Is there any money to be made in blogging about your personal interests?

[Jon]

Was thinking about this over the weekend

If you create a blog and you want it to earn you an income, are there more negatives to doing a personal interest one than a generic, mass appeal one.

If you make a blog all about your favourite pink socks. The blog covers the latest developments in the pink sock world and connects with other pink sock blogs, is there only so many eyeballs available to bring an income into that blog?

Compare that to making something mass appeal like the mummy blogs where there is surly more chance of earning more money but maybe the market is quite saturated..

better to be a medium sized fish in a small pond?

 

[Chammy]

I'll keep you updated as you know that is what I am doing.

In my case I already know that the possible reach of my interest is HUGE all over the world and it grows every day. I know one small area of my interest has almost 4 million fans on Facebook and 515k followers on Twitter.

A mummy blog would bore the living poop out of me and even if I only make pennies from this blog I am enjoying writing on it, I've managed a post a day so far (3 in total).

 

[Jon]

I suppose niche blogging is easier to advertise in that there is only one core community to throw your advertising at

If it was a general blog then you can end up advertising everywhere until you find what works to bring eyeballs to your blog

 

[Flitterbug]

If I ever get round to actually doing my minecraft blog I'll let you know

 

[alditoharrods]

Definitely! Obviously there is affiliate marketing, but even without going to Kristian's lengths, there is money to be made.

Possibly the easiest way is to stick adverts like Adsense on your blog, then you get paid per impression, and more for clicks.

Then there's sponsored posts. I've done them for anything between free and £720. Bloggers tend to use their page rank x £10 plus an extra £10 - so a Page Rank of 4 is £50. There's also a formula for working it out based on followers, but I can't think what it is.

 

[FreeSwagSites]

Was thinking about this over the weekend

If you create a blog and you want it to earn you an income, are there more negatives to doing a personal interest one than a generic, mass appeal one.

If you make a blog all about your favourite pink socks. The blog covers the latest developments in the pink sock world and connects with other pink sock blogs, is there only so many eyeballs available to bring an income into that blog?

Compare that to making something mass appeal like the mummy blogs where there is surly more chance of earning more money but maybe the market is quite saturated..

better to be a medium sized fish in a small pond?

The whole idea of niche sites is exactly that - except that you want to be a big fish, not a medium one.
Better to get lots of page 1s with keywords attracting 150 searches per month than page 20s for a keyword attracting 5,000 searches per month. But, you don't need to have a site as small and focussed as "pink socks" to do this - it is your content that gets ranked so you can also target less competitive keywords from within a larger site.

The general trend is away from building lots of very small and narrow niche sites and more towards fewer slightly larger ones. It is said that Google now takes a lot longer before it will start to rank your content well (4-6 months perhaps) and so the days of building a site over the weekend and getting good ranking within a week or so are long gone.

For example, a few years ago if I wanted to start blogging about "buggies for twins", I would create a separate small site called besttwinbuggies.com. Now, I would just add it to an existing site (as i have with KSF) that already has a reasonable relationship with Google. That way, you don't have to wait ages to start getting ranked and can instead get ranked immediately. You also don't have to spend the weekend building the site or buying new domain names etc. You just have to make sure that the new stuff fits well with the existing site - E-cigarettes and Viagra would probably not work on KSF!

So, my advice to anyone starting out is that it is perfectly sensible to concentrate on a narrow niche area at the start, but when choosing the name of the site etc. always leave room for expansion into other related areas. Personally, I also trust branded domain names more than keyword based domain names when I am a visitor.

 

[Jon]

good post

is it not harder to market a personal niche than a more general one though?

Without the marketing you don't get the eyeballs

without the eyeballs you don't get the money you want to make from the blog

 

[FreeSwagSites]

good post

is it not harder to market a personal niche than a more general one though?

Without the marketing you don't get the eyeballs

without the eyeballs you don't get the money you want to make from the blog

As in all things, it depends upon your particular niche and the type of content that you are adding.

For affiliate marketing sites (as opposed to lifestyle blogs relying more on adsense etc.), it's not just about the number of eyeballs - you want "buying" eyeballs rather than "browsing" eyeballs.
This is why I spend far more time on SEO than social media - it's nice to get a few shares etc, but ultimately I want buyers and not casual readers. It's all about targeted traffic and getting people that are in the later stages of their purchasing decision.

So, a person who arrives on my "Car Seat A vs Car Seat B" post having searched in Google for "differences between Car Seat A and Car Seat B" is far more likely to generate a commission for me than someone who finds the same post on a social media site. They have already done some research to narrow it down to 2 seats and are looking for a little nudge in the right direction. I don't even need to give the hard sell to these people - my comparison posts generally just highlight the similarities and differences (i.e. whether you can fit 3 in a row or if one has an extra safety feature etc).

People actively searching for "[product] review" are generally looking to buy and just need to be steered in the right direction - the review posts just need to have enough content for them to be able to make a purchasing decision before leaving your site. It may well be that, having read the review, they decide that the product is not for them - that's fine, but provided that I have given them enough info to make a decision (and didn't leave them needing more), I have done my job.

KSF received 417 visitors yesterday and at least 90% were organic. These are mostly people actively looking to buy child safety equipment - I would rather have these people visit my site than 4,000 "lazy link clickers" from Twitter.