Whether you have started your blog with the intention of making money off of it or just as a hobby, there will come a time when you will be looking at monetizing your blogging website.
At that time you will be asking yourself: what to blog about to make money online?
To answer that question, we need to consider several aspects.
Your Niche
“I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.” – Seth Godin
If you already have a niche then you are limited to writing within it.
The good thing is, with a clever thinking and creativity, you can link a lot of interesting topics and ideas to make it fit your existing niche.
If you do not have a niche yet and are in the process of trying to figure one out, there are many suggestions that experts offer. There are niches that have proven to be vary profitable. Some of them are:
- DIY and crafts
- finances
- making money online
- health and well-being
- fitness
- pets
- parenting
- fashion
This is a valid list but in my experience, it’s just not that simple. Picking a popular niche is rarely the way to success if that’s the only aspect that is taken into consideration.
However, picking the correct niche is a vary important step that needs to be taken carefully. You really need to think about it before you make the final decision.
I struggled with it for a while.
I knew that I wanted to get people to see the world in a different way, provoke their minds, challenge their way of thinking, get them to see different perspectives, show them that other and better ways of living are possible, but this niche was too broad.
I was lucky to have found a platform that not only trained me how to pick a winning niche but also allowed for a temporary website where I could start posting my blogs without a firm commitment to the domain and give me time to define my exact niche.
It wasn’t until I completed the training and started composing blog posts on regular basis, that my exact niche got clarified.
But, somewhere along the way, as I was happily building my Personal Transformation Zone website, I realized that I was learning how to start my own business online and decided to have a second website with a niche to help people in a position similar to mine.
My original intention was to follow my passion and help people but to be able to do that I ended up learning a brand new industry and how to be successful within it. At that point, the urge to help people kicked in again, this time in the technical aspects of building my own blogging website.
My point is, yes, picking the right niche is extremely important but if you have a supportive platform that allows you to experiment with ideas, your niche will reveal itself to you in the process.
My strong suggestion to you is:
Just start creating as many high quality posts as you can.
If you believe that the way to a successful blog website is to get involved in one of the popular niches but you are not all that interested in any of them, what can you do then?
Related: Is An Entrepreneur Born Or Made?
What If The Popular Niches Don’t Interest You?
“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” – Brian Clark
If you are not interested in any of the niches above, there is no reason to worry.
You have two choices:
1. you can become interested in them – you can learn and with good quality research you can become an expert and start blogging that will make money
2. or you can forget about what is popular and follow your true interests. The thing is, with over 4 billion of people currently on the internet, there is not a single interest area that you will not find a group of people interested in it.
This is my advice, forget what others are suggesting, define your own niche by examining your interests and passions.
Keep in mind that if you want to start a blog you will be writing a lot of articles and posts. Ideally, you will pick something that you have a lot to say about.
What Is Needed To Make Money On Your Blog?
“As a blogger, everything you do flows from understanding your audience and seeking to help them.” – Brian Clark
Regardless of your niche choice, to be able to make money on your blog website, you will need the following:
1. you need visitors to your site – for that to happen your articles need to be indexed in Google and other search engines and it needs to be ranked high.
2. you need people to read your content – having visitors is not enough. You will need your visitors to read your content, and stay on your website long enough to either purchase something or click on something depending on your monetization approach. For this to happen, you will need quality content that is interesting and engaging.
3. you need people to trust you – your readers will have to developed trust in you. Consistency in publishing your articles is one way to achieve that. Being honest and truthful will also help you build trust with your readers.
4. you need readers to answer your call to action or listen to your purchasing suggestions
What To Blog About To Make Money Online?
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
To make money online from your blog you can blog about anything as long as your blogs have the below characteristics:
- you are passionate about it
- you are knowledgeable about it and can help others in that specific area
- you are offering value to your readers
- your posts are high quality and engaging
Related: How To Start A Business Online? -The First Step That Most People Skip
Monetizing Your Blog
Once you have a website with quality content, and regular traffic, there are other strategies that you can use to monetize your blog. You can do the following:
- affiliate marketing – you can start writing reviews and start promoting products and services that will pay you commission when your readers make a purchase through your website
- online courses – if you feel you are knowledgeable in a certain area and want to teach your readers, you can develop online courses and workshops and charge the participants for it
- E-books – you are already a writer, you write quality content for your readers, you can write e-books or books and sell them on your website
- Ads on your website – this is also an option once you have a significant amount of traffic to your website. You can have ads displayed on your website and get paid once your readers click on them
- Consulting services – if you feel you are an expert in a certain area you can start your own consulting/coaching services business
- Freelance Services – you can offer freelance services through your website
There are other ways that you can monetize your blog website but it all starts with a quality content and significant traffic to your website. Before achieving that, there isn’t much point in figuring out how to make money off of your website.
So how do we make sure we produce quality content and get visitors and readers to our website?
Follow The Process
There is a process that you will have to follow to ensure your posts are ranked in Google and other search engines but there are other things to consider also. The process may vary from person to person but there are some components that should be a part of everyone’s process.
Your focus should always be at first to build an amazing website with quality content. Without that you will have no Google ranking and no visitors to your websites and you won’t even qualify for any of the affiliate programs available.
I know it’s hard, as you would like to have a solid plan for how you are going to get to your financial goals but his is wasted effort at this stage. It’s impossible for you to figure that out at this stage. That would be like trying to sell a product that you don’t even have an idea for.
Building your website is the first part of the process. Hopefully you have picked a great platform with amazing training and community support and as you are learning and building your website at the same time, you will discover new opportunities for monetizing your blog that you could not even imagine before. It also helps if you have found a great keywords search tool that will help you find keywords that will rank high with Google and other search engines.
Related: What To Do When You’re Bored At Home
In Conclusion
You can write about anything that you want or interests you as long as you follow the process to properly compose the blog post and ensure all the components are there.
The main objective here is to create quality content that gets ranked high in search engines and attract visitors to your website that will read your blog posts.
So now that you know what to write about to make money online, go ahead, start creating that amazing content for your readers so that eventually you are able to monetize the effort that you put into it.
Hi Anna,
The Seth Godin quote you mentioned made me think a lot. Instead of helping others, many are selling and that’s the reason many (bloggers) fails. I am in the make money online niche and to be honest, it’s not an easy task to find the content to write and you know already it’s a highly competitive niche. Sometimes I do run out of ideas on what to write/blog.
The information you shared under the topic of monetizing your blog provided me with helpful insights. At the moment I just use only one strategy (Affiliate Marketing) on my blog. I am planning to try the rest of the 5 strategies one by one. Applying for Google Adsense is the first thing I am going to do. Thanks Again!
Hi Paul, thank you for your comment. I’m glad you found the article useful. I have to say that my approach was always to help others instead of making money. I just believed that if I focus on helping first, the money part will come later somehow, but when I see others that seemed to have a balance between helping and making money, I wonder if I’m doing things right.
In the end, I always lived my life like that, focused on helping others and living with passion and the money always followed, I’m going to trust the process this time as well and see where it leads me. Also, it does make sense, you have to provide value to attract your readers. No one is going to read my blog if they don’t see anything helpful in it.