You can make or break your blog if you don’t target the proper audience with your writing. If you don’t know who you’re writing for or what people want to see on your website, it doesn’t matter how good your writing is or how beautiful your design is. Finding your blog niche is challenging, but once you do, all you have to do is produce tailor-made blog posts for that specific audience, and you’ll be well on your way to blogging success.
When you’re first starting, the chances of making the right niche choice are vanishingly small. Consider it! Most bloggers start writing about topics they’re truly enthusiastic about, only to tire of the endeavor once they realize they won’t make any money from it.
If you’re serious about making blogging your career, you should base your niche selection not on personal interests but on these four practical considerations:
- Effective Use of Professional Leverage
- Prospective Income from an Audience
- Prospects for Affiliate Marketing
- Keyword Search
Make the most of the leverage you’ve got in the business
The next phase in learning how to create a blog is to find your strategic advantages, which you may do after you’ve identified a profitable audience for those who deliver value.
Things to consider when choosing a blog niche:
- Can I turn this into a blog that makes money?
- Where do I stand in terms of my career right now?
- Who would be the first website to accept me as a guest blogger if I had the chance to pitch them?
- How well-connected am I in my field?
If you want your blog to go far, you need to establish your authority in the field.
To gain clout, you must go against your natural inclinations and make the most of your personal and professional networks and other advantages. You’ll be doing a lot of networking and reaching out to new people with your blog. Among these methods is networking to publish guest posts on high-authority sites in your area and acquire backlinks with a high Domain Authority (DA).
If you’re just getting started, you might not have a lot of people you know or any content out there. You may be wondering, “Why would someone highlight me?”
Your professional experience will come in very handy here. For instance, if you’re a photographer, you might already have a set of regular customers, connections through meet-ups, and even influential acquaintances in your field. You can speed up the development of your blog by capitalizing on these connections in the future.
Get the most out of your available resources. Because of these benefits, guest posting, backlinks, and social sharing will help you get off to a running start.
Your blog niche should have the potential for affiliate marketing
When deciding how to make money off your site, You always look to affiliate marketing first. It’s the least time-consuming and hands-off way to generate income; once you acquire traffic, you can monetize even while you sleep.
Affiliate marketing entails promoting the goods and services of other companies in exchange for a cut of the profits generated.
You may become an associate of just about any major company nowadays. Once you’ve applied and been accepted to one of their affiliate programs, you’ll be able to access your personal affiliate links to use on your blog, along with click and sale reports and information on when you may expect to get paid.
To get your affiliate marketing campaign off the ground, follow these steps:
Join an affiliate network or a company’s website and apply to become an affiliate. To do so, you’ll need your own website and a custom domain for your email rather than using a free service like Google or Yahoo.
Once you have been given permission, you may insert your affiliate link into any post on your site.
When a user hits that link, your browser stores a cookie on their hard drive; the cookie remembers their purchase history for a set period (30, 60, or 90 days, typically) and credits you with the sale.
What images pop into your head right now when you hear the word “blogging”?
Perhaps they’re writing about the latest purchases they’ve made for their family on a lifestyle blog. Or a blogger who offers helpful tips on how to shed pounds while simultaneously promoting weight-loss-related affiliate services. It could be someone of interest writing about their own life.
While they may be entertaining, these aren’t the markets that will provide the most income for your business. The following formula should be used instead:
- You need to rank for keywords that generate a lot of affiliate income if you want people to visit your website.
- Making money as an affiliate requires both search engine visibility and visitor numbers.
- Blogging may be lucrative, but only if you learn how to leverage affiliate marketing to your advantage.
Here are a few illustrations for affiliate marketing:
For example, “best laptop of 2020,” “best virtual reality headsets,” or “best Mac accessories” could all be relevant search terms in the tech industry.
Best travel insurance and finest coworking spaces are two examples of keywords that could be used in the tourism industry.
The most fabulous credit cards, vehicle loans, and property insurance are just a few examples from the realm of personal finance.
This may refer to the finest website builders, web hosting providers, or email marketing programs in advertising.
Consumers looking for reviews online will use these “best” terms in their searches.
Customers who aren’t ready to buy something right away (and want more information) are more likely to visit a blog with in-depth content about the “greatest” thing.
You could look for a new laptop by searching for “best laptop of 2020.”
Just now, type that into Google and see what comes up in the first ten results.
Looking at the top 10 results, you’ll see they’re all affiliate links. Not a single real company sells computers, as you may have noticed. Laptops are recommended solely by affiliates; there is no mention of Best Buy, Walmart, Dell, or HP.
Next, try searching “best credit cards” online and see what comes up.
The top 10 results are all affiliate blogs, so it’s not surprising that they all rank highly.
When searching for a product, why do these affiliate sites rank higher than the actual company offering them?
They specialize in penning in-depth reviews that are loved by both search engines and people.
It’s been found that nearly half of the customers (49%) trust suggestions from people they consider influential.
You’ll soon notice that the most successful blogs essentially review sites that earn money from affiliate commissions on posts with numbered lists. Nevertheless, the truth is that the affiliate blog’s top suggestions are chosen solely based on the revenue they generate rather than the quality of the products they promote.
Learning this is a crucial step in learning how to create a blog since, after that, you will start noticing affiliate sites everywhere.
Now, while you’re thinking about starting a blog and figuring out your specialty, consider modeling your blog after the following:
- Business: The Balance SMB, FitSmallBusiness, FinancesOnline.
- Tech: Tom’s Guide, Techradar, Wire Cutter, CNET.
- Finance: NerdWallet, Fool.com, WalletHub, CardRatings.
- Travel: Nomadic Matt, The Points Guy, Expert Vagabond.
Finance, technology, tourism, business, and marketing are currently the most lucrative areas for new blogs. But you have a lot of other choices. Your blog should be able to generate income through affiliate marketing; we’ll discuss keyword research in more detail later.
Audience Revenue Potential
The trick is to zero in on a topic where you excel and address a problem your target audience faces. Yet it’s not enough to address an issue; it has to be one that people are prepared to pay to have resolved.
It’s crucial for you, as a blogger, to have an in-depth familiarity with the problems faced by your readers so that you can provide them with solutions tailored specifically to their needs.
Moreover, it would be best if you began by examining your own actions.
Inquire about your target audiences.
When you’ve been through something, you can empathize with others who are going through it.
The first step is figuring out who you’re talking to.
Learning how much money your target market is ready to spend to alleviate their problems is the second (and maybe more crucial) stage.
This is how much money your audience could make you.
It cannot be stressed enough how vital knowledge of your target market and their willingness to pay for a solution is. Say, for argument’s sake, that you want to launch a blog geared toward Millennials that covers topics like human resources and employment advice.
Your blog entries could attract a wide range of visitors, including those actively seeking employment, established professionals, and students. Let’s imagine you want to make money off a blog in this field, and so you design a sales funnel:
To draw online readers, you create fresh content.
The next step is to make a “job interview checklist” as a lead magnet to get them to sign up for your email list.
Next, you’ll insert affiliate links to the goods you’re selling.
Thirdly, a product called “The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Online Course” is available for $300. You can’t go wrong with such an attitude!
This is a standard practice among novice bloggers. After two or three years of hard work creating content and growing an email list, you will be able to start earning passive income.
Nevertheless, you can multiply your blog’s earning potential by shifting your focus ever-so-slightly.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; just shift your focus from potential employees to hiring managers. Changing your blog’s focus from consumers to businesses is as simple as installing a business-to-business (B2B) module.
There is less risk of not getting paid by a business because of their more fabulous bank accounts. The great thing about taking this course of action is that your blog launch, content, and marketing funnel can all be practically identical. In contrast, the B2B aspect doesn’t end with a $300 training session. It’s complete; you can now charge five figures for virtual advisory services.
Instead of publishing a blog article on how to ace your first job interview, focus on selling your services directly to companies by conducting HR audits or providing onboarding consulting for several thousand dollars a month.
Consulting services are an excellent strategy to increase revenue in the early stages of your business when visitors are few. It’s straightforward math: if your new blog receives 100 visitors and converts 2% of them, your two purchases ought to total thousands of dollars rather than $19.99.
If you’re just starting and don’t yet have much traffic but still want to generate money, you shouldn’t worry too much about putting affiliate links and adverts on your site. Instead, focus on developing a high-end consulting product.
Don’t forget that knowing where your audience hurts is not enough.
Some of your clientele needs to belong to a profitable company niche and be willing to pay on a regular, recurring basis for you to see significant growth in your revenue. I’m hoping this strategy is helping you see why I think a new blog can generate $10,000 per month in revenue within the first three months. To put it simply, for the time being: this fresh money will be used to speed up your journey toward passive income.
Keyword Research
When deciding what topic to cover on your blog, you should first study keywords. Only one keyword should be highlighted in each blog entry. You won’t receive any clicks if they aren’t using the search bar.
In order to gain visitors to your site, you need at least a rudimentary knowledge of keyword research and SEO.
On average, people spend 6.5 hours online each day.
There are around 63,000 Google searches per second. This equates to 3.8 million searches each minute, 228 million queries per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.
Furthermore, search engine traffic that is organically generated is far more valuable than traffic from social media. People don’t just wander around the Internet aimlessly; they do searches to find answers to their questions.
The bright side is that search engine optimization tools can decipher this mountain of data. Search engine optimization (SEO) software like SEMRush and Ahrefs provide detailed information on certain keywords, such as:
- How often a keyword is looked for in a particular month is known as the monthly search volume.
- How challenging it is to rank for a particular keyword concerning the competition on a scale of 0 to 100.
- The average cost per click (CPC) indicates how much the keyword would be worth if a PPC ad were created and clicked on. It’s an effective way to gauge how valuable a keyword is.
- A high-volume, low-competition keyword list is what you are looking for.
Below are some guidelines for rating these competitive criteria.
The volume of monthly searches:
- 0-1,000: Low
- 1,000-5,000: Low/Medium
- 5,000-20,000: Medium
- 20,000-100,000: High
- 100,000+: Very High
Keyword Difficulty:
- 0-20: Low
- 21-50: Medium
- 51-75: High
- 76+: Very High
Revenue Generators
Keywords with Medium Volume, Low Competition, and High CPC.
Medium volume, low competitiveness keywords should be the first ones new blogs look up in search engines.
Note
You can see which other keywords the highest-ranking pages for your target keyword also rank for in the top 100 results by using Ahrefs’s Also Rank for Report. You may use these results to locate less common keywords to sprinkle throughout the body of your content and its subheadings.
More detailed inquiries may help you uncover valuable keywords from this report to incorporate into your blog. For instance, “cooking” can be replaced with “vegan recipes” and “marketing” with “email marketing services.”
How to get this kind of search term for your blog:
Apply a filter to the results using a tool like Ahrefs. Use a Keyword Difficulty filter with a maximum of 50 and a minimum of 1,000 monthly searches to narrow your results.
Practical uses for these keywords include:
Most of your posts should contain these keywords, which will also serve as your blog’s primary source of income. Discovering a sizable pool of low-competition, medium-volume, long-tail keywords is essential.
You may tell you’ve found a profitable niche and a pain point to solve if the search terms you’re targeting come before the question marks “how to” and “best.”
Blog Builders:
Medium-High Competition/High Volume
The second class of keywords you should target are highly competitive terms that are difficult to monetize but have significant traffic potential.
Initially, there needs to be a 25x increase in volume over the old model for these terms. Being in the top 5 places for this term could bring in between 30 and 65,000 visitors per month due to the high search traffic and several keyword variations.
In contrast to the previous set of terms, they likewise have a lesser search intent.
On your blog, here’s how to get this kind of keyword:
Apply a filter to the results using a tool like Ahrefs. Limit your results to those that meet two criteria: a low monthly search volume of at least 20,000 and a high Keyword Difficulty of at most 75.
Practical uses for these keywords include:
5–10 pillar blog entries using these keywords should be the product of extensive work and effort. Although these high-volume keywords won’t bring in money right away, they drive tons of traffic to your site and can expand the size of your email list.
Overview of Keyword Research
High-volume keywords are essential, but so are high-intent ones when it comes to running a blog.
Planning the first five posts on your blog uses the complete method. For instance, a few pieces should be extensive how-to manuals with lots of search traffic to draw readers. Some other blog entries should also contain monetizable low-volume, high-intent keywords.
You can use the following tools to conduct keyword research:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Google Keyword Planner
- Choosing Your Niche: Final Remarks
Keyword research, professional clout, the size of your target audience, and the possibility of affiliate marketing earnings all play a role in finding your niche’s true potential for profit.
Picking a specialization that brings in money will prevent you from having to put in as much unnecessary effort. One of the most crucial aspects of blogging success is this preliminary preparation.
