When you are starting a blog, probably the most difficult decision is choosing your blog niche. You want your niche to be something profitable, yet easy enough to write about and if possible with low to medium competition level.
You also want to create blog posts that are interesting for you personally so that you don’t get bored from working in a year.
Well, I can’t help you with the last part because I don’t know you personally and what is exciting for you. But I will help you with the other questions – I’ll show you the most profitable niches based on the trends for this year and beyond. And stay until the end of this post if you want to see an awesome blog niche where you can make $43,000/mo.
First of all, I’m going to surprise you with this but hopefully, it will be a relief. You actually don’t have to choose the blog niche right away.
Usually, people get stuck in choosing their domain name because they think it has to be relevant to the blog niche. But the truth is that many websites have very weird domain names that don’t reflect any specific niche.
And if you are stuck, the best solution is to use some generic domain name. Something that allows you to change the niche later, experiment with different topics on the blog, or make your niche as broad as you wish in the future. It could be your personal name or some made-up word.
You know a ton of huge brands that used invented words like Google or Nestle, Adidas, Kodak, and so on. If you take a generic or invented word for your domain name, you can always change your mind about the niche.
Things to Consider and Research Before You Start Your Blogging Career
There are lots of steps involved in getting your blog up and running with valuable content, and marketing your blog, as discussed in our courses, YouTube videos, and other articles. However, when it comes to the fundamental decision of finding a blog niche, there are only four major categories of tasks or things to consider and research. We’re not including technical or design elements, marketing, or other content-related tasks here. Rather, we’re just looking at the steps leading up to a topic decision.
Explore Your Interests and Expertise
A common piece of advice for new bloggers looking to select a blog niche is to follow your passion, which can seem a bit ambiguous. It is important to choose a topic for your blog that you are passionate about, or at least interested in, or it can become very tedious very quickly. Our advice is to explore the intersection of your interests or expertise, hobbies, past experiences, and so on, with trending topics or what might interest others. Find a problem to solve or a unique voice to provide, and you’ll be on the right track to focusing in on a good popular blog topic.
Monetization
When considering blog topics to make money, you need to give some thought to your method(s) of monetization. How are you going to turn visits to your blog and pageviews into a source of income? Popular options include advertising, affiliate or referral programs, making and selling your own products or services, and alternative support methods, such as Patreon. The reason you need to consider this in the context of blog niche ideas is that the two are inextricably linked. The most profitable blogging niches not only draw large amounts of traffic but have one or more reliable, high-value ways of monetizing their content and converting readers into a revenue stream.
Competition
You likely will want to come up with a few blog niche ideas when you brainstorm, and then research each one. It’s vital that you spend some time doing keyword research and looking at your competition. How will you differentiate yourself? Some of the most profitable blogging niches have a lot of competition in them already, and if you don’t bring something unique to the table, you may not be successful. That’s why we stress again it is possible that an extremely niche blog, with limited competition, that otherwise doesn’t appear on our most profitable blog niche list below, may in fact be the best choice for you. Do your research!
Choose a Topic and Get Started
After all is said and done, you will eventually need to choose a niche and get started on developing a plan for your blog. This may seem obvious, but this step deserves some attention. Figure out the scope of what you intend to cover, and brainstorm important topics or areas related to your blog niche. This will help set you up to make the best choices for things like design, structure, marketing, and other steps that come later. It’s always better to have an abundance of ideas within your chosen topic, rather than have too few and end up running out of content ideas after you go live.
What Makes a Nice Profitable?
Now the big question you probably have on your mind is what makes some niches more profitable than others? The answer is made of these 3 components:
1. Is the Niche Monetizable?
2. What is the Potential Traffic Volume
3. Does this Niche Have a Future?
Let’s talk about each one of the 3 elements that actually can make it or break it, in more detail.
Is this niche monetizable?
When you start a blog, you need to understand how you will make money with it. It’s tough I know. As a beginner, you have no idea what is the potential income and how exactly you’ll monetize your blog.
The best advice I can give you here is to do your research first.
For some niches, you can easily find income reports from established bloggers. Just go to google and type in something like “…. your niche blog income reports”. It’s more typical for bloggers to share income reports in several profitable niche like personal finance, and business-related niches, but sometimes even lifestyle blog, fashion blogs, mommy blogs, food, home decor, and craft bloggers step publish their income reports. If you can’t find anything interesting in particular, I can recommend you as a reference one interesting page with a lot of income reports listed for many niches here.
It’s a page on Mediavine – it’s an ad management company and they made a small collection of bloggers who joined their network and publish income reports.
Just go down this page and see if you can find something close to your niche. Keep in mind that most of the popular blogs on this list are monetizing with ads as their biggest income source, as typically these are income reports from the bloggers who just reached Mediavine’s minimum traffic volume of 50,000/mo sessions. Very few bloggers on this list use additional monetization methods and in some niches, affiliate income can be a huge income stream.
For example, in software reviews or in tech niches, if you want to understand how your competitors make money, you need to open their blogs and analyze which affiliate links they included.
On this site, they reviewed the top podcast hosting sites and if you go through this page, you will see that every link on this list, is an affiliate link.
I will just show you an example of how you can find out the potential income from one post like this. Let’s open a random company they promoted here, go to the footer because that’s normally where you will find a link to their affiliate program. And as you can see just from this site, you could earn $25 for every paid account you refer.
This obviously has a one-time affiliate commission. But many software companies will pay you recurring commissions. Like 20 or 30% commission from each monthly payment.
Potential traffic volume
The main idea I want you to understand is that popular niches with high traffic volume are usually the most profitable because more people are looking for information related to those niches.
The easiest way to evaluate traffic volume is to use any Google keyword research tools. The most affordable and easiest-to-use tool is the Keywords Everywhere browser extension. You can start your research with the main focus keyword and then the tool will show you the search volume for it and suggest related keywords.
You might ask me but how about competition? Shouldn’t you also consider how competitive the niche is? Well in my opinion, if you really start looking into most of the best blog niches with a decent potential traffic volume, there will always be some competition. If you keep looking for niches with low competition, you might end up never starting a blog. There are always different types of blogs with a high domain authority ranking for anything you might search for.
You have to understand that large publishing companies have thousands of writers and believe me, they have enough resources to cover almost every low-competition keyword you can imagine.
It doesn’t mean that you have to give up and not even try starting your own blog. It’s just to tell you that no matter how deep you go niching down and looking for a unique topic that no one ever covered, there is no guarantee that no one will go after this topic a few months later, and then what was the point of niching down so much?
I will emphasize it again, if not a lot of people are searching for the topic you want to cover, most likely it’s not a good niche for a blog. I don’t like niches that are too narrow. Niching down too much and choosing a domain name that reflects that narrow focus keyword is limiting your income growth.
Say, you like a particular dog breed. Maybe even a very rare breed. So you think it’s great to start a blog with that dog breed in your domain and blog name. But in less than a year, you’ll find out that you wrote every possible article for every long-tail keyword related to that dog breed that existed in this Universe. Then what? How are you going to grow your blogging business from there?
Really, don’t do this to yourself. Don’t go after a narrow niche! And even if you choose a relatively narrow topic initially, to gain some authority with your blog, at least make sure that your domain is not limited to this first topic. And that you can later add other related topics to your blog without having to start a new site from scratch.
And now how can you see if your niche has a future?
A great way to know if you have the perfect blog niche is to use Google Trends to see if your topic has growing popularity or at least it should be stable over the years.
If you compare keywords Facebook marketing and Instagram marketing, you can see how Facebook reached its peak of popularity around 2013-2015 and since then it retained a pretty high but slowly declining search volume. Instagram marketing as a search term only emerged around 2013 and was growing but kind of stagnated since 2020. At the same time, Tiktok marketing is on the rise.
Now that you know how to evaluate blogging niches in different ways, I wanted to give you a few ideas of the most profitable blog niche ideas for this year.
People often say: well, the only bloggers who make money are the bloggers who teach you how to start a blog. You are so wrong my friend! But it’s not your fault that you think so. It’s just that most of the time, income reports that you see online, are from bloggers who teach how to start a blog. The thing is that bloggers in other niches rarely share their income reports. Why? Well, why would they want to share all the secrets if this doesn’t benefit them in any way? Bloggers who teach you how to start a blog, have to share their income reports to justify their expertise and simply to prove to you they know what they are talking about.
So you mostly see income reports from bloggers who teach you how to blog. And you start thinking that people in other niches don’t earn anything.
Now I wanted to show you some numbers from research published by RankIQ. It’s one of the AI SEO tools that can help you rank your content on Google. So they analyzed data from 800 blogs that were making $2000+ per month and/or getting over 50,000+ monthly sessions.
For median income, food and personal finance blogs were at the top of the list. The food bloggers had a median monthly income of $9,169, and the personal finance bloggers came in just a hair below $9,100.
It’s interesting that Pro bloggers making between $7500 and $25,000 per month get 33.3% of their income from ads and 42.2% from affiliates.
The Most Profitable Niches This Year
Now that we’ve outlined the process of selecting your blog niche, let’s get straight to our niche list. Below, we highlight and provide some additional detail on the most profitable blogging niches for this year. This includes topics that have been popular over the past years and will remain popular this year and beyond. I have also listed new and upcoming blog niches that are forecast to explode in interest and growth in the near future. As a reminder, these are high-demand blog topics, and fairly broad – you can absolutely hone in on a particular blog niche within these topics that is far more specific and unique.
Niche #1: Food and Recipes
Food blogs are #1 on the list. It’s relatively easy to start getting a ton of traffic to a food blog, you can start with Pinterest as it can help you drive traffic much faster than Google SEO. If you want to get started on Pinterest, check out my free Pinterest masterclass here.
Just for inspiration, I will show you some blog income reports for each of the niches. So this food blog called MidWestfoodieblog made over $67,000 in the second quarter of 2023. Most of this income comes from display ads on her blog.
Niche #2: Personal finance, and Investing (stock, including Crypto)
In the last couple of years, all content related to investing in stocks and crypto was getting a lot of attention. With the recession on the horizon, people are still very interested in learning about investing as well as saving money.
You can check an income report on Fin Savvy Panda from March of 2021 when she made over $27,000 of which about $20,000 was her income from affiliate products.
Niche #3: Health and fitness
Health is the type of content that will always be in demand. People will always need to take care of their health, no matter how bad or good is the economy, people are always prepared to spend money on their health. So this blogging niche, in spite of high competition, is always profitable. Check for example this blogger The Trusty Potter who made over $11,0000 with a health and fitness site in September 2021.
Niche #4: Lifestyle
Lifestyle blogs will never be out of fashion because they are so broad and can cover any new trending topics. There are several lifestyle subcategories that you can choose, and make almost every list of the most profitable blog niches. These can include mommy or parenting blogs, as well as multi-topic blogs that explore fashion, health and fitness, beauty and makeup, and other topics from our niche list. Lifestyle can also include topics specific to your everyday life, professional or non-blogging career, and similar, provided they have wide interest and appeal. It also pairs well with those who have extensive Instagram and/or Pinterest followings related to style, fashion, food, and life in general.
This blog A Modern Homestead made $10,356.00 in July of 2020.
Niche #5: Travel
The travel niche is coming back after the pandemic and can keep driving a lot of traffic to your blog. Travel blogs remain very popular, though have slid down in the rankings somewhat. However, travel spending and interest remain steady or even grow year after year, and there’s no shortage of people looking to plan trips, save money, see the world, and so on. Your approach and unique voice matter here, as travel blogs can be difficult to differentiate. Monetization can also be a bit more challenging. Despite those drawbacks, travel continues to be one of the high-demand blog topics moving into 2023, and will likely stay there for years to come.
Check out this blog called Living the Dream which made almost $15,200 in June 2023.
Niche #6: Business and software reviews
Business niche and software reviews are incredibly profitable even if your traffic volume isn’t huge because you can monetize it with high-ticket affiliate products or products with recurring commissions.
RyRob blog made $35,218.31 in March 2021 according to his income report.
Niche #7: Home decor
When you think of the home decor niche, it might not be obvious to you how profitable it can be. The reality is we all live in a home and people always want to make our homes more cozy and pretty. Furniture, new gadgets, home improvement materials and technologies are typically the products in a higher price range, so as an affiliate for those products you can count on really great commissions.
An example of a blog that does a good job with both display ads and affiliate links in the home decor niche is the blog called By Sophia Lee. And you can check here one of her latest public income reports for May 2020 when she made $43,000.00.
Final Thoughts
Starting your first blog can be both creatively and financially rewarding, but it can also take a lot of time and effort to get right. If you are considering making money with a blog, then one of the most important decisions you will have to make is deciding on a niche or topic for your blog. You simply can’t sit down and write randomly about what you ate for lunch or your plans for the weekend – at least, not if you intend to gain readers and page views, or monetize your content in any meaningful way. Rather, you need to put some serious thought and research into your topic selection and focus on things to blog about.
It’s important to stress that there are lots of recurring themes for blog niche ideas and the most profitable blogging niches out there today, which can be easily found with a few well-chosen searches on your favorite search engine. But really, almost any niche, category, or interest can be turned into a popular blog topic. In fact, a blog niche idea that doesn’t appear on any major itemized niche list may in fact be the best choice for you. It simply requires commitment, passion, professionalism, and hard work, along with a bit of luck and some careful planning and forethought. As with most things in life, the more you put into your blog, the more you are likely to get out of it.
But to answer your doubts, yes, you CAN make a really good income in many blogging niches. You just have to pick the one that works best for you.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I choose a profitable blog niche?
To choose a profitable blog niche or a popular topic for your blog, review your interests and expertise, figure out a monetization plan, do your research on the competition, and then choose a best niche for your blog. Develop a plan and flesh out ideas and topics within your chosen niche. Remember to keep in mind problems to solve or a unique and different perspective, and offer content to your readers that they want to read. Appeal to a broad audience!
What type of blogs make the most money?
Some of the most profitable blog niches of today are not included on our niche list, and with good reason – they are either super-saturated with many big-name competitors or are forecast to be declining in popularity. At the same time, many of the topics on our list are evergreen and can be extremely profitable, depending on how you choose to monetize them (and the quality of your content, of course).
Is blogging still profitable in 2023?
Top bloggers can easily earn a comfortable living running their blog this year and beyond. But you can’t expect that to happen overnight, and not everyone is a success. That’s why it is an important factor to take care to choose a high demand blog topic that works for you. In all cases, the actual expenses for running a blog are relatively low, so it is relatively easy to turn some kind of profit. The benchmark for profit is usually at $500-$1,000, depending on your marketing and content generation costs and plans, with anything earned beyond that annually being pure profit.
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
