Make money blogging: niche site or blog?

If you have been following our journey here at Make Money Your Way, you know that blogging takes time, effort, and a lot of energy. This website is only 18 months old, yet countless hours have been spent making it what it is today. If you read the income reports, you also probably know that the site barely generated any income for the first six months. However, for the following 12 months, it has turned into a nice little stream of additional income, which is what attracts many aspiring bloggers in the first place.

There are many ways of monetizing a blog, one of the most basics being Adsense. Over at Scottish Friendly, you can learn a bit more about Adsense, if you aren’t too familiar with it. It is super easy to set up, and then you earn a few pennies for every time a reader clicks on an ad.

Which means you need readers! That is where a blog is very different from a niche site. Niche sites are usually pretty small in terms of content, some have as little as a dozen pages, about a very specific topic. For example, how to feed a Great Dane, or how to become a nurse. They target mainly search traffic, which are all the people googling that kind of information. Knowing that a vast majority of them will click on the first search result suggested by Google, the battle is fierce when it comes to popular searches, like… “how to make money blogging”!! But you can find a niche that has a decent amount of search traffic, and a lower competition, and give it a try. Some people just look for the perfect niche, whatever it is, looking for low competition keywords with a software, and then just find a way to make it work. I know for sure I couldn’t do that, as I am unable to write a dozen posts on a topic I know nothing about. However, you can also look for a niche you enjoy, thinking about your less traditional hobbies. Let’s say you enjoy making quiche, you could create a site about your best quiche recipe, and all the different ways you can cook it, eat it, prepare it for a party, and so on. Writing then becomes easy, meaning you write good posts, that in turn attract more traffic.

With a blog, on the other hand, you really need to find a topic you can talk about for hours, or you will get a burnout after a few weeks of pumping content. When I started blogging three years ago, I had been reading personal finance blogs for about seven years, and I still loved reading them. I felt like I had a voice to add and I have been doing so since. I had written about travel before, which seemed very cool on paper, but after two years, I was bored and needed a change. After three years of personal finance, I still have things to talk about! So think long and hard before choosing your niche. You can still change down the road, some personal finance blogs have become lifestyle blogs, travel blogs, mommy blogs… but if you want to keep a coherent brand, it makes more sense to stay in one niche. That is why I started Make Money Your Way, to talk more specifically about ways to make more money, while at Reach Financial Independence I used to talk more about early retirement, travel and lifestyle.

The more content you put out, the more readers you can reach, the more money your blog could make. And as you keep writing, it will become easier to write, just like the gym. Good luck!