Starting a niche blog can be a rewarding, and profitable, endeavor. However, there are “rules” you must adhere to if you want to create a successful niche blog. Unlike blogging for fun, when you’re blogging for money, you will need to pay particular attention to the niche you choose. In fact, it’s crucial.
If you learn the basics and apply them, you’ll start off on a good note. And you’ll watch your blog take off in popularity.
5 Steps to Starting a Niche Blog
Just like setting up a website or selling products, there are fundamentals that you must get right. This article will cover some of the basics of starting a niche blog.
Let’s get started.
1. Choose a Niche for Your Blog
We’ll keep things simple since we’ve previously discussed how to choose a niche here. There are many guides on choosing niches and all of them have different criteria. We’ll focus on the most important ones so that you pick a niche that people are passionate about and are willing to spend money on.
The first criterion is that your niche needs to be a popular one. Examples of popular niches are: bodybuilding, weight loss, paleo diet, etc. If you’re wondering what niches are popular, just go to ClickBank or Amazon and look at the bestsellers.
Your niche will need to have a variety of products to promote. Again, this is crucial. If you choose a niche and there is no way to monetize it, you’ll be hard pressed to make even a few dollars. Generally, if your niche is popular, there will always be products to promote. You just need to find them.
Stick to niches where people have problems they want to solve. These are desperate buyers and are much more willing to spend money to solve their problem. A book on raising hamsters will never sell as well as a book that shows how to reduce one’s back pain. Solve a problem. That should be your mantra.
Pick a Niche for Small Blogs
There are two ways to blog. You could create several small blogs that target narrow niches or a large blog that targets several related niches. For example, six pack abs for women is a narrow niche while bodybuilding is a large niche.
If you prefer the option of building lots of small niche blogs, your keyword research will need to be good.
- You will need to group all the closely related keywords and plan out a strategy to create content for them.
- You will need to look for products closely related to your niche and optimize your posts for the product names.
Small blogs often succeed based on low competition keywords. This is referred to as the low hanging fruit.
These keywords may only have a few hundred searches a month. However, if your blog ranks for many such keywords, the accumulated total will be quite huge. Your knowledge of SEO will need to be good to rank well with small blogs.
Pick a Niche for Large Blogs
A large blog is generally considered an authority site. For example, if you set up a blog about spine health, you can tackle smaller niches such as sciatica, slipped discs, lower back pain, etc. You have many related topics to create content about.
A large blog has much more profit potential but it requires a lot more work. You will need to create a ton of good content or outsource the job. You will also need to promote your blog, optimize it, drive traffic, build backlinks, etc.
2. Keyword Research
This is highly important and you should use a professional, well-established keyword research tool such as Keyword Titan, Market Samurai, or Long Tail Pro. These tools are not cheap and not necessarily easy to learn.
Of course, you could use Google’s free Keyword Planner, but it may not give you the whole picture. If you don’t want to purchase keyword research software or perform keyword research yourself, you could outsource the job to someone on Fiverr or another freelance website.
However you obtain the research, look at the data to see the keyword competition score. This will tell you how easily you could rank for the keyword, or not. Focus on the keywords that you can rank for first. Then work your way up until you are ranking for many keywords.
Also, you can check out this article on keyword research tools you could use to perform keyword research for your niche blog.
I suspect this all sounds confusing. Well, it is. Mastering keyword research isn’t easy and it takes time. There are many guides, articles, and blogs published on the subject of SEO and keyword research. The problem is, the rules change frequently. Another problem is that while lots of folks claim to be experts, they really are not.
Therefore, my advice is to just be careful from whom you take advice.
3. Publish Posts to Your Niche Blog
This is what adds meat to your blog. Your posts are similar to articles and should contain a good mix of your keywords and related keywords. Your content should be useful, informative, and entertaining. The better your content, the more loyal your visitors will be.
It’s like watching a TV show… why do you tune in every week? It’s because the show is interesting and fun. You want your readers to think of your blog the same way.
Update your blog often. This will keep it fresh, current, and Google will rank you better if it sees that you routinely add new content to your blog.
4. Monetize Your Blog
You can only make money from your blog if you monetize it. Use Adsense ads, affiliate links, product image links, etc., to tempt the visitor to purchase one of the products. You will earn a commission when they buy.
The strange thing is that some blogs do better with Adsense while others do better with affiliate products, either tangible or digital. You could utilize a combination of both to determine which is more profitable. Only testing will tell.
5. Promote/Drive Traffic to Your Blog
Once your blog has sufficient content and you think it’a good to go, start promoting it. Use social media, blog commenting, guest blogging, etc., as ways to drive traffic to your site.
Also, use social bookmarking to build backlinks to your site.
Conclusion
Once you get these basics down, you will then need to keep doing what you’re doing to improve your blog. Repeated efforts on a daily basis will add up and make your blog a success.
This is not an overnight thing… it will take time. But if you take the time to do it right, you will have a niche blog that is highly popular and rakes in good money for you.