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Guide to choosing the niche for your blog
1. Audience revenue potential.
When starting a new blog, the most common question is:”What should my niche be?”
The key is to find an area that you understand and to resolve a pain point for your audience. However, it is not enough to solve a problem; it is also necessary to solve a problem that the public is ready to spend money on.
As a blogger, you need to deeply understand your audience's challenges in order to be able to offer them exactly what they need.
And the best place to start is to look at yourself.
Ask yourself: “Of What audience am I a part of?”
You are much better able to understand the difficulties of a specific audience if you have encountered them yourself.
Who is your audience?
Take my blog, for example.
When I started this blog, I was a 33-year-old French man working in the technology sector.
I worked long hours, sacrificed time with family and friends, and was stressed and exhausted by the frantic rush where I had no hours left to really live.
So I created this blog as a means to an end - a way to earn passive income, to escape the “metro-work-dodo” and to regain control of my time - and my life.
So my target audience was people like me:
- 25-45 years old.
- Those who have a classic job but want to escape the mad rush.: The Rat Race.
- Ready to put in the work and work hard to succeed.
- Smart and technically gifted (or not afraid to get started)
- People who want to earn passive income through a blog.
Understanding your audience is the first step.
READ MORE: What is Persona Marketing and how do you define it?
How much is she prepared to pay?
The second step (just as important) is to understand How much your audience is willing to spend to solve their problems
That's the revenue potential of your audience.
It needs to be said again: you need to understand your audience AND know how much they are willing to spend on your solution.
For example, let's say you're considering starting a blog about human resources and employment advice for young people.
Your blog posts can attract different types of readers, including job seekers, working professionals, and students.
To monetize a blog in this niche, let's say you're creating a sales funnel:
- You write new content to attract an audience on the web.
- Then, you create a lead magnet “The Checklist for Preparing a Job Interview” to generate email registrations.
- Thirdly, you place affiliate links to certain products that you want to promote.
- Finally, you offer a 300€ product entitled “The online course to prepare for job interviews”.
There is nothing wrong with this approach.
This is a common approach for most new bloggers. If you spend a few years creating content and building your email list, I estimate that you could start earning passive income in 2 or 3 years.
However, by slightly changing your potential niche, you significantly increase the revenue potential of your blog.
Primarily target B2B to get started
All you need to do is change your target audience from jobseekers in employers.
Let me explain.
By adding a B2B component to your blog, you're bringing your audience composed only of individuals to an audience composed of businesses.
Businesses have larger bank accounts and are more likely to pay you without hesitation.
The benefit of this approach is that the launch of your blog, the content, and the marketing funnel are practically the same. However, with the B2B component, you don't just stop at a 300€ training course but more on 5-figure products or consulting.
Rather than writing a blog post about interview tips, position yourself as an expert and tackle the businesses themselves by offering services such as HR audits or advice on onboarding new employees for thousands of euros per month.
When you're just starting out and traffic is hard to come by, offering consulting services is a great way to generate more revenue with less traffic.
READ MORE: What is the difference between B2B and B2C Marketing?
It's a simple calculation: If your new blog only has 100 visitors and a 2% conversion rate, your 2 sales should amount to thousands of euros, not $19.99.
Instead of focusing on adding affiliate links and ads to your site when you have low traffic at the beginning, see if you can offer a high-end consulting offer to build momentum and make money from the start.
Remember that it is not enough to understand pain points of your audience.
To improve your earning potential, a portion of your audience needs to be in a lucrative business niche and pay on a monthly recurring basis.
With this approach, I hope you start to understand why I really believe that you can earn €10,000/month in less than 90 days with a new blog.
These gains will allow you to accelerate your path to passive income, but we'll stick with that for now.
Let's move on to a subject that I am passionate about: affiliate marketing.
2. Your niche has affiliate marketing potential.
Affiliate marketing is my preferred form of blog monetization.
It's the most passive, and once you start getting traffic, you can make money while you sleep.
Affiliate marketing involves recommending products and services from other businesses and earning a commission on each sale.
Most big businesses have affiliate programs that you can join. Once you've applied and been accepted into their programs, you can retrieve your unique affiliate links to add to your blog, view click and sales reports, and see any future payments you're supposed to receive.
Here are a few steps to get started with affiliate marketing:
- Sign up for affiliate program of a company, either on its site or in an affiliate network. For that, you'll need a website and a professional email address — not just a Gmail or Yahoo address.
- Once approved, enter your unique affiliate link and copy/paste it into any text on your blog.
When a user clicks on this link, a cookie is stored on their computer, which credits the sale to you based on the duration of the cookie — typically 30, 60, or 90 days.
When you think of the word “blog,” what comes to mind?
- Maybe they're lifestyle blogs that tell about what they've been buying for their family lately.
- Or a fitness blogger who gives you great tips for losing weight.
- He may even be an interesting person who writes his personal memoirs.
I want you to forget about these types of blogs.
They may be interesting to read, but they are not the niches that will bring you the most value.
Instead, consider this simple formula.
- To make a lot of money blogging, you need affiliate income.
- To make money through affiliate marketing, you need to rank in search engines and get web traffic.
- To get web traffic, you need to rank for the keywords that generate the most affiliate revenue.
So what are these keywords?
The answer: keywords that contain the word “best”.
Here are a few examples:
- In the financial field, these can be the best credit cards, the best car loans, or the best home insurance.
- In the field of technology, the keywords could be the best laptop of 2020, the best VR headsets, or the best Mac accessories.
- In the field of marketing (like my blog), it can be the best email marketing software, of the best CRM Or best website builders.
- In the field of travel, keywords could include the best travel insurance or the best coworking spaces.
These “better” keywords are searched by people who are looking for product reviews.
They want to read a blog with in-depth content about “best” product before making a purchase (and they're not yet ready to go directly to a company's website to buy something).
Think about it.
If you are looking for a new laptop, you can type “best laptop.”
Search for this term on Google and look at the top 10 results
Each website in the top 10 results is an affiliate.
Note that there are no real businesses that sell laptops. There are no Darty, Walmart, Dell, or HP - only affiliates that recommend laptops.
Now try Googling “the best credit cards.” What do you see?
Again, every result in the top 10 is an affiliate blog.
Why do these affiliate sites outperform the brands that sell the products?
They write long, detailed articles that search engines (and readers) prefer. In fact, 49% of consumers thanks to opinions or recommendations from influencers.
You'll start to realize that most profitable blogs are, in fact, review sites that earn affiliate commissions from lists of articles.
And the truth is that these recommendations are mostly based on how much money the affiliate blog earns from its best recommendations - not on the actual quality of the product itself.
Once you understand that when you learn how to start a blog, you'll start to see affiliate sites everywhere.
I think the most profitable niches for new blogging right now are finance, technology, travel, business, and marketing.
But there are tons of other options out there.
We'll come back to keyword research later, but be aware that your blog should have affiliate marketing revenue potential.
Now let's move on to the next weapon in your blogging arsenal: your professional leverage.
3. Use your professional leverage.
After discovering a lucrative audience to offer value to, the next step in learning how to start a blog is discovering your strategic advantages.
Ask yourself:
- What is my current level of work experience?
- What relationships do I have in my business sector?
- Can I take advantage of this experience to create a profitable blog?
- If I could suggest that any website in the world contribute to a guest article, who would choose me from the start?
To create a successful blog, you first need to develop your influence.
And to grow your influence, you need to get out of your comfort zone and take advantage of your relationships, work experience, and everything you have like never before.
With a blog, you will also have to put a lot of effort into establishing new connections. This includes establishing relationships in order to be able to publish articles on authoritative sites in your niche for get relevant backlinks and with strong domain authority (DA).
And when you're just starting out, you might not have a lot of contacts or published content. You might say, “Why would someone want to view my content?”
This is where drawing on your professional experience is invaluable.
For example, if you're a photographer, you may have a customer base, contacts in groups, and even know photography influencers you've met in the past.
If you can take advantage of these contacts in the future, you can accelerate the growth of your blog.
Use all the benefits that you have. These benefits will help you gain momentum through guest posts, backlinks, and social media shares.
Now let's move on to the last (and most important) factor in choosing your niche.
4. Keyword research
For me, keyword research is the most important step in the choosing the niche for your blog.
It is very simple. Are people looking for the topics you want to write about?
Each blog post should focus on one or more target keywords. And if no one is looking for it, you'll never get traffic.
It's a fact: you need to have a basic knowledge of keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) so that your Blog can be ranked and get traffic.
Why?
- People are online for six and a half hours per day on average.
- Internet users perform 63,000 Google searches Every second. That's 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.
Additionally, organic traffic from search engines is much more valuable than social media traffic. Rather than browsing the web aimlessly, Internet users conduct targeted searches to find solutions to their problems.
The good news is that there are SEO tools and software making it possible to understand all this research data. With tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs, you can view metrics for each keyword, including:
- Monthly search volume : How many times a keyword is searched in a given month
- Keyword difficulty : On a scale of 0 to 100, it is difficult to rank for this keyword according to the competition.
- Average cost per click (CPC) : This is the value of the keyword if you create a PPC ad for it and pay for the click. It is a good indicator of the value of the keyword.
So what are you looking for?
You need to find keywords with high volume and low competition.
Here is how I assess these competitive parameters.
Monthly search volume:
- 0-1,000: low
- 1,000-5,000: low/average
- 5.000-20.000: Average
- 20.000-100.000: high
- 100,000+: Very high
Difficulty of the keywords:
- 0-20: weak
- 21-50: Average
- 51-75: high
- 76+: Very high
On my site, there are two main types of keywords that I target when it comes to SEO : high-volume, high-competition keywords and medium-volume and low-competition keywords.
1. Revenue Factors: Medium Volume, Low Competition, High CPC Keywords
The first keywords that new blogs should look for are keywords with medium volume and low competition.
For example, let's take an example from an article about webinar software.
- Key word: webinar software
- Monthly search volume: 4,300
- Keyword difficulty: 22
- Average CPC: 25.00
4,300 is not a very high monthly search volume, but like the Position 1 receives over 33% of traffic, you can expect to receive 1,419 visitors per month to your blog for position 1 on this term.
Also, with a low difficulty level of 22, this term should be relatively easy to classify.
Finally, with an average CPC of $25, this is a valuable, high-intent search term.
A small note about keyword search volume:
If the keyword webinar software is the subject of 4,300 searches per month, there are thousands of potential variants of this keyword - for example, best webinar software, webinar tools, webinar platforms, etc.
This item could be classified for all of these variations.
Pro tip:
By using the report Ahrefs Also Rank for, you can see the keywords for which the top-ranking pages for your target keyword are also ranked in the top 100 search results. This allows you to find less obvious keywords that you can also include in the text and subtitles of your article.
The key to finding relevant keywords in this report and using them to launch your blog is to search with more specific queries. For example, instead of “cooking,” use “vegetarian recipes.” Or “email marketing services” instead of “marketing.”
How to find this type of keyword for your blog:
Use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and filter the results. Set the monthly search volume filter to a minimum of 1,000 and the keyword difficulty filter to a maximum of 50.
What are these keywords for:
These keywords should make up the majority of your articles and be the main revenue drivers for your blog. The key is to find a good quantity of long-tail keywords, with average volume and low competition in your niche.
If these keywords are preceded by terms like “how to do it” and “best”, you are well on your way to finding a profitable niche and solve a problem.
2. Blog pillar: High volume/medium-high competition
The second type of keywords I'm targeting are very high-volume terms that are not as easy to monetize but can bring in a lot of traffic.
For example, take my article called”How to make money online“.
- Key word: how to make money online
- Monthly search volume: 103,000
- Keyword difficulty: 55
- Average CPC: 2.00
First, this keyword has a volume 25x higher than the webinar software. With a high volume and all the potential variations of the keyword, ranking in the top 5 positions for this term could bring 30 to 65,000 visitors per month.
However, this keyword also has a lower search intent than the webinar software. With the keyword webinar software, we know what the researcher wants.
With regard to the way to make money online, that user could be interested in anything from starting an online business to podcasting or looking for promo coupons—we just don't know that.
That's why its average CPC is only $2.00 - it's vaguer and harder to monetize. However, this keyword can get a lot of traffic and make readers click on your other higher-earning blog posts.
How to find this type of keyword for your blog:
Use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and filter the results. Set the monthly search volume filter to a minimum of 20,000 and the keyword difficulty filter to a maximum of 75.
What are these keywords for:
These keywords should make up 5 to 10 pillar blog posts that you spend a lot of time and effort on. While these high-volume keywords don't generate immediate revenue, they bring a ton of traffic to your blog and can increase the size of your email list.
3. Summary
A blog needs a mix of high-volume keywords and high-intent keywords.
All of this strategy comes into play when you plan the first 5 posts on your blog. For example, a few articles need to be big how-to guides with a high search volume to attract readers. And a few other articles need to be low-volume, high-intent keywords that can be monetized.
Here are some of the tools you can use for keyword research:
Conclusion
Your niche needs audience revenue potential, affiliate marketing potential, professional leverage, and keyword research.
Choosing a profitable niche will save you countless hours of wasted time and energy. This early planning is one of the most important keys to a successful blog.
