How to Find the Best Blogging Niche (plus 10 Profitable Ideas)

This post is part of my in-depth guide on How to Start A Blog. Finding your blogging niche is the first step when you want to become a blogger.

Most beginners love the idea of starting a blog but either fail to come up with an idea or launch straight in blogging about anything and everything that interests them. They don’t take the time to find their best blogging niche.

If you’re stuck, or just want to know why you need a blogging niche, I’m here to help. This guide will help you find the best niche of you so you can own your little slice of the internet and be one step closer to becoming a successful blogger.

What Is A Blogging Niche?

A niche is more than just a blog topic. It’s a topic that’s targeting a specific audience. Not just anyone who’s interested in your particular topic.

Let’s try an example. I write about blogging but that’s a huge topic. Some of the techy interests of pro bloggers starting their second or third blog will be completely different from the needs of the beginner blogging just starting out. Simply Hatch is a niche blog writing specifically for beginner bloggers.

When you start a blog you need to know who you’re writing for. It helps to profile your audience. Know their income level, likes and dislikes, needs and desires. That way you’re carving out a distinctive niche you can dominate and own with your brand new blog.

A niche is about the audience.

Finding a niche is about finding an audience to write for. It needs to be a sizeable audience and it needs to be something you can keep writing about for years to come.

What do you know about this group of people? Their interests, the problems that keep them awake at night and how can you help them.

How do you get this audience to keep coming back for more? Ideally reading all your posts and signing up for your email list? Buying your recommended affiliate products, your ebooks and your online courses?

Some of you may know I have a lifestyle blog. People landing on my lifestyle blog are trying to get fit, maybe lose some weight, and take up running. They’re looking for answers and it’s my job to provide them. Writing for my audience.

Just like this blog. It’s aimed at people who want to start a blog. Who need real, honest answers to their blogging questions.

This is my audience. You need to figure out yours.

How will your Niche Make Money?

This is the big question. For some unknown reason, many new bloggers don’t nail this one before they launch their first blog.

If you don’t know anything about making money from blogging start by reading this post:

• How to Make Money Blogging For Beginners (Your first $100)

So many people launch their first blog and 6 months later wonder why it’s not making any money.

✅ Often there’s a big mismatch between the blogging niche and the target income. Go through your 20 ideas one-by-one and work out how each idea will make money.

Adverts – the ultimate passive income source…

You see a lot of new bloggers try to make money from ads. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against making money from adverts. I love making money from adverts on my lifestyle blog. It’s the ultimate passive income source.

The introverts dream; just blog away, have zero contact with your audience and watch the money roll in.

At least that’s the theory. In reality, to make a living from ads you need a ton of traffic. Around 60,000 to 100,000+ pageviews a month to make $1000 – $2000+ dollars. That takes a sizeable potential audience and a fair bit of blogging know-how.

You either need to be really good at building social media traffic or learn some SEO (search engine optimization). It’s certainly a great way to make money but you do need a focused blog.

Going back to our example, gardening is one of those topics with a huge potential audience. Just don’t mess it up by talking about Megan and Harry, or how much you love cats.

You can only pull off talking about different topics if they’re related. My lifestyle blog talks about fitness and healthy eating. These topics are related and both interest my audience.

Making money with a small niche.

Simply Hatch doesn’t have a huge audience. Helping beginner bloggers doesn’t easily lend itself to high numbers of pageviews. It’s a smaller niche and extremely competitive. My often neglected lifestyle blog attracts way more traffic than I have on this site.

You won’t find any adverts on this blog and I have no plans to add any.

There are two ways I make money on this blog; affiliate marketing and selling my own digital products in the form of ebooks.

Affiliate marketing… not all products are equal.

The easiest way to start affiliate marketing is with Amazon Associates. You just need a blog to be able to sign up, link to your favorite products and away you go.

There’s just one problem. Making money from Amazon needs a ton of traffic.

It’s a great add-on if you have a high traffic blog. Monetize with ads plus affiliate marketing with Amazon. Don’t get sniffy. It’s a tried and tested way to make a lot of money. 250,000+ pageviews a month and you’ve got a full-time income.

With a small blog, Amazon Associates takes a lot more effort. You need really focused posts and a high conversion rate. The conversion window with Amazon is just 24 hours and the commission rate is tiny.

How does affiliate marketing work for a small niche?

With a small audience you need affiliate products with commission payouts that are worth the effort. These products will be harder to promote. You can’t just dump a link to Bluehost on your blog and expect a result.

I came across a small blog last summer making a tidy income from project management tools. This blogger was making 3X the average wage as a side income.

Now project management tools is a small niche but the commissions are high. The tools are both complex and expensive, with users searching the internet for reviews before they buy.

This blogger uses her experience to provide an in-depth review of each project management tool. Her blog is a mix of reviews and management advice and she promotes each new post to her sizeable email list.

Selling high commission affiliate products only works if you build relationships and the best way to do this is with email marketing. The money is in the list they say and for good reason.

This is why you need a coherent audience. If you’re the gardening, mystery novel lover with relationship problems it’s not going to work.

By all means try and get people to sign up for your list but if you’re writing about Miss Marple solves a mystery one week and planting roses the next, no-one will read your emails.

Selling products with a small niche.

Let’s say you’re aiming for a full-time income from blogging of $5000/month.

There’s lots of different ways you can get to this figure.

An audience of 250,000+ pageviews/month could get you about $5000/month from ad income or maybe more with some Amazon Associate commissions.

An audience of 10,000 pageviews/month with highly targeted affiliate marketing for high commission products. Earn 100 commissions at $50 a referral will earn $5000/month.

Sell your own digital products; 100 online courses at $50 or 10 online courses at $500.

If you’re selling just 10 courses a month you don’t need a big audience but you do need an audience of raving fans.

Your Niche Size Matters

I’ve seen lots of bloggers falling into the trap of writing for a very small selective niche and failing to understand their income streams.

It’s hardly their fault! There’s so much advice about finding your unique niche. An audience where you can really stand out. Often this niche is really small.

Now that might be just fine if you’re promoting $10,000 golden retirement courses to Fortune 100 Company CEO’s. These are wealthy people who love to spend.

It’s not so great if your tiny niche is bog snorkelling and you’re selling $10 how-to guides. Yes bog snorkelling is a real sport and even has a World Championship. There were 160 participants. Maybe one or two of them would buy your guide.

See how this niche thing can go badly wrong? You need to know the size of your niche and the spending habits. You can’t flog expensive courses to people who can’t or don’t like spending money.

Likewise it would be a huge mistake to pitch low priced products to lavish spenders.

It’s essential to work out the size of your niche and how it will make money before you start and give yourself some room to maneuver.

Getting your niche right at the start can be a difficult judgment call.

It’s a lot easier to engage a really specific audience. For example, specifically targeting mom bloggers on pinterest, can be really successful.

But what happens when you’ve sold your premium course to every person in your niche? Do you have to start over?

Blog Niches that Make Money

Now this is really sticking my neck out. I’ve written about 10 Types Of Blogs That Make Money. You can read about my 10 suggestions in the post but here’s the list:

• Personal Finance And Making Money
• Health And Fitness
• Diet And Nutrition
• Food And Healthy Eating
• DIY And Crafting
• Home Decor
• Beauty And Fashion
• Lifestyle
• Personal Development
• Parenting

It’s not a complete list and there’s no guarantee that if you blog about one of these niches it will work for you. There’s far more to being a successful blogger than just finding an angle for a niche.

There’s a few obvious omissions. Gardening is one of them. Probably because my ideal home is a flat and I just see gardening as a chore.

Do you need to enjoy these topics to be able to blog about them? It’s not essential.

Writing about your passion makes it easier to come up with ideas. Know what really makes your readers tick. I can’t image how you can write about trail running if you’ve never run up a hill but I guess it’s possible.

There’s a lot of bland blogs about that still make money. If you think you can write every day about a topic you hate I’m not going to stop you.

Just don’t make me write about gardening…

Conclusion – Find the Best Blogging Niche

I have two takeaways for you:

• Make sure you understand your blogging niche size and spending habits.
• Know exactly how your blog will make money before you start and match your audience to your money making method.

Get these two things right and you’re on your way to a starting a successful money making blog.

Frequently Asked Questions