The right niche is rarely the first one you try. That’s not failure — that’s how this works. But there’s a difference between trying and failing randomly for six years (my approach) and trying with a framework that helps you learn something useful each time.
Between 2012 and 2018, I made £2.50 from someone who definitely probably accidentally clicked an Adsense ad.
This is their that stories story. And more usefully — here’s what each failure was actually teaching me, and what finally changed.
DUN DUN
(This is a Law and Order reference if you’re confused).
Niche #1 — Makeup (2012)
I started a makeup blog because I watched a lot of beauty YouTube and thought: I could do this. Which is *maybe* a reason to start a YouTube channel, not necessarily a reason to start a blog. But I didn’t know that then.
The problems were numerous. I was a terrible photographer, which is a significant handicap for a beauty blog. I had no money for products. I had no SEO strategy — I had, in fact, a weird belief that optimising for SEO wasn’t “proper” writing, which in hindsight is one of the more spectacular pieces of self-sabotage I’ve managed. I had no social media. I had no niche within makeup — just “makeup,” which might as well be “things that exist.”
There was one interesting angle available to me at the time: cruelty-free beauty. This was 2012, before it became mainstream, and I was actually ahead of the curve. If I’d built the whole site around that — cruelty-free drugstore makeup on a budget, for example — I might have had something. I didn’t see it.
The failure mode: wrong reason to start, zero strategy.
The lesson: loving a category of content as a consumer is not the same as having something useful to contribute as a creator. Before you commit to a niche, ask what you know that the existing content doesn’t say — not just what you enjoy reading.
Niche #2 — Personal finance (2013-ish)
Switched to personal finance because it required no photography and no product budget. Progress.
The thing is — I actually had relevant experience here. I was working in a restaurant, making close to minimum wage, and managing money carefully by necessity. Frugal living wasn’t a lifestyle choice, it was a practical reality. That’s real, useful, differentiated experience.
But I wrote the same generic “make a budget, track your spending, build an emergency fund” articles that every other personal finance blog was writing. Useful information, but indistinguishable from a hundred other sites. Nobody found it. Nobody needed to find it when identical content was already everywhere.
Then EEAT became a conversation, and I talked myself out of it entirely. Decided I didn’t have the credentials, stepped away from the niche.
With hindsight: my specific experience — genuinely poor, actually managing, with the particular perspective of someone who wasn’t choosing frugality as a philosophy but living it out of necessity — was exactly the kind of experiential authority that EEAT rewards when handled well. I disqualified myself from something I actually knew about.
The failure mode: real experience, generic content, then self-disqualification.
The lesson: lived experience counts. But only if you use it — if you write from the specific thing you actually know, not the general version of the topic that everyone else is covering. If I had actually used my brain and thought about any of these niches objectivity I’d be a lot farther ahead. Do not be me.
Niche #3 — Veganism (2017)
Went vegan, immediately deleted everything on the personal finance blog and started a vegan blog on the same domain. If you’re thinking that sounds like a chaotic way to manage a website, you’re right.
I am a chaos goblin.
I wrote hundreds of articles. I was actually a vegan (still am), genuinely interested in the topic. And yet: nothing.
The problem was that “vegan” is not a niche. It’s a lifestyle. It’s like saying your niche is “food” or “health.” Google had no idea what my site was about because I’d given it no clear signal. I wrote about recipes, ethics, product swaps, restaurants — all vegan, but with no throughline beyond that.
The kicker: the thing I was actually doing every week, the thing I had genuinely specific knowledge about, was budget vegan meal prep. I was doing it out of financial necessity, I was good at it, I had real content to share. It never crossed my mind to make that the blog.
As I’m writing this I’m beginning to realise I might have something actually wrong with me. Is being a bit thick a diagnosis? What is hilarious is that if you’d boxed up all the above info and presented it to me as the experience of someone else I would have given good advice, but apparently I just love to watch myself fail.
The failure mode: topic without a niche, effort without strategy.
The lesson: energy and output aren’t enough without direction. Writing hundreds of articles in the wrong direction doesn’t compound — it just accumulates. Find the specific intersection of the topic where you have something genuinely useful to say, and build around that.
Niche #4 — Houseplants (2019)
I actively didn’t like houseplants before I watched Jenna Marbles’ plant tour. This is not a joke. Something alive that you have to dust? No ta. Then I watched Jenna showing off her Hoya and something clicked. Within a few months I had an embarrassing number of plants and had spent an amount of money I’m not going to put in writing.
Around the same time, I discovered the Income School YouTube channel (you may roll your eyes, but those guys taught me a LOT). Something clicked there too. I realised — properly, for the first time — that all I had to do was write what people were searching for. And I knew what they were searching for, because it was exactly what I’d been searching for six months earlier.
I was my own ideal reader, very recently.
I started writing in July 2019. Took terrible photos. Wrote about everything I’d been looking up: care guides, propagation, why leaves go yellow, what “indirect light” actually means in a UK flat in November. I didn’t stress about strategy. I just wrote useful content consistently, aimed at the person I’d been six months earlier.
By November 2020, I was making $3,000 a month with Mediavine.
What made it different from everything before:
The timing was right — interest in houseplants was rising fast, content online was either overcomplicated or generic, and there was room for a simpler, more honest approach.
I had genuine interest, not just a sense that it might make money.
And I was actually my ideal reader. Not “I have this audience in mind” — I had been that person, recently enough to remember exactly what questions they had.
What I’d do differently: niche down further from the start. With hindsight, a site specifically about monstera, or about beginner tropical houseplants in low-light UK conditions, would have ranked faster and had a clearer identity. I’d also have built a monetisation strategy beyond ads from the beginning — the affiliate landscape for houseplants is limited, and I didn’t think through that until the ceiling was already there.
The failure mode that didn’t happen: I didn’t over OR under think it. For once.
Niche #5 — The pothos site (now)
The first niche I’ve chosen by actually running it through a proper validation process.
I wanted a live project to document alongside this site — something tighter than Planet Houseplant, chosen deliberately rather than by happy accident. The pothos site is that project. One plant genus. A clear differentiation angle: most pothos content treats them as forever-beginner plants, but there’s a growth arc that almost nobody talks about — the point where they start producing large, fenestrated leaves — and a significant misinformation gap in the existing content.
It passed the 60-article test without straining. It has a clear angle. I have six years of personal experience with the plant. And the main competitor appears to be AI-generated content with no real person behind it — which leaves the trust and voice gap wide open.
The paid product. A book. Not a care guide. A freaking BOOK. Turns out I have a lot to say about Pothos.
I’ll document how it goes. The real numbers — traffic, income, what worked, what didn’t — will come back into this site as they accumulate. That’s the whole point.
The one thing that made the difference
It wasn’t the niche itself. It was the combination of three things finally being true at the same time:
- Being my own ideal reader — knowing the questions because I’d had them recently.
- Having a specific angle that filled a real gap — simpler, more honest content in a space full of overcomplicated or generic advice.
- Understanding, finally, that you write for search intent rather than for yourself.
That last one is what Income School gave me. Not a magic formula — just clarity. Write what people are searching for. Answer the question properly. Do it consistently. The rest follows.
That’s also what this whole site is trying to give you. Not a guarantee, not a shortcut — just a clear path through a process that took me six years to figure out by trial and error.
You don’t have to take the six-year route.
The Niche Finder Worksheet will walk you through the validation process I wish I’d had in 2012:
Or head to Article #5: How to Pick a Niche for Your Blog for the full framework.