Let's take examples - photography and video, travel, sports and fishing. If you had to write articles for a blog on one of these topics, without making money and increasing the number of subscribers, you would just waste 100% of my time.

Yes, some bloggers say: "I blog not for money and subscribers" or "It's just a hobby."

But in essence, such bloggers are people who do not yet know how to make money and say that this is a hobby to save face.

In any creative field - be it design, web development, photography, copywriting, editing, etc. - there are people who do not earn, and there are experts who receive high income.

Most bloggers fail because they start writing about their passions and only then try to decide on monetization.

In addition, most of the recommendations for blogging, as a rule, are outdated or written only for ranking in Google and imply an elementary appeal to the widest possible audience.

Bloggers don't fail because they lack desire or motivation.

Bloggers fail because they can't go from author to business owner.

How does this happen?

They choose an unprofitable niche, with an obviously insolvent audience.
They don't do keyword research before writing content.
They do not use work social media accounts and professional connections to their strategic advantage.
They do not know how to monetize their blog and do not plan for this important aspect from the very beginning.

These writers burn out because their passion was not really in writing content, but in what they wrote about.

So how do you make sure your new blog doesn't fail?

You need to choose the right niche based on the audience's income potential and plan for monetization from day one of blogging.

Before starting a blog, it is imperative that you choose your niche not based on your passions, but based on four core business factors:

The budget potential of the audience
Affiliate Marketing Potential
Keyword volume
professional experience

So let's get started.

Note: This course will help you start your own blog and earn $1500/month after 150 days.

1. Audience budget potential.

In order to offer a valuable product on your blog, you must identify your audience's pain problem and find its most sought-after solution.

Start by looking for niches where you are a member of the target audience - in this case, you will have more knowledge in the subject area, and you will be “in the know” from the very beginning.

More importantly, you need to know how much your potential audience is willing to spend to solve their pain problem.

Let's say you're a project manager and you want to create a blog that provides tips for IT managers. You could write about interviewing tips, certifications to get, and other things related to the job.

Your blog will attract a wide range of readers, including college students, marketers, and job changers.

In order to monetize a new blog in a given niche, you must move your followers up the sales funnel:

Create Content to Engage Your Audience
Write career tips that motivate your audience to subscribe to your email newsletter
Post affiliate links to promote multiple products or info courses
Finally, offer your subscribers a $200 online course on How to Become a Project Manager.

This is how most successful bloggers approach blogging, and by doing so, you will earn good passive income after building your audience. However, by redirecting your content to a more profitable audience, you can increase your earning potential by thousands of dollars.

Here's how to do it.

Instead of targeting project managers looking for career guidance, why not target the companies they work for?

Now, instead of writing about career counseling and interviewing tips, write about the best project management software, task management tools, and ways to interact with a team.

By adding a B2B component with informational and affiliate articles, you will simply shift your audience from individuals to companies and multiply the potential income of your blog many times over.

The great thing about this approach is that your blog launch and marketing funnel are pretty much the same for both employees and B2B employers. However, with a B2B niche, you don't stop at $200. You can add for example $1000+ online consulting.

That's why it's not enough to simply understand your audience's pain points.

To increase your blog revenue potential by 10x, part of your audience needs to be in a profitable B2B niche and pay you monthly in the form of consulting or affiliate commissions.

When choosing your niche, instead of worrying about getting thousands of passive, low-value website visitors, focus on getting 2-3 high-value customers within the first 5 months and rank for their keywords.

With this approach, I hope you now understand why I sincerely believe that you can earn $1500 a month after 5 months of starting a new blog.

2. The potential of affiliate marketing in your niche.

Affiliate marketing is my favorite form of blog monetization. This is passive income, and once you start ranking on Google, you can earn money while you sleep, travel, or spend time with your family.

Affiliate marketing is about recommending other companies products and services and earning a commission on every sale.

Most large companies have affiliate programs that you can join. Once you apply and get approved, you will receive unique affiliate links. Add links to your blog, view click/sales reports, and track payouts.

What you need to do to get started with affiliate marketing?

Apply to the company's affiliate program either on their website or through the affiliate network. To do this, you will need a website and an email address associated with your domain - sometimes a Gmail or Yandex email address is not suitable and your domain is needed.
Once approved, copy your unique affiliate link to a suitable post on your blog.

What do you see your blog about?

Perhaps this is a lifestyle blog in which you write about what you have recently bought useful for your family, as well as about repairs and your hobbies. Or a blog about fitness and wellness, where you give tips on losing weight, eating right, and how to keep fit. Or maybe you want to blog about your personal life? I would recommend forgetting about these types of blogs. Yes, these blogs can be fun to read, but these are not the niches that will bring you the most profit. Instead, consider a simple formula: To make enough money from a blog, you need affiliate income. To earn affiliate income, you need to get Google rankings and web traffic. To get web traffic, you need to rank for the keywords that bring in the most affiliate revenue.

So what are these keywords?

Answer: keywords containing the word "best". Here are some examples:

In finance, it's the best credit cards, the best car loans, or the best home insurance.
In tech, the keywords are the best laptop of 2020, the best headsets, or the best photography gear
In marketing and travel (like my blog) is best email marketing software, best web hosting or best travel backpack, best camera

These "best" keywords are searched for by people looking for product reviews. Users are interested in reading blogs with detailed content about what is “better” before making a purchase (and they are not yet ready to immediately go to the company’s website and make a purchase). If you're looking for a new smartphone, search Google for "best smartphone of 2020" and look at the top 10 results. Every site in the top 10 results is an affiliate. There are no real companies selling smartphones. Now try entering the query “best credit card”. What do you see? And again, the top 10 results are partners. Now you understand that the most successful and profitable websites are those with affiliate sales. And the truth is that their recommendations are often primarily based on how much money the site makes, rather than the actual quality of the product or service itself. Once you understand this, you will start noticing affiliate sites everywhere. So, now that you have plans to create your own blog and choose a niche, look for sites like these:

Business & Finance: VC, Millennialmoney, CardRatings
Tech: Habr, Ixbt, Mobile review
Travels: Adventureinyou, Nomadicmatt, Karaandnate

I think the most profitable niches for new blogs right now are finance, technology, travel, business, and marketing.

3. Your niche needs big keywords.

Before choosing your niche, do some keyword research. This is very important, and I place special emphasis on this. Most bloggers fail precisely because they start creating content aimlessly instead of learning SEO strategies and keyword research. Each blog post should target one specific keyword. We'll take a closer look at exactly how to format posts later, but for now, just know that your blog traffic is dictated by how many people request what you write about. To get started, use the free Google Keyword Planner keyword research tool or SEMRush, or Ahrefs SEO tools, and enter your keyword suggestions. You can also install a free Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere to get keyword data directly from Google search. For clarity, if you want to create a travel blog, enter keywords such as:

best credit cards for travel
best travel insurance
best travel backpacks
best travel shoes

When you research keywords, there are 2 things you should pay attention to: keyword volume and competition/difficulty.

Keyword volume is the number of searches for that keyword in a month.
Competition (sometimes called difficulty) is how hard it will be to rank for a given keyword. This is a score from 0 to 100 (or 0 to 1) based on the authority of sites that already rank for that target keyword.

There are no hard and fast rules in keyword research. I recommend that you target keywords with 1000+ searches per month and difficulty levels up to 30 so you can get more traffic with less competition. Another way to measure competition is to check SEMRush's search engine results page ( SERP ) data, specifically the domain rank (DR) of first page results and SERP position history . Shown here is DR (authority on a scale of 0 to 100) and the top 5 ranking sites for the target keyword over the past six months. If all of the top 10 results have a DR greater than 60, your new blog with a DR of 0 will not make it to the first page. However, if you see websites with a DR below 30 on the first page, that's a good sign and you'll likely be able to land on the first page as well. The second good sign of getting on the first page of search results for your query is if the positions have changed within the last 3-5 months (SERP). Based on the above, when choosing keywords for your niche, focus on:

1000+ monthly requests
Keyword difficulty score up to 30
There must be at least one site with DR under 30 on the first page of Google
SERP position history that has changed recently

4. Use your professional skills when choosing a niche.

After identifying the paying audience that you can benefit from, the next step is to identify your strategic advantages. Ask yourself:

What is my current level of professional experience?
What connections do I have in this area?
Can I use this experience to profit from my blog?
Given my current experience, which existing website would host my post (as a guest post)?

To build a truly successful blog, you first need to become an influencer. And in order to increase your influence, you must step outside your comfort zone, and use your connections and professional experience. When working with a blog, you will spend a lot of effort on establishing new contacts. To build relationships, you need to guest post on authoritative sites in your niche, so you will get relevant backlinks with high domain authority (DA). When you first start blogging, you may not have many contacts (on Linkedin) or published content. And this is exactly the point where using your professional experience helps a lot. For example, if you're a photographer, you might have a client base, contacts from local photography groups, and acquaintances with other photographers you've met in the past. If you use these contacts in the future, you will be able to accelerate the growth of your blog. Ultimately, when you start planning your niche based on the four business factors described above, you are much more likely to succeed. Choosing Your Niche - Summing Up Key takeaways: Bloggers don't fail due to a lack of motivation and desire to keep blogging. Bloggers fail because they can't go from author to business owner. To truly make a living blogging, you should choose your niche not based on passions, but based on four main business factors: audience budget potential, affiliate marketing potential, keyword volume, and professional experience .

Identify the audience that you yourself are a part of and personally know its pain points.
Make sure the segment has a B2B component that will increase your potential revenue.
Make sure your niche has sufficient keyword volume and market demand.
Search Google for "best" keywords to find affiliate marketing opportunities.
Use your social media accounts, professional experience and anything else that might be useful to make new contacts.

This tactic works because, in the end, passion doesn't create money. But money creates passion.