What Can I Blog About To Make Money?

The question of what to blog about to make money is very important. After all, who wouldn't want to create an income online, right?

Introducing NICHE.

A niche is simply a topic that your website will be about. In order to see results faster, your niche should be very specific.

What Can I Blog About To Make Money?

When I started my first blog back in 2015, I was blogging about all things baby and parenting: what to do when the baby is crying and sick, to product reviews of baby things that we own - stroller, diaper bag, rocker, etc.

I also have posted about postpartum and breastfeeding and personal experiences as a new mom. I don't know why but I had eBay topics, work from home jobs, and even blogging stuff, lol.

I was happy with my writing progress. For half a year, I published almost 50 RANDOM articles. But I wasn't earning enough to pay off all my efforts.

I began to "narrow down" my topic and unpublished all of my posts one by one. Ouch.

I thought the "baby registry" was a good niche. I thought it's okay that it's broad in a way since there are hundreds of baby product categories that I can choose from.

I started with products that we personally own and use often - cloth diapers.

I reviewed all of our cloth diapers. We had at least 10 different brands and types. Diaper 1 review. Diaper 2...and so on. Diaper 1 versus Diaper 2 versus Diaper 3 until I have compared "almost" all.

Since my posts were already very targeted, I started seeing monetary results. My readers started buying my recommendations. And even if they don't, they would buy random stuff and I earned commissions in return.

Fast forward 7 years, my "baby registry" blog is just around 5% done. I have infant car seats, convertible car seats, different kinds of strollers, diaper bags, and baby registries.

I also have blog posts related to the baby registry.

How Do Beginner Bloggers Make Money?

The fastest way honestly? Thru mentioning products and services. 

You educate your readers about products/services and insert your affiliate links of the products so readers can check them and buy/avail if they want to. Depending on the affiliate program's terms and conditions, you can earn a commission (affiliate marketing).

What Is The Best Blog To Make Money?

As a beginner, you "practice earning" by helping companies or individuals promote their products and services (affiliate marketing). If that is not something that you feel like doing, you can offer your own products and services instead.

Take note though that creating products takes time and not to mention money. Offering your services (and actually getting people to trust your "brand") also take time, too.

That is why "helping" those who already have a name in the industry (affiliate marketing) is not a bad start for newbie bloggers.

To make money, you need to be affiliated with the companies. To apply to their affiliate programs, you just need to have a platform with audience - and in this case, a blog that you own.

Here Are Some Of The Lessons That I Learned From Writing Product Reviews

Be Specific.

To narrow down your niche is your number one goal.

Baby registry? Nope.

Baby products? No.

Baby strollers? Almost.

Let’s try the baby strollers. If you go to Amazon strollers’ categories, you can categorize it by age range: 

Birth to 3 months, 4 to 7 months, 8 to 11 months, 12 to 23 months and 24 months and up. But NO PARENT will ever buy a stroller that will be outgrown in just months.

Remember, your articles should be very helpful.

Try to help a parent find a stroller that they can utilize the longest. That CAN be a niche.

Help a parent find a jogging stroller that they can use for their jogging activities. Jogging strollers, another NICHE idea.

Identify your target audience.

Parent C is looking for the best standard stroller that they can use for any activity for their TWINS - Niche Idea #3.

When I started writing about strollers, I was ambitious. I started with trying to find the best travel system stroller that can accept the best car seat. LOL. I researched for months. I did not get THE answer but I found MANY answers.

I also realized in the process that I am again involving myself in the CAR SEAT niche, which is again too broad.

You probably get the idea by now. 🙂

It will be a tough job while writing your reviews, but it can be very profitable while you are trying to find the answer.

Ideally, you should already know about it.

You probably can imagine how much headache my baby registry niche has given me. LOL. All I ever know are cloth diapers and the rest of the products that WE OWN.

When you already know about what you will be writing about, you can finish one article in one day. Some people can even write 3 in a day. It will just be as easy as posting a long Facebook status, LOL.

If you don't know anything about it, be prepared to become an "expert."

In the process of trying to find the best infant car seat, I learned a lot. As I researched, read forums/Amazon reviews and watch YouTube videos, it’s like I have already owned the products.

Believe it or not but we don’t have an infant car seat. It was not required yet to use an infant car seat in the Philippines when I started writing about it.

I am not an expert with car seats, but I can confidently answer my audience’s questions as long as I have already researched about the product.

I have many infant seat reviews. Most of my income now is coming from my car seats articles.

Product comparison reviews work best.

When you write product comparison reviews, your target audience becomes very specific. These are the people who already know the product. They are already at the stage of buying. They are just confused on what to choose.

Your job is not to sell. You should be helping them clarify their doubts. If the products you are comparing are not good, it’s okay.

Write honestly. And at the end of your article, mention what might be better and give them a link to the article that you wrote for that.

Your audience can decide for themselves. No matter how much you convince them to buy or not to buy a product, at the end of the day, they will stick to their guts.

Compare Amazon products for the best results. Whatever they choose to buy (even unrelated products) after clicking your affiliate links, you get the commission.

Choose a product that is at least "expensive."

A car seat that is $300 gives $9 in commission (at 3% commission rate, at least as of updating this post). If I get an average of 4 car seat sales a day consistently, that’ll yield to at least 1,000 USD a month, just for car seats alone.

USD300 is just my personal range. I live in the Philippines so our cost of living is lower. Cloth diapers that sell at $20 per piece when bought in bulk (since babies need a lot of diapers), will still yield to good income despite not being expensive.

Depending on the category of the product that you choose, your commission percentage can vary. Baby products pay 3%. The luxury beauty category pays 10%, at least as of writing/updating this post.

Raise your standard if you live in a more expensive city. If you want to earn higher, choose more expensive products that pay higher commission rates.

You should be very helpful.

Helping your audience solve their problems should be the number one goal. People use search engines such as Google to find answers. Most of the time, you should be able to help with your article alone.

There are times when they would leave questions in the comment section. You should be diligent to answer, too. I’d usually reply in 24 hours or faster if I know the answer.

In instances that I need more time to research the answer, I’d give it 2 days so I can have a meaningful and helpful reply.

Main Thing To Consider: Passion Vs. Profitability

It's easier to earn money from product reviews. To be specific, from comparing 2 products. This is the stage where your reader is in the buying stage. They are already choosing between two products.

If you can incorporate your passion with product comparison reviews, you will earn money faster. If you don't have a passion about the topic you are writing about, you'll get tired easily and will end up giving up.

Try to find the balance between the two. 

TIP: The main reason why I was able to write cloth diaper reviews easily is that I researched a lot before buying our cloth diaper stash. That made me confident to write reviews since I can easily compare each and every diaper to the ones we own.

I was "passionate" about what to buy. In this regard, I didn't need to give the word "passion" a deeper meaning. I was simply "passionate" to learn what to buy.

Reminders

Give yourself 6 months to one year to do the work yourself. By the time you are earning enough, outsourcing the reviews is the best way to do it. Writing product reviews for years (though VERY profitable) can eventually burn you out! 

The ideal rule of profitability is - you do the SEO (separate lesson), since you'll know better, but using outsourced reviews (Do not outsource in the beginning. Use your blogging income to re-invest in outsourced articles).

This is the exact training I used to find my writers in the past.

While product reviews will make you earn fastest, the topics will expire the fastest, too! Doing product reviews is like having a 9 to 5 job.

If you really want to build a passive income, mix reviews with evergreen topics (or topics that do not easily expire, or don't expire at all!).

In the long run, evergreen topics can be monetized thru displaying Ads or can be used to funnel your readers to your new reviews/product/services mentions. Do a 50-50. 50% products/services and 50% evergreen topics. 

The reviews will make sure that you'll earn money faster, while the evergreen topics can be used to supplement your traffic (or website visitors) once your product reviews become obsolete. You need to update/replace them as soon as they become obsolete.

Why Use Pinterest As A Market Research Place

If you are just starting out, you have nothing to pin yet. I'll show you why use Pinterest anyway, as a market research place for now.

In our search for a niche, most of us get stuck. We want this, we want that...and so on. Most of the time, they are from completely different topics.

Pinterest is a VISUAL search engine. Like Google, people type keywords in the search box. And if you optimize your pin title, description, and alt text for the image (separate lesson), you can get found (not just in Pinterest but in Google, too!).

However, Pinterest is not just a search engine. It is also a social media platform and a market research place.

Notice how diverse my Pinterest boards are. For firsttimeparentguide, I have boards for:

For my fulltimeblogging blog, I have these boards:

If I have all the time in the world, these are the topics I want to blog about! However, it’s going to take ages for a solopreneur, let alone a beginner to successfully achieve all these!

That is why we need to choose a niche. Pick a topic from any of the boards I enumerated, for example.

Do you have enough to share about the topic? If not, are you willing to read the contents of other websites to learn from them, instead? 

If yes, you can actively pin about “busy mom hacks” for example and use that Pinterest board as your market research place. Learn from them and only keep what you believe in, and reconstruct to make it your own.

Pinterest also has “analytics” so you will know which of the contents you pin gets most of the impressions, saves, and clicks - regardless of whether it is your pin or not. If a pin is getting the clicks, or repins, learn from that pin. 

What’s so special about that pin that it gets so many clicks and saves? Does it have an enticing headline? Is it the “freebie” inside in the blogpost? It is a “free guide to solve your whatever problem?”

By using Pinterest as a “user” and not just another marketer, you’ll also attract organic followers - that is, people who actually want to follow your boards versus those who just follow you in the hopes that you’ll follow them, too.

As you get more Pinterest/Pinterest board followers and as you produce contents, you can now pin your own pins - and share your content to people who actually need them.

As you learn Search Engine Optimization for Google, you can also optimize your pin titles, descriptions and call to actions in Pinterest.

Still stuck with your niche? Why not create a Pinterest profile? Compile different boards of what you want to blog about.

Arrange the Pinterest boards as if it is your website. Then choose only one board that really resonates with what you want to do. That’s your starting point.

That's your niche. Look at the pins inside the board. Do you think you can do better than them? If not, move on to your next favourite board.

Don’t get stuck picking a niche. There’s no wrong niche. As long as it is something you are interested in doing, it is good to go.

My Advice? 

Getting stuck with picking a niche is one of the newbie's obstacles in starting a blog. The best advice I can give is to stick to what you are interested to do.

Stick with what you love doing. It was my greatest mistake when starting out. I know I wanted to teach how to blog for a living, but I became addicted to the fact that Amazon Affiliate marketing was so profitable. 

I ended up being burned out reviewing products. I began outsourcing the reviews (due to lack of interest) and still have unpublished outsourced articles 2 years later (due to lack of interest to proofread).

There are so many ways to monetize contents, so you should never worry if your niche will be profitable enough. Decide on your niche, start a blog, produce the contents.

Once traffic (visitors) start to come, we will use data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to optimize your content for monetization.

Good luck finding your niche! Leave a comment below if you need anything and I’ll be happy to help you out!