%)
- Services (1.1%)
What are the 4 highest-earning niches for blogs?
(According to Rankiq)
The 4 niches that earn the most money are the following: (from blogs that were making more than $2000 per month with more than 50,000 monthly sessions)
- Food ($9169/month)
- Personal finance ($9100/month)
- Lifestyle/mom ($5174/month)
- Travel ($5000/month)
We’ll talk about the other profitable niches in the last section.
What blogging niches get the most traffic?
The food niche not only is one of the niches with the highest earnings but the niche that gets the most traffic.
More traffic doesn’t always mean more money because in certain niches you can make quite a bit of money with little traffic while with other niches the opposite is true: you may get a lot of traffic but not a lot of money in return. This is something to think about when selecting a niche to blog in.
(According to Rankiq) About 43% of blogs with more than 50,000 monthly traffic are food blogs. All the other blogs that get more than 50,000 monthly views are not in the food niche, they are in the following niches:
- Food blogs (43%)
- Lifestyle/mom (13%)
- Travel (10%)
- Arts/Crafts (8%)
- Outdoors (<5%)
- Beauty/fashion (<5%)
- Personal finance (<5%)
- Homeschool (<5%)
- Pets (<5%)
- Gardening (<5%)
- Decorating (<5%)
- Health/fitness (<5%)
- Tech (<5%)
What are the most lucrative niches to blog in?
Below is a list of the 10 most lucrative blogging niches in 2022. Try to pick a niche that you’re interested in. Preferably, this is also a niche that you have some expertise in or is willing to learn more about.
1. Personal finance
Personal finance encompasses a lot of different things. This is also where the big money is. Everybody needs money and most of us want to learn how to make more money, save more money, turn our money into more money, etc.
There are different sub-niches in personal finance. You can choose one of the following sub-niches to start.
- Saving money
- Investing
- Debt management
- Budgeting
- Retirement
2. Health and fitness
The health and fitness niche is very broad. You have to pick a sub-niche to begin from. There are huge companies out there with a whole team that is dedicated to writing all they can about health and fitness. They can produce 50 articles a day to cover all aspects of health and fitness. You shouldn’t compete with them by starting a general health and fitness blog unless you have the money to hire a whole team of writers to work for you.
Something to note is that with a health niche, Google has to learn to trust you first since this information may harm a person if the quality of the article isn’t good. Say you tell people it’s okay to sand their teeth when in fact, it can lead to nerve damage, such article should be ignored. Google needs more time to trust your site if your niche is in the health niche.
There are many good health and fitness sub-niches to start from. For example:
- Gluten-free diet
- Losing weight for women
- Gaining muscles for men
- Diabetes management
- Yoga
- Marathon-training
- Hair-health
- Skin-care
3. Food
The food niche is huge. There is a lot of money to be made in the food niche. Mostly from affiliate marketing and ads. It’s best to pair your blog with Instagram and/or Tiktok and/or Youtube. Your blog can be the place where you post your recipes. The sub-niches in the food blog includes:
- Vegan
- Seafood
- Asian
- Mediterranean
- Dessert
- Depression-era cooking
- Red meat
- Food for babies
- Food for kids
4. Personal development
Personal development can be many things. If you’re a trained mental health professional or have a psychology background, this can be a great niche to blog in. The sub-niches in personal development include:
- Building confidence
- Overcoming PTSD
- Overcoming social anxiety disorder
- Dealing with the loss of loved ones
- Growing leadership skills
- Depression
- Bipolar disorder
- Schizophrenia
- Happiness
5. Pet
Everyone loves their pet and many people are willing to spend a lot of money on their pet. In fact, when people lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic, the last expense they cut is on their pets. The sub-niches include:
- Cats
- Dogs
- Hamsters
- Fishes (tropical, cold-water)
- Birds
6. Lifestyle
You’re the face of your brand if you pursue the lifestyle niche. The lifestyle niche can be lucrative. If you can give people a reason t follow you, you can affiliate market with any brand that you personally use.
Say you own a personal finance blog, you can’t affiliate market pet products because it’s not a pet brand. But with lifestyle blogs, people grow to know you as a person. They know that you have a dog, you have 3 kids, you live in Japan, you do yoga, and you like baking. You can literally affiliate market anything that you use in your life.
Many moms start a lifestyle blog to share their journey of becoming a mom and raising kids.
Here are the sub-niches in lifestyle blogs
- Mommy blog
- Living in Japan blog
- Living in New York blog
- Teacher blog
- College student blog
- Father blog
- Single parent blog
- Moving to a new country blog
- Country living blog
7. Travel
It’s many people’s dream to travel around the world. If you’re able to travel around the world or want to make money traveling the world, this is something you can do.
It’ll take you some time before you can make money with a travel blog so you may need to have a job that you can do online if you want to make a travel blog. You should also take into account how the pandemic may affect your ability to freely travel in and out of different countries.
- Traveling with kids
- RV travel in America
- Digital nomads travel
- Sea travel via your own boat
- Asia travel
- Europe travel
- Traveling for cheap
- Traveling by yourself
- Traveling with pets
Afterthought
If you want to make money blogging, the first thing you need to do is to just start. Go ahead and pick a niche and dive in.
If you contemplate too long, you may never start and you’ll look back one day and wonder what if you had.
Nobody tells you to pick one niche and that’s it. You can always change your blogging niche if you want to.
A lot of people blog in the lifestyle niche because it’s their life and they have the most knowledge in how they live their life as opposed to other niches that they have little knowledge in.
You’ll learn things as you go along. For now, all you have to do is to begin. Good luck on your blogging journey.
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