What Is a Niche Blog (And Why It Beats a General Blog Every Time)

STEP 1 / ARTICLE 1

If you’ve been Googling ‘what is a niche blog (and how can it make me a millionaire)’ — you’re in exactly the right place.

Between 2012 and 2018, I made £2.50 from blogging.

One niche blog later, I was making $3,000 a month.

The difference wasn’t my writing. It wasn’t my work ethic – I’m pretty good at sticking to my routine of writing for 4 ish hours per week.

The difference was having a destination AND a map.

If you’ve landed here, you’ve definitely heard the word “niche” thrown around a lot.

We all have the same worries:

• What if I like writing about loads of different things?
• What if I pick the wrong niche?
• What if I have no idea what my hobbies and interests are?
• ONLY TECH SITES MAKE MONEY

All of that is completely normal — and all of it is exactly what this site is here to help with.

But first, let’s get the basics straight.

So what actually is a niche blog (and why do we writers care)?

A niche blog is a blog that covers one specific topic for one specific type of person.

That’s it. That’s the whole definition.

A blog about houseplants is a niche blog. A blog about peace lilies for beginners who keep killing them is an even better niche blog.

A blog about “home, lifestyle, travel, food, and every thought I’ve ever thunk” is a general blog — and general blogs, in my extensive and expensive experience, do not work.

Don’t forget that you can always niche up.

Buuut if you start in a tight niche then it’s SO MUCH EASIER to produce unique, valuable content.

Niche blog vs general blog: the honest comparison

Here’s what the difference actually looks like in practice:

The thing that took me the longest to understand is that column three (the general blog one) was ME. For six years.

Writing articles I was proud of, sharing them everywhere I could think of (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon — remember StumbleUpon?), and getting almost no traffic.

Because I hadn’t done the one thing that actually matters: decided who I was writing for and what I was writing about.

Why does a niche blog actually work?

There are three reasons, and they all feed into each other.

1. Google trusts specialists

Search engines are trying to send their users to the most helpful, trustworthy result. A website that has written fifty articles about peace lilies signals expertise.

A website that has written ten articles about houseplants, eight about iphones, and five about theme parks signals nothing. Niche sites rank faster, rank higher, and stay ranked longer.

2. Readers actually come back

If someone finds your post about why their pothos keeps dying, and your whole site is about keeping houseplants alive, they will explore. They might read three more articles. They might sign up to your email list. They might buy your ebook.

You might be thinking to yourself come on love, no one reads blogs anymore, but online magazines are still a massive deal. I would know, I read them every day because I’m COOL.

If your next post is about your favourite pasta recipe, they’re gone — and they’re not coming back UNLESS you are an incredibly compelling writer that sucks them in with your addictive prose.

3. Monetisation becomes obvious

A niche blog attracts a specific audience with specific interests, which means that over time, it will become clear what you need to sell to them.

Don’t try to flog your audience some half-arsed course. Ask them what they need to solve their problems and how much they’re willing to pay for it.

But won’t I run out of things to write about?

This is the question I get asked most (after ‘how do I get traffic to my blog’, obvs), and the answer is: almost certainly not.

A tight niche has more content potential than a general blog, not less.

You can really get into the nitty gritty instead of just skimming the surface.

When I started my houseplant blog I had a list of over 150 article ideas within the first week, just from thinking about every question I’d typed into Google during my own plant-obsessed research phase.

(Though don’t do what I did and write them all with no cohesive internal linking strategy).

The trick is keyword research — finding out exactly what people are searching for within your niche.

We get right into the technicalities of that in Step 4: Planning Your Content, but the short version is: remember when you were a noob in your niche? What did you search for?

That’s it, that’s the whole thing.

My story: the long way round

I want to be honest with you, because in this game, no one else will be.

(That was over dramatic as hell, but there are SO. MANY. grifters out there.

I started blogging in 2012.

I tried makeup (of course, I did, we all did).

Then personal finance (I was working in a restaurant at the time, making minimum wage, and very interested in being less broke).

Then veganism, when I went vegan in 2017.

Every single time, I thought I had a plan. In reality, my plan was always some version of: write a load of good, well-structured, funny articles → make millions of pounds.

Somewhere between 2012 and 2018, I earned £2.50 from someone probably accidentally clicking an Adsense ad. That was it. That was my entire blogging income for six years.

I tried everything to get traffic. Sharing to Facebook. Sharing to Twitter. I even spent £200 on a Pinterest course. Everything except the one thing that would have actually helped: sitting down and thinking seriously about who my ideal reader was and writing specifically for them.

It wasn’t until I found Income School on YouTube that the whole blogging thing finally made sense. Their message was simple: write what people are searching for.

Sure, they ignored a load of things like backlinks and encouraged people to go for quantity over quality but their core message was right.

And I realised — I knew exactly what people were searching for, because it was everything I’d been searching for six months earlier, when I was a complete beginner. I was my own ideal reader.

I started the houseplant blog in July 2019. I wrote and wrote, largely ignoring the traffic and marketing side of things, just focused on answering questions I knew people were asking.

By November 2020 (sixteen months later) I was making $3,000 a month with Mediavine.

Was it perfect? No. I should have niched down further. I should have had a clearer monetisation strategy beyond ads. But the core thing (having a niche, writing for a specific person) was the thing that changed everything.

And yes, I got crushed by the HCU but it’s bouncing back all by itself because the content was unique, evergreen and (hopefully) entertaining/useful.

If I can do this, starting with zero tech skills, zero budget, and six years of failed attempts behind me, I promise you can too.

How do you know if an idea could be a good niche?

There are three things a good niche needs:

• something you can write about with genuine interest (you don’t have to be an expert — more on that later)
• enough people searching for it to generate traffic
• some way to make money from it.

We’ll go waaaay more in depth here in Step 2: Picking Your Niche. BUT if you want to start thinking about it right now, the free worksheet below will walk you through it in about ten minutes.

What to do next

Before you do anything else (before you pick a domain name, before you think about WordPress, before you worry about any of the technical stuff) download the Niche Finder Worksheet and fill in section one: the passion audit.

It takes ten minutes. It will give you a shortlist to work with. And it will save you months of second-guessing.

When you’re ready to get into the nitty gritty, head to Step 2: How to Pick a Niche for Your Blog — where we’ll take that shortlist and work out which idea actually has the best chance of making you money.