How to Find Profitable Blog Niches That Are Insanely Popular

Last modified on 27th November, 2018

You want to start a blog (or have started one) but you’re not sure what topics to write about.

You are not alone. This is a hurdle nearly every new bloggers face.

If you want to make money blogging, finding the right blog niche shouldn’t be taken lightly. In fact, it is one the most important steps of starting a new blog.

Get it wrong, it might come back to bite you later.

So in today’s post, I’m going to show you how to find profitable blog niches and be confident whatever niche you choose will get you traffic and make you good money.

I will also share a blog niches list and tools to get your inspiration going.

In any case, if you wonder how bloggers make money from their blog and want to start your own, check out my how to start a blog guide.

Ready? Let’s get started on finding that perfect blog niche!

What Is a Blog Niche?

Before we talk about profitable blog niches any further, allow me to explain what a blog niche is.

A blog niche is a general topic area that you want your blog to focus on.

For example, if you want to write about health and fitness, you need to narrow down your focus to target one specific sub-topic such as:

• Weight loss/dieting
• Healthy living
• Muscle building/workout
• Running
• and so on.

Why?

Because it will be easier for you to stand out and attract the right kind of audience to your blog.

If you focus on one topic area, there’s a good chance your readers will also be interested in your other blog posts since they all are related to one another.

Trying to appeal to everyone will only confuse your visitors.

For example, do you think you can be a fan of a radio station that plays music from all different genres when you’re only interested in K-pop music?

That said, avoid niching down too much.

If your topic area is too narrow, you’re going to run out of high demand topics to write about. And you’ll struggle to get enough traffic.

How to Choose a Blog Niche That Drive Traffic and Make Money

Some people say just follow your passion and the money will follow.

However, being passionate about a topic is not enough. You must also find out if there’s an existing audience that’s large enough in that niche that you can make money from.

People go online to find a solution to a problem, learn something new or be entertained. If you can offer any of these, you will make money no matter what niche you choose.

But the question is not if you can make money but how much can you make from that niche.

To answer this question you need to look into three factors which are passion, demand and profitability.

The trick is to find the right balance between them to arrive at the best blog niche for yourself.

#1. Passion – How passionate and knowledgeable are you about the topic

Growing a blog takes time and a lot of hard work. In fact, most bloggers only start seeing the fruits of their labour six months even a year later down the road – if they don’t quit.

When the going gets tough, the passion will carry you through they said. So how passionate are you about the blog topic?

The second question you need to ask yourself is how knowledgeable are you about the topic?

It’s easier to create great content, attract an audience and stand out if you have existing knowledge within your niche.

However, you definitely do not need to be an expert to start blogging in a niche. Documenting your unique journey can be as exciting and insightful as that by an expert.

That being said, having a passion and deep knowledge about a blog niche before you start is actually optional.

What? Wait, that’s the exact opposite to what I’ve just said earlier you ask?

What I mean is that you can go to sites like Fiverr, iWriter or TextBroker and hire a writer to write articles for you. No passion or expertise is necessary!

Although your ability to suggest the right topics and evaluate the quality of the article is another matter altogether.

So you can’t just jump blindly into any niche expecting other people to write for you because it will show in the writing.

Paying others to write is actually more common than you might think. In fact, some of the most successful niche blogs are doing this all the while.

One good example is Health Ambition, a blog in the health niche by the guys behind AuthorityHacker.com.

The blogger behind Health Ambition blogger is actually just a pen name because there’s no single writer who wrote all the content.

According to SimilarWeb, the site is currently getting roughly 600,000+ visitors per month.

That said, if you are new to blogging, you should try writing at least the first 10 posts yourself. This allows you to gain experience and understand what it takes to create a good blog post.

As your blog begins to grow and start generating good income, you’ll have the budget to hire a writer or two and scale your content creation.

At this stage, you can focus more on things that you really need to be doing like promotion.

#2. Demand – Is there a large enough audience in the niche?

You can slave away at blogging telling yourself of some future success which may or may never come because your audience is just too small and nobody searches for your topics.

Sorry but that’s why it’s important to make sure the niche you want in has an existing audience that’s large enough.

The best way to judge the demand is by looking at the competition. More competition could mean there are many other bloggers who are earning money in that niche.

For example, personal finance is a highly popular niche and some may say oversaturated. Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of demand and search volume to go around.

Since this is a big niche, you can focus on a wide variety of financial and money-related topics. There will always be a gap that no one else is covering.

Before long after doing your keyword research, you’ll discover that you’re probably not competing directly with other bloggers but your ability to produce the most helpful and relevant content.

Take DollarSprout as an example. It’s a relatively new blog launched just over a year ago in October 2017. In October 2018, the site broke $61,000 in monthly income.

That’s insanity, I know!

Like Health Ambition, the majority of their content was written by guest writers.

Secondly, you can perform keyword research to gauge the popularity of the keywords and their competition in your niche using tools like KeySearch.

Also, make use of Google Trends to see what everyone is searching and to discover trending topics you can focus on.

For example, if you are in the online marketing niche and want to know which e-commerce software is more popular between Shopify and WooCommerce, Google Trends has the answer below.

Google Trends is also great in identifying seasonal topics. At this time of the year, people have started creating tons of holiday-related topic.

#3. Profitability – Can you make good money from this niche?

It’s entirely fine to blog about your hobby or things that interest you. If you don’t care about turning your blog a profit then this factor is irrelevant to you.

However, this post is about finding profitable blog niches and niche ideas that you can monetize from the get-go. You know you aren’t wasting time because you knew it’s a profitable blog niche.

Even if you are not really passionate about the topic, once you start making money from your blog, it’ll be much easier to develop your passion for the topic.

How much money you can make blogging depends largely on the niche you are blogging about and how you’re providing solutions to problems people are searching for.

For example, if you blog about used books, you probably won’t make much money from it unless you also sell rare and expensive books that are in demand.

Blogging about your attempt to learn a new language can be a good read for your audience but probably won’t be profitable for you.

On the other hand, teaching other people how to learn a new language in a unique way would probably be very profitable.

Just take a look at Idahosa of the Mimic Method who generates $300k to $400k in annual revenue four years after it began.

He developed a method to help himself learn multiple languages – and sound like a native speaker in all of them!

Idahosa eventually turned his unique approach to learning languages into an educational business and now provides courses in 10 different languages including.

To gauge the profitability of a niche, check out how other blogs in the same niche are monetizing their content.

• Are they using affiliate programs to make money?
• What type of topics do they write about?
• Do they write mostly promotional or informational blog posts?
• Do they have a newsletter where people can sign up to?
• Are they using any ad network to monetize their traffic?
• Do they sell their own products and services?

Answering these questions should give you some ideas about the niche’s money-making potential.

To summarize, your best blog niche is at the intersection of passion, demand and profitability.

How to Find Popular Blog Topics in a Niche

To help you evaluate the potential traffic of a blog niche, I highly recommend giving KeySearch keyword tool a try.

KeySearch offers a no credit card required free trial that allows 3 daily searches and analysis as well as YouTube research.

One of my favourite features is the Competitive Analysis which lets you analyse your competitors and discover all the keywords they are already ranking for.

Then you could easily target similar keywords and select those which you’ll have a better chance of ranking for.

Why second-guess the popular blog topics in your niche when you can find out what already working for other bloggers with KeySearch?

After all, a blogging niche consists of multiple blog posts.

Once you’ve zeroed in your keyword, you’ll need to dig further to make sure it won’t be difficult to rank on Google for your website.

How to Find the Best Keywords to Target

Just because your competitors are already ranking for the keyword doesn’t mean you will too.

Let me give you an example. Can you guess what my target keyword is for this blog post?

If you guessed “profitable blog niche ideas” or “blog niches” you are right. You can see them in the post title!

Here’s how I found it.

Using KeySearch as my go-to tool for keyword research, I went to the Competitive Analysis tab and entered a domain that belongs to a particular niche, in this case, it’s TwinsMommy.com.

Then KeySearch spits out all the keywords that TwinsMommy.com are ranking for.

Looks like quite a few long tail keywords related to the blogging niche I could target myself.

Next, I wanted to know how difficult it is to rank for the head keyword “blog niches” and see how much traffic it could bring so I dug further using KeySearch.

As it turns out, it’s not that difficult at all. With a difficulty score of 30, this keyword is easy-to-moderate to rank for.

The cost-per-click (CPC) is decent ($1.44), and the monthly search volume is reasonable (560) for this niche.

Since my goal was to find keywords that won’t be difficult to rank on Google I think I’ve found my keyword!

The CPC indicates how much advertisers are willing to pay to get their ad shown on Google Ads for this keyword.

A high CPC (over $1) means more advertisers are bidding for this search term which shows there’s money to be made here.

By comparing the Domain Authority (DA) between our sites, I should be able to predict if I could beat TwinsMommy.com for this particular keyword.

Since Sabahan.com has a higher DA than that of TwinsMommy.com, i.e. 42 vs 36, this tells me I should be able to rank for “blog niches” easily.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. It predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages.

A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

You can check your blog DA and that of your competitors using Moz Link Explorer.

Different keyword research tools may use different metrics but DA should give you some idea of your ranking capability.

In general, you would want to compete with websites that have similar DA or lower than yours.

If there are websites with lower or similar DA to yours in the top 10, then you should have a good chance of ranking for that target keyword.

Again, this is very easy to check using KeySearch as you can see below.

Here’s what it looks like for the keyword “blog niches”.

As you can see above, you don’t always have to have the highest DA to rank on the first page of Google.

While there’s no guarantee that you will rank for the chosen keyword, a proper keyword research will definitely improve your chance of ranking.

Related: 9 Quick SEO Tips and Tricks For Blogs

Keyword research is an ongoing process requiring continuous blog posts optimization and backlinks acquisitions.

Having a good keyword research tool like KeySearch will definitely help. Learn more about KeySearch here or sign up for the free trial.

Why Choosing a Profitable Blog Niche is Important

In some niches like blogging, if you want to write about a popular subject to bring in traffic, everything has probably been done to death by many other bloggers.

The competition can be fierce.

You can target long tail keywords instead with easy to moderate ranking difficulty.

Long-tail keywords are simply longer and less competitive keywords containing 3 or more words.

For example, instead of targeting “wood flooring”, go for “which wood flooring is most durable”.

To rank on the first page of Google result, writing a long blog post (>1800 words) is often a prerequisite (but it’s not always the case).

According to a study quoted by Search Engine Watch, the number 1 position in Google gets 33% of the search traffic.

Suppose I manage to secure the number 1 spot for the keyword ‘blog niches’ that gets around 590 searches per month.

That’s 590 x 33% = 194.7 visitors/month or just 6.49 visitors per day.

All this hard work to write a useful and meaty long-form content, just to attract a measly 6 visitors per day to this article 6 months to 1 year down the road.

That’s not very exciting, is it?

Sure some people say the small wins do add up. If you write 10 of such posts, you could end up with 60 visitors per day.

But what if I tell you, it’s easier to find long tail keywords with easy-to-medium difficulty in niches other than blogging and with 10 times the search volume.

Just one article from that niche alone could bring in 60 visitors per day to your blog.

That’s 9 fewer posts you have to write and still get the same result as that in a blogging niche.

Combining Topically Related Blog Niches that Make Money

I should mention that one could actually get more visitors from a long-form content because it could rank for multiple keywords, sometimes hundreds of keywords for one article.

This article, for instance, could end up ranking for “blog niches”, “profitable blog niches”,  “best blog niche ideas”, “how to find profitable blog niches ideas” – you get the idea.

So what’s my point?

Some niches are easier to drive traffic to than others (and make money from).

I’m not saying you shouldn’t blog about blogging. I am saying, for some less popular or highly competitive niches, you should try combining multiple topics as long as they make sense.

For example, “travel and budgeting” or “mommy blog and make money blogging”.

If you want a concrete example, look no further than the personal finance blog The Penny Hoarder.

While they write about all the different ways people can make money from home and manage their finance, they also have posts to help people save money, live frugally and get deals in categories like

• Food -  “These Grocery Stores Will Give You a Free Thanksgiving Turkey”
• Parenting – “Keep The Holidays Happy and Affordable With These 16 Kids’ Toys Under $30”
• College – “Enter the Google Science Fair for a Chance at a $50K Scholarship”
• Travel – “Plan Ahead to Snag the Best Travel Deals on Cyber Monday With These Steps”
• And so on…

Also, be ready to capture the visitors’ email by placing the opt-in forms on your blog.

That way you can drive these targeted visitors further into your marketing funnel and maximize your money making potential.

If done right, you can make tons of money from the blogging niche (or any other niche) from the backend even with a smaller search volume.

Related: How to Start an Email List for Free Right Now

Profitable Blog Niches List

Below are some of the unique blog ideas you can consider.

Once you found a niche, you can use the Keyword Niche Finder tool from WordStream to find unique, potentially undiscovered long-tail keywords in your niche.

You get 10 free searches up-front, and one free search per day going forward.

When I typed “blogging” the tool return the following long tail variations to consider.

With some keyword research, you should be able to quickly uncover many more popular and high demand blog topics to write about in your niche.

Additional Resources to Help You Get Started

• How to Start Your Own Blog (Beginners Guide)
• Learn How to Make Money Blogging (Detailed Guide For Beginners)
• 7 Proven Strategies to Increase Blog Traffic for Free

Conclusion

Finding a profitable blog niche involves a balancing act between these three factors:

• Passion
• Demand
• Profitability

Without passion, it’d be easier to quit writing when no one is reading your blog.

Even if you are passionate about it, you’ll struggle to get traffic if no one is searching for your topics.

Finally, to find out if the niche is profitable, you need to make sure there are existing blogs which are already making money in that niche.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You just have to create a better blog or approach that niche in a way that no one has taken before.

Now it’s your turn.

Have you started your own blog yet? If you have, I love to hear in the comments why and how did you select your blog niche.