What are the most profitable blog niches and can anyone be profitable with a blog? Not all blogs are profitable and with over 600 million blogs on the internet, in a variety of difference niches, it can be tough competition.

Especially if you choose a popular niche. In a popular niche, it’s much more difficult to get traffic to your blog because there’s so many other bloggers writing similar content. Google, the most popular search engine, can only rank one piece of content at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPS). It is typically the blogger who has been around the longest and/or has built a huge amount of content and hundreds of thousands of back links to their blog posts, who ranks on top.

With a high Google ranking you can get a lot of free traffic. This is often the highest priority for bloggers. Without traffic they can’t sell anything from their blogs. Without sales they won’t be profitable. So to be profitable as a blogger, you need to consider two things:

• The topic you will write about on your blog posts, and how that will attract traffic
• How you monetise your blog – whether you use affiliate products and/or advertising and what affiliate products to choose to maximise profitability

Most Profitable Blog Niches: Traffic

Even with a top listing as a blogger, you are still sharing traffic for that particular keyword phrase. The #1 result in Google gets 34% of the organic traffic. (see also the value of Google result positioning).  

So even with a tonne of work building content and back links, you still only get 34%! Bloggers also build traffic in other ways of course. You can share content on social media, do guest posting, build an email list and even pay for traffic.

But blogging is a strategy where the idea is to rank content on Google (and other search engines) and get free traffic. With enough quality content, and with some tenacity and determination, you can build hundreds if not thousands of blog posts on a website. This means even if many of your articles don’t rank at all, some will; especially if you find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, and target them with your content.

This can give you more chance of ranking your posts, because there’s a lot fewer posts competing for the longer tail keyword phrases. To write this much content takes a lot of time and effort, and even though you can outsource some of the writing, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you have a passion for, or at least an interest in. That way, you can sustain the necessary effort required much longer than your competition can.

Monetising A Blog

Monetising your blog can be done with a few strategies. Assuming you don’t have your own product or service to offer, these are the most popular:

• Affiliate marketing products that suit your topic
• Advertising platforms (Adsense & Adsense alternatives such as Mediavine, Ezoic, Adthrive etc.)

While there are affiliate products in most niches, many of the most profitable ones are in the top niches which are evergreen. That is, they sell all year round. Seasonal topics, such as Christmas, Easter and other seasonal/holiday related products only sell during a certain time of year. They are therefore typically less profitable.

Here’s some of what are thought to be the most profitable blog niches. A study was conducted by RankIQ.com. They analysed data from 803 blogs that were making $2000+ per month and/or getting 50,000+ monthly sessions. The niches that had the highest percentage of blogs (with over 50,000 monthly sessions) were; food (42.8%), lifestyle (13.3%), and travel (10%). You can read the full article here.

Bloggers make the vast majority of their income from ads, affiliate products, sponsored product reviews, their own products, and online courses. The following were the highest earning blog niches:

• Food
• Personal finance
• Lifestyle/Mommy
• Travel

The study showed that the food bloggers made 42% of their income from ads and only 10% from affiliate products. However this wasn’t the norm, and the study also showed that Pro bloggers making between $7500 and $25000 per month get 33.3% of their income from ads and 42.2% from affiliate products.

Can Anyone Be Profitable With A Blog?

It’s worth mentioning too that not all blogs are going to be as successful as these bloggers are. Note that the study was conducted on only 803 blogs that were making $2000+ per month and/or getting 50,000+ monthly sessions. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and most of these make next to nothing! So just by starting a blog, don’t think you can easily make these kinds of figures without a lot of effort. Bloggers income varies wildly and those who have just started blogging will likely make nothing for some time.

As your blog grows, so does your traffic, but it can take some time before your traffic explodes to the levels needed to make regular sales, or advertising fees. When using ads on your blog content, you’ll usually only receive tiny commissions on each ad click. So you’ll need a high value of traffic in order to make advertising work well from a blog.

With affiliate products you can increase the likelihood of your visitors making purchases (or repeat purchases) from your blog in a number of ways:

• Use an email list – offer a giveaway product in exchange for your visitors email address – such as an ebook lead magnet
• Use push engage – which alerts subscribers to new posts you publish
• Run retargeting from your blog – target people who have been on your posts with an advert, bringing them back to your site
• Use subscription affiliate products – where each sale gives you a recurring income, rather than a one off commission