In a particularly competitive niche, it will likely take much longer to build traffic through blogging due to the competition. In a less competitive niche it may be quicker to build traffic, but niches with low competition tend to be more difficult to monetise.

Getting this right isn’t just about picking a topic you love. Although choosing a topic you have an interest in will definitely make content creation more sustainable. If you choose a topic just for the money though, you’ll likely burn out. Conversely, if you choose a topic just because you love it, it may be difficult to monetise. So you need to do both.

Blogging For Profit – Choosing A Bad Niche

After six months of blogging about mushroom harvesting I’d had enough! I picked that particular niche because I thought I could rank on Google for it. I did and was at the top of Google for my chosen keyword “when to harvest mushrooms”! Unfortunately for me, this topic was pretty difficult to monetise. Also after a few months of blogging, I was absolutely done writing about it. Each post had to be thoroughly researched, since I knew nothing of this topic. I wasn’t even vaguely interested in the topic either – just about making money online!

So even though I did manage to get free traffic to by blog, I was unable to monetise it or sustain my interest in it over the longer term. I soon burned out and another blogger (who was much more into this subject) took over the top placement. This person was actually uploading videos on a regular basis of their mushroom harvesting activities! How could I compete with this clear passion?

So the first thing I’d say when choosing a topic to blog about is at least make it something you want to learn about. Ideally find a topic you can write and create content about over several months or even years. That way, you’re giving yourself the best possible chance of success.

Blogging For Profit – Know Your Product

It’s well worth knowing what product you’re going to be promoting well before you choose your niche. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself several months in looking for a way to monetise all that content you’ve created. If, like me, you’ve picked a bad topic for monetisation, you’ll find all the work has been for nothing – at least in the monetary sense.

Ideally find a product or service you can promote as an affiliate that you believe in and can stand behind. You can also monetise your blog with Google Adsense or other similar ad platforms. However, you’ll only earn tiny amounts from monetising in this way, and you’ll need thousands of daily visits just to make a pittance. So I’d recommend finding a topic you can monetise with an affiliate product; preferably one which pays out larger commissions and recurring commissions too! With a recurring commission affiliate program, such as a membership program or software, you stand to earn a lot more from each sale. With a single “one off” sale, you need to keep making sales to keep making money.

Good products to promote offer huge lifetime value and pay out recurring commissions to affiliates.

Blogging For Profit – Found Your Niche?

Once you have found your niche you can build a niche website around your target keywords. This can give you a head start as far as free traffic is concerned, particularly if you’re careful about doing your keyword research and you choose a keyword which is relatively uncompetitive but well targeted for your topic.

A niche website can help you rank your content for a particular keyword. However there’s plenty more to do in order to build a good amount of traffic to your site. To find other keyword combinations within your niche you can use Google’s keyword planner. Type your main keyword into the planner and look at the other variations which it gives you. Then, set about writing content for each of these keywords.

Use an SEO tool such as Yoast SEO and other plugins which will help you rank your content and promote it via social media. See affiliate tools for more tools which bloggers use to get more visitors for free.

Keep creating new fresh content for several months and use an automated tool to syndicate it throughout your social media accounts. You should start seeing some hits on your website within a few weeks if you’re posting and sharing regularly. You can also write guest blogs on similar websites to your own. This helps you build up a backlink profile which Google uses to determine rankings for your content.

This can be a long labour intensive process but you can also outsource much of it to SEO companies and content creators.

Email Marketing

It’s well worth building an email list from your blog too. Without an email list you’re relying on traffic from your blog converting into sales. This happens only for a tiny amount of your website visitors because more people need a few contact points or “touch points” before buying something online. With email marketing you can accomplish this much more easily than through blogging alone.

On a blog website, you only have a small “window” of opportunity to get your visitors to make a purchase. But once you get them on your email list, by offering a freebie on your site, you can send them messages on a daily basis over a much longer time period.

Often people will buy from an email list after weeks, months or even years of having been on it. But on a website, they are much less likely to return.

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