Now all this is great but at some point you still need to think about the money. As with the design stage of any product, it’s important to test there is an audience out there before you invest too much time and effort building your site and producing content.
This is why you need to think about how you’re going to monetize and whether the niche you’re thinking of choosing will support the business model that you have in mind.
And yes, some niches vary drastically in terms of profitability so this is a skill you should learn early on!
What Makes a Niche Profitable?
So what makes a niche profitable? To understand this fully, you need to think about the options available you have for monetization.
One of these options is advertising: placing Google AdSense or banner ads on your website. This is actually the least profitable form of monetization though because you’ll be sending your visitors away from your site every time they click on an ad. What’s more, you should consider that if those advertisers are willing to pay for your traffic, they must have a way to make more money from them than you are.
How are they making money? Most likely it’s by selling something. If they are selling something, then they’ll be able to keep the lion’s share of the profit from each visitor while at the same time keeping them engaged with their brand. This is what you should be aiming to do from your site, at least eventually. You can do this either by creating a product of your own – ideally a ‘digital product’ such as an eBook – or by selling a product you didn’t create, such as an affiliate product. Of course services are also an option.
Now what you have to consider is that some niches lend themselves to products you can sell much more easily than others. And this will impact on your advertising fee as well – think about it, if there’s nothing for your advertisers to sell in your niche, then they won’t be willing to pay very much to appear on your website!
So the most profitable niches are definitely those that have lots of things to sell.
This is where picking a niche like ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ isn’t quite so good. After all, Sonic the Hedgehog is a trademark of SEGA. This means that you can’t sell your own Sonic the Hedgehog merchandise and the best you might get away with is a ‘guidebook’ – which isn’t going to fetch a ton of cash.
At the same time, other advertisers aren’t really going to want to advertise on your website either. You’ll be able to get ads from Google AdSense but they might not be very relevant (they’ll probably be from the likes of Amazon, or from other game manufacturers). This means they won’t get clicked that often, which means you won’t earn that much money from them. What’s more, because they won’t be selling any ‘high ticket items’ themselves, they won’t be able to pay out huge amounts for those clicks you’re getting them!
This is the kind of thing you need to be thinking about when you’re coming up with your niche. Of course you can still make money from Sonic the Hedgehog blogs or other fan sites but it’s going to be much harder compared with some other niches and you might want to think hard to come up with some kind of plan first.
Some High Earning Niches To Consider
One of the most obvious reasons a niche might be high earning is that it offers a form of investment for the customers. So let’s say that you have a blog on investing – this is something that people will be willing to pay to learn about, because they should be able to earn more money from that knowledge than they spent to acquire it. The same thing goes for something like business (like The Personal MBA). People spend thousands on online courses to learn how to make money from websites. Why? Because in theory they’ll earn that money back!
The other type of niche that is likely to be very profitable is any that promises to change your viewers’ lives in a very measurable way. Here you want to think about your ‘value proposition’ or how you are making people’s lives better.
This is why fitness is such a great niche to be in from a profitability standpoint: people are willing to spend a lot more money on fitness books, or workout equipment because they believe that they will give them abs, build them biceps and tone their buttocks.
This in turn can lead to them living longer, being more confident, having more luck with the opposite sex, looking better in clothes and more – to most people this is a highly tempting prospect and one they’d be more than happy to spend a lot of money on!
A similar example of this is dating. Dating is something many of us feel very strongly about, so if you write about that, you can earn a lot.
Of course other things are simply desirable and in this case, the ‘higher ticket’ the item you’re selling, the more you can potentially earn from your site. So if you’re writing about sports cars… well then you have the potential to earn a lot of cash! This is also why travel blogs can earn a lot of money – because they appeal to travel agents and sites like Trivago or Expedia for advertising.
If your niche isn’t obviously profitable in that it doesn’t have a tempting value proposition, the promise of investment or high ticket items then you just need to get a little more creative. And creativity can benefit you anyway.
For instance, maybe your plan is to make money by helping people find hotels to stay in so that you can then take commission? Maybe your plan is to build the site up and then branch out and extend into another area? Or perhaps you’re just going to sell the site once it gets to a certain size.
Whatever you decide, just make sure you’ve thought all this through before you go ahead!
Profitability and Your Target Audience
Something else to think about here is the type of audience you are going to get writing on a particular subject, or your ‘demographic’ to use the correct parlance. Even if your niche is potentially profitable, you need to consider the possibility that it might not earn as much as it should if your audience don’t have any disposable income!
If you’re writing about computer games then there’s a good chance your demographic might be somewhat younger – at least a large portion of it. This means they may not have as much money to spend as an older audience. This also happens to be a reason that the ‘silver surfer’ audience are so popular at the moment (pensioners on the web) as they tend to have a lot of disposable income!
Profitability and Evergreen Sites
Another thing to think about is whether the niche you’ve chosen is always going to be profitable. Because the point you need to keep in mind is that some things will just be ‘fads’ and others will be long lasting. Likewise, some topics will lend themselves more to ‘evergreen content’.
This is something you need to take into account with a fan site again. If your fan site is about something new that is currently in the public eye – a recent film or book for instance – then you may struggle to find an audience once that particular interest falls out of favor.
Likewise, even if the thing you’re writing about has a hardcore fan base that stick by it for a long time, you might still find it difficult to write ‘evergreen content’ that people can read in ten years’ time.
Let’s say for instance that you are running a site about Star Trek and you write a piece on your predictions for the third movie that’s about to come out. In doing so, you have instantly dated that piece of content and if people find it again in 10 years, it’s not going to be relevant or interesting to them.
News sites struggle with this problem, as do tech sites and more. This is another advantage of a fitness site – it stays evergreen other than the trends that come and go.
Note that ‘trends’ and ‘fads’ can also mean movements – like CrossFit or like ‘Bikram Yoga’. Even diets like the Paleo diet will likely eventually fall out of favor.
This isn’t to say that you can’t potentially make a lot of money from a fad in the meantime if you want to get in quick and get out. Better yet, if you can anticipate an upcoming trend or fad then you can stand to earn a lot of money before there’s even any competition for you to face off against.
Unfortunately no single niche ‘has it all’ and whatever you pick, you will be making some compromises.
