Screw profitability, screw misleading guru advice. It’s the wrong way to pick the niche for your blog in 2024!
In this blog post, I’m holding nothing back. I’ve been in the SEO and blogging industry for 15 years and boy, let me tell you this thing called hindsight!
A lot of us got our start in the industry in the late 2000s into early 2010s when The Warrior Forum and other forums were full of people thriving with their niche sites and blogs, exploiting the living shit out of the Google algorithm.
(Funny how things change but don’t really change).
In those forums, the early days were all about exploiting the Google algorithm because the search engine was super dumb.
Techniques like keyword stuffing, creating links from basic PBNs with your keyword stuff anchor text over and over, and creating sites with spyntax spam could rank sites at the top of Google search.
Those $7 Warrior Forum info products showed us how some folks made thousands of dollars by blasting forum links with SEO tools and everything else I’ve mentioned.
And what did Google do?
Unleash the Penguin and the Panda and the Crows and pecked our bodies in the alleys.
The harsh truth is that the Google search engine was pretty dumb in its early days and you could get away with a lot until an update would come and wipe out blogs and niche sites gaming its search engine.
But what has changed from then to now?
Thanks to AI content generation tools, the internet is now getting flooded with spam again, parasite SEO, super spammy search results leading to making the game harder as Google keeps unleashing update after update trying to clean up their SERPs.
Once again, some legitimate bloggers and niche site owners have been caught up in the crossfire.
With that said, one huge problem back then and even now is people entering niches they have no business entering.
(And because of that, EEAT was born and will be something Google’s algorithm will get much better at in 2024 and 2025!)
There, I Said It!
There are greedy gurus in this industry who preach that you should select niches where the affiliate commissions are high and you should start sites to earn those commissions.
Actually, let me fix the wording on that: you should exploit people and earn commissions from a product you’ve never used and don’t know anything about the overall topic!
They see Google as an algorithm to exploit which has always been an issue and Google will always fight it and try to fix the issue of spam and content produced by people who have no experience in the topic they’re talking about (how do you think we’ve ended up with EEAT and all the brutal Google updates?!)
What they don’t like admitting is that you’re also exploiting human beings who think they’re getting information from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
In fact, by listening to that type of advice for years, my journey with blogging, niche sites, and affiliate markeing became very turbulent and stressful.
I was in niches I had no business entering because I had no idea what the hell I was talking about and as a result, either I lost interest after the initial few months or my sites got completely wiped out.
It’s this experience that has taught me this valuable lesson that greedy affiliate and blogging gurus detract you from.
Build Your Blog Based on a Topic You’re Passionate About!
Do not waste a year or two of your life learning this lesson.
Of course, you’re here to make money from your blog. We’re all here to make money from our blogs!
But the advice of starting a blog in a topic that has high affiliate product commissions has never worked well for me.
I needed to invest my time into things I love, enjoy, and am passionate about!
The advice about leading with affiliate commissions or high ad revenue will eventually lead you to some serious burnout because you may experience some success, only having to restart over and over or realizing that the niche site has become more of a burden than a joy when it’s about a topic you don’t care about. At all.
Not to mention, writing about topics you know nothing about will take you at least three times longer than writing a blog post on a topic you love!
Imagine This…
You decide to base your blog on a topic you don’t know much about but you chose it because for every product you sell, you’ll earn a $100.
That’s a high commission, you need the money, and it sounds awesome.
You setup the blog, do some keyword research, and sit own to write your first article.
You know nothing about the topic so you pull up 3-4 top articles on the topic, start gathering data, and create an outline.
Maybe this takes you 1-2 hours at first.
Then, you sit down and write your first draft and this takes you a good 2 hours.
Then, editing it takes another 1-2 hours.
That’s anywhere from 4-6 hours to produce and publish one article.
Let’s take another scenario. You sit down and make a list of topics you’ve been interested in years.
You make a list of your passions and hobbies.
You think about it for a while and settle down with the main topic of your blog and start a blog.
You do keyword research and sit down to write your first article.
You know this topic well.
You sit down and write an outline for the article within 20-30 minutes.
You write your first draft in 1-2 hours.
You spend an hour editing and refining it.
You are able to produce and publish an article in 2.5-3.5 hours.
Almost half the time it’ll take you to produce an article in the first scenario.
Sure, you can use Chat-GPT to speed things up but it will always take longer to produce an article on a topic you’re not familiar with.
The downfall of choosing a niche you’re not familiar with is that you get fatigued a lot easier since you’re putting in a lot more time research and understanding the topic and as a result, you lose motivation.
Then comes that one day you stop working on it.
And months and years go by.
Annnd that is how thousands and millions of blogs have died a slow, cruel death.
The One Exception to this Rule
I do believe you can enter a niche under certain conditions.
There are two instances where entering a niche you don’t know anything about is fine.
#1. You’re Learning the Topic and Sharing the Information You’ve Learned
If you’re entering a niche that you’re super interested in learning, that’s great. For every new thing you learn in this new niche, you can share the information in a new blog post.
Also, considering that you’ll read books and articles, watch YouTube videos, and perhaps engage in this topic personally, you’ll be acquiring a hell lot more experience in it.
For that reason, you should go back to your About page and update it every three months to showcase your experience in this topic.
#2. You Hire Writers With Experience or Expertise in that Topic
If you have the budget, then hire writers who have experience or expertise in it so that the information is coming from trusted sources.
Here’s What You Should Do to Create a Sustainable, Six-Figure Blog
Here are the things you need to do to create a six-figure blog that will give back like a seed that has blossomed into a fully-grown fruit tree:
- Pick a topic that you love and create your blog in that topic
- Learn the importance of good content
- Learn on-site SEO
- Create a publishing schedule
- Start a social media account around your topic, learn how to grow that account, and learn how to drive traffic from that account to your blogs
- Grow on other platforms
Focus on those steps and in 1-3 years, you’ll see tremendous growth.
If you want to learn how to grow a profitable blog by leveraging Google as a traffic source, then check out the Affiliate Phoenix Academy.
But whatever you do, don’t listen to the misleading folks who tell you that the only thing that matters is “commissions” and “profitability”.
Kick that shit energy back into 2023 and walk into 2024 with your badass, authentic self!