Choosing a niche for your blog is the most important decision to make. Your niche can make or break the future success of your blog, so you need to think about your blog topic carefully. You can also build a niche website around specific keywords too which can help you get more traffic from the search engines. This website, for example, has been built around the main keywords affiliate marketing mentors, which has helped it rank for those specific keywords.
You should choose a topic in which you have some interest in too. This is for a couple of reasons. Don’t aim solely at a topic because you think it will be profitable. If you aren’t interested in your topic, it will be much more difficult to keep creating content for it. Plus, you’ll need to research every article you write, which will be much more difficult than writing about something you love. Choosing a topic you have a passion for, and interest in will mean you can keep going for much longer – and you’ll enjoy the process much more. It’s no fun writing about something you have no interest in, and you’re more likely to quit too.
Choosing A Niche For Your Blog – Monetising with Adsense
Monetising a blog can be done through either affiliate marketing or advertising (e.g. with Google Adsense). If you intend to create a blog which makes money, it’s worth thinking about how you are going to monetise it. Even if this won’t happen until later down the road.
If you’re going for earning from advertising revenue, from placing adverts on your site, it’s worth looking at what revenue you’ll be getting from each click. Advertising revenue will vary according to your traffic and the niche topic you choose. There’s a variation from $0.20 cents a click to $15 per click. The content which attracts the $15 clicks will be much more competitive, topics such as forex marketing, or online business, for example, are likely to earn more per click than stamp collecting or scrapbooking.
But these topics are also much more difficult to get traffic for, because of their competitiveness. Easier topics may get you more traffic, but you’ll earn less per click for advertising revenue.
Choosing A Niche For Your Blog – Monetising With Affiliate Marketing
Monetising your blog with affiliate marketing can work better than through placing advertising on your site with Google Adsense. Especially if you match your products to your audience well. Before choosing a niche for your blog, it can be a good idea to research the affiliate products available for you to sell. You may find certain topics don’t have much in the way of affiliate products in them. You don’t want to find this out months or years in, after you have already created heaps of content.
To find affiliate products in your niche, do a Google search for {your niche} affiliate programs. Spend some time finding a good product which you would like to become a representative for. Products can also give you ideas for content too. Ideally find an affiliate product which pays recurring commissions. This will pay off later and make your hard work more worthwhile. It’s much harder making an income from one off sales as an affiliate, especially in the beginning. See recurring commission affiliate programs.
Most bloggers will use an email marketing service too, to collect email addresses of visitors to your blog. This lets you build a longer term relationship with your visitors and will help generate more sales from your blogging efforts. See the power of email marketing.
Blogging Your Passion
Whether you are niche blogging for profit, or simply as a hobby, you will enjoy the process and have more success if you choose a topic you can sustain long term. I built a site around a topic I had no interest in, or knew nothing about once. It was a site about mushroom harvesting which I choose only to make money from! After 6 months of difficult blogging, creating content I had to research each time, I threw in the towel.
I also didn’t research any affiliate products in the topic area. I later found there were limited available products within this niche. My main reason for choosing this topic was that I though it was untapped. But even though I got a top placing for my website for the main keywords, the venture was doomed from the start. I let the site go and another more passionate blogger took its place at the top. Eventually I dropped the site as it didn’t make any money and I couldn’t bare to write any more about garlic harvesting!
Don’t make the same mistake – choose a topic you are passionate about and you have much more chance of success.
Finding A Long Tail Keyword To Build A Site Around
The strategy I like is to find a keyword which encompasses your topic well and which is already getting searches on Google. Type your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look for its longer tail derivatives. This can take some time, but it can give you a head start when it comes to traffic generation.
Keyword domain names can help you get found on the search engines, despite what some people say about it, even though it’s not essential. Ideally, find a longer tail keyword which you want to rank your site for. It should have low competition on Google for other competing websites and still get traffic which you can see using Google’s keyword planner.
See also niche affiliate marketing website for more on this.
Your keyword should bring together your interest/passion and a “buyer” keyword which attracts a good audience for your affiliate products. Avoid using keywords with “free” in them for instance because it will attract the wrong kind of audience if you want to sell affiliate products.
