Transcription
So you want to start a passive income-driven website, but you don't know where to begin? Well, you're in the right place. So, in this video, I'm breaking down how to monetize a true brand in all the different popular niches like finance, the outdoors, lifestyle, food, travel—all the different options, right? Because strategies are radically different for each one. Might be different monetization paths, different platforms to be on. Plus, I'm going to show a few, you know, super competitive niches that you probably want to avoid. They might be better suited for YouTube or other things, and some options to pivot into so you're not just reliant on Google traffic alone.
So, by the end, you'll have a full understanding of the current landscape and exactly how to make money with a simple website in 2025 and beyond. Now, if you're new to the channel, don't know who I am, my name is Adam Infro. I grew the fastest-growing blog at AdamInfo.com. It's made me a million dollars three years in a row, and I teach dead-simple content strategies where you don't have to go viral, spend a bunch of money, or waste your time. All right, so we're going to get into exactly what to look for and all the different niches first.
If you want to start a website, you want to build a blog, you just need to set up your website in the first place. So I have a link; if you click the Bluehost link in the description below, it's the best possible, the cheapest option you can get. It's hosting for $1.99 a month. So, for $2 a month, you can get started. You click the link, you get to a page like this, you hit "Get Started Now," you go to "Basic," choose the basic plan over here on the far left, and then you can put in a put in your own domain name if you want one, like your name. I always recommend personal branding. Let's just say "choose it later," cuz you don't have to pick it right this second. It then gets you to the checkout page. You'll see that you can check out for $23.88. It's pretty cheap just to have a full website for a year. All right, all right, so let's get into it. All right, so when it comes to creating a true brand online, cuz that's what we're actually doing now, we're not creating a tiny little niche affiliate site; we're trying to create a real brand around ourselves.
Think of all the different niches out there. There are things like hobbies, indoor hobbies, outdoor hobbies, lifestyle, travel, business, health, wealth, relationships—all kinds of different things. Well, blogging that's going to work well for you in 2025, you have to couple yourself, your personal brand, with one: Google traffic, because that's still what blogging is to a certain extent. You need to be able to find 100-plus low-competition keywords that you could rank for over time. But also, we don't want to just put all our eggs in the Google basket. Google owns a monopoly on bloggers, as we've seen from all the recent algorithm updates in 2024. It's very volatile. So what I want to give you in this video is a way to pivot and adapt so that we're not just relying on Google, because screw Google. I don't want them to control my life; I don't want them to control my business. I think if you have just a thing that's 100% reliant on SEO, you don't have a business; you have something that Google completely controls.
So, with that said, you know, think about what your website needs. So what are we looking for in a good niche here? Well, we need low competition. We don't want to be going after like financing credit cards when it's been super competitive for 20 years. We also need some search volume, so we need to be able to find these keywords because we need people to be searching for the things that we're writing about. And also, I'm not saying like it's impossible; every niche is impossible, like insurance. You should never start an insurance blog in 2025, but I'm just saying if you want to make money with insurance content, you should just do it on YouTube and do affiliate marketing through there. It would be so much easier and so much faster. So I'm just trying to give the most realistic expectation of what blogging is in 2025, because sometimes you could pivot; you can do—I'm going to do YouTube or PPC, I'm going to do some paid ads and do all these different things.
So let's get into some specifics. Let's get niche by niche. Niche by niche, we will get into each one, starting with my favorite, and that is delicious food. So you love Gordon Ramsay, Guy Fieri, you think Bobby Flay is cute, whatever you want to get into—you love food, you love cooking it, you love eating it. What do you do? Well, if if you're trying to create food content, there's a couple different things here. Every food video that I've ever seen is like a TikTok, a short, or something where it's ASMR, and they're going right, they're doing that. Now, with the blog, it's actually a lot different. There's a good strategy, though. Overall, the strategy that I would do is I would find low-competition recipes that I rank for for ad revenue and a ton of traffic, and then I would build up my email list and sell a book and couple this with Instagram and short-form videos. That is how I would become known as a food influencer in 2025.
So let's get into some blogging strategies. I'm using HRS for this uh keyword tutorial, but it's really just giving you ideas of different niches. You don't have to use this specifically. I'm using it to find different opportunities and to show you how competitive things are, how easy is to rank or not. So if I put in the word "recipe" and I look at different matching terms, this is giving me all the potential articles I could write, right, related to all different recipes. There's 2.69 million different recipe keywords. Banana bread apparently is the most popular one right now. Everyone just loves that nice old moldy black banana that you say, "I'm not being a slob; I'm making banana bread." I can leave fruit on my counter for months if I so choose. So people love banana bread or meatloaf, a nice just blob of mystery meat in a thing where you pour ketchup on it and you eat it. This must be an American—yes, it's in the United States. Okay, beautiful. So what we want to do is we see there's lots of different recipes, and we could write all of them, but we don't want to just—if we're in food, we don't want to just do like banana bread recipe and then, you know, margarita recipe and then sourdough bread recipe. It's too random, right? We want to find a sub-niche that we dominate. So is it vegan food? Is it barbecuing? Stuff you love meat versus not meat? What is it? Well, we have to find that. So we could say maybe it is vegan. So you could put in a second keyword. What you always want to do is look at the niche broadly, then put a secondary keyword in to find a seed phrase. So if we go to vegan recipes, we have a lot of options. I'm going to drop the difficulty down to five or less, meaning that this is the lowest competition keywords out there. So I can see there's actually 773 easy-to-rank-for vegan recipes—from croissants, kitos, bagels, salmon—basically what you realize in any niche when you think about blogging, you're like, "Oh, it's saturated; it's this; it's that." It's like when you go deep on these topics, you'll realize just how many random words in the English language there are. I mean, look at—there's vegan pizel recipe. I don't even know what that is. Is that like a mixture of a pizza and a Michelle? It's like a Michelle Obama pizza. I don't know what it is, but it sounds delicious, and I would eat it.
So we find one area, and then we write all of these. So that's why, you know, I talk a lot about AI strategies and how AI content is going to make up like half or like 30, 40% of the world's internet content in the next few years. I'm not giving exact stats, but uh, we have to come up with a plan to create content, and this is for all niches in the background of our life that's not going to consume our lives. So we can use—again, if you click the link in the description below, not the Bluehost link, but my own link at the top there, you'll get 10 AI prompts, and one of them is finding the sub-niches and then outlining everything. So if you can automatically just outline every post and have it almost written for you, and there's other ones that'll write stuff for you, you can—again, the idea of blogging is use AI, speed up the process, add in your own humanized personal takes, like, you know, when I created my vegan pizel recipe, it was when Barack Obama was in the White House, and I looked at Michelle and I said, "You know, this is the best vegan recipe I've ever seen." That's actually how recipe uh blogs are written a lot, right? Like I started my vegan mushroom recipe when I was first in the womb, and I went, and then I became 2 years old, and my grandmother, my great-great-grandfather told me about the vegan mushroom recipe, and well, it's kind of funny, but that's why food blogs are so long and obnoxiously long. It's because to get to the recipe—it's because they're monetized with ads. So the more you scroll, the more money the blogger makes. Money is the hidden force behind everything online. The quicker we know that, the better. Anyways, I'm getting a little bit sidetracked here with food because I like it so much, but part of my strategy would be recipes in a specific sub-niche within food and write them all, and then, of course, the second half of your strategy should be around affiliate revenue, like things like best plus different tools you need in the kitchen. So it's going to be different for every sub-niche within food. If it's vegan, like it's not going to say like "best vegan spatula," right? It's kind of hard to have a seed phrase. It'll come up with like 20 different affiliate keywords. That's why I recommend using like the AI Niche Hunter tool that I have. If you click the link in the description, you'll get that. It'll give you—like you put in a niche idea; it gives you five sub-niches, and then it'll give you 20 affiliate article ideas. But, you know, I put in like "best juicer"—that's something that involves fruits and vegetables—but you can see a lot of even variety in that. So you want to have like 80 to 90% of your articles just be recipes and stuff, and another 10 to 20% would be about products that you use in the kitchen. You can even see just with juicing there's so many different varieties. So "best juicer" is an article; citrus juicer, masticating juicer—whatever that means—juicer for celery, slow orange, lemon, affordable—these are all like you could write 30 articles on just juicers if you're into that, if that's part of your niche.
So overall, if you're into food, you write a lot of recipes, you join Mediavine as an ad network to make money through banner ads, you join uh, Kit—which is free—ConvertKit to create exit-intent popups to have people join your email list. Maybe you give them your top 10 or 20 recipes in a PDF as a lead magnet when they sign up, and then you sell stuff to them over time, affiliate links, maybe eventually you want to sell your own thing, and food is probably a cookbook or something like that. So you couple it with Instagram, take pictures of the stuff, have a cookbook, build your email list, lots of ad revenue through recipes. All right, let's get to the next niche, and that is travel. Now, as a person who has traveled a lot, I love travel. I don't—I haven't done it too recently with a baby, but if you follow me on Instagram, you can see all kinds of random travel and places I've gone to in these highlights, like the Great Pyramids of Giza or Thailand or Japan when I went there, Ireland, etc. So there's so many different types of travel content that you can see. So what should we do when it comes to blogging? Well, there's so many different issues within travel. You could talk about specific countries, like only in Spain or only in Italy. You could talk about RV travel, traveling with a baby, budget travel, travel insurance, travel credit cards—all of those things. Typically what happened is some of the biggest blogs that ever were created, uh, like The Points Guy, for example, or Nomadic Matt—these big blogs that started 10-plus years ago, they became huge. I remember like you get onto a flight, and you can see on the side of the the airplane, it's like "number one recommended so-and-so airline by US World and Health"—whatever—no, Points Guy is on a freaking side of an airplane. So okay, they blogged 20 years ago; they started—what if we're just starting today? Well, I think you avoid—if you're blogging and you want to rank on Google, you're probably avoiding a lot of the harder stuff: travel insurance, travel credit cards—a lot of the financial products related to travel are just too competitive now. That's much better suited for YouTube, actually. A really good YouTube channel around travel would—that where you don't even have to travel is you're just talking about travel credit cards, insurance, all those financial instruments. But there are still good blogging opportunities; it just is in within, you know, sub-niches within travel. Take RV, for example. If I put in "best RV," there's tons of different affiliate articles I could write on, like the best RV insurance. These are all low competition. I didn't even have to filter it; they're all just low-competition keywords. And before, like you saw SV as search volume—I think anything is worth writing even if it just says 10 here, cuz as I showed in another video, it doesn't—it's not always accurate. You can get thousands of visits from something that says 10 here. So I try to avoid it. If you're going to stack rank what to write, I try to do ones that have a lower competition and higher seemingly search volume, which ones you think will get you more traffic. But anyways, if you look at RVs as a form of travel, like or like van life stuff, you have so many different keywords: RV mattress, battery, loan rates, toilets, campgrounds, generators, GPS—there's just so many different products. So this is really good for affiliate. You could just write an entire RV gear thing, how to convert a van into an RV, all of that. So sub-niches within travel are possible, but we don't want to just do broad travel. A big mistake I see a lot of people do in general with niches—they they just start broad at the top. They say, "I'm going to do wellness," so then my articles are like "how to be well," "best wellness apps," and it's like you don't want to go that high level with your keyword strategy. You have to dive deeper. I saw that a common problem people have—like we'll get into fitness, but some will say "fitness," and then you get into best treadmills, best ellipticals, best chest press, best this, how to do squats, how to do yoga, and it's just too—like who are you helping? What is the point? Why do you exist? What's the elevator pitch of your brand? It's too broad. Same thing is true of travel. If you're just trying to say general travel, you have to get deeper into a niche. You want to be known for one specific thing. For example, you could also put in like "how to plus a country or location," so "how to plus Italy." You get how much is a trip to Italy, how to plan a trip to Italy, you know, how much does it cost to live in Italy, how to order coffee in Italy—all kinds of different things related to as individual location, right? So if you want to be a local travel guide, that's one aspect. If you want to do a specific type of travel, like RV or van life, that's one. I would just say avoid these super broad travel insurance, travel credit cards, or things like that, because that's better suited for YouTube where you can just get views on your videos and have people click affiliate links that way.
Let's get into the third niche in this wonderful list, and that is lifestyle. So lifestyle—it sounds really broad. Lifestyle, a style of life—like that could be fashion; it could be home; it could be personal development; it could be parenting; it could be anything. So that's a little bit broad, right? But there's some niches within here that are worth discussing. So there's a couple different ones, so like home content. So there's a huge amount of blogs that talk about things like furniture and home products and interior decorating and design and even outdoor patio stuff and all kinds of home stuff. So that niche specifically is one that I want to cover. Personal dev will be another, and then parenting, baby stuff is another one. So first on the home front, uh, one thing to look at is ideas posts. So if you put in "ideas," you'll get a lot of different ideas. There's 2.3 million of them, but if I put in something like "bathroom ideas" or whoops, "bathroom ideas" or "living room ideas," "patio ideas," you get tons of different ideas posts, which is a huge, highly searched thing when it comes to blogs. So you can see even like "bathroom ideas," there's 24,000 different keywords, things you could write. Again, take a step back; we're looking for individual keywords because one keyword has to become one article, right? And we have to create individual articles for each of these to rank them separately. So, you know, if you're talking about bathroom ideas, we could drop the difficulty down to like, let's say 10, apply that, and then we can see what do we see here? Well, bathroom mirror—it's just like you'll notice every niche you go into, there's so many freaking keywords because millions, billions of people are searching for stuff all the time. So bathrooms, shelf ideas, flooring ideas, kids' wall—you get the point—tons of different ideas posts related to the home. These—if you're a home blogger, you would mainly monetize again through ad revenue with all these high-volume posts that you're ranking for—hundreds of them—that would be the main source of revenue, then building your email list, maybe selling your own course or product on interior interior design or building a community around it that way.
Okay, another one in the lifestyle category is personal development. To me, I love personal development, mindset stuff, self-limiting beliefs, overcoming motivation—all of that. It's just not that good for blogging. Okay, people find motivation in personal development content like on YouTube or videos where people are talking; it's a lot more personal; it's a lot better, in my opinion. The only ways to really monetize personal development content is trying to rank for these really old keywords, like letting go of your past, or these things that aren't really monetizable. They might make you some ad revenue, but they're actually competitive and hard to rank for. You're much better suited for video content. The only really like—yes, you could be an affiliate for other people's courses on mindset stuff, but then you're writing like Tony Robbins reviews. That's not a sustainable way to build your own brand. So if you're into personal development, I would say do it on YouTube, but not necessarily a blog. However, another one in lifestyle I'm going to cover is parenting and baby stuff, which is an affiliate marketing powerhouse. Just knowing from my own house, all of the random products that are made for babies—babies are the way to sit up like this and then sit like that and this little toy and that little toy and then these new cloth diapers that are really nice and then this gadget device, and it's just the amount of baby products obviously is very high, so and people spend a lot of money on them. So there's a lot of products there; there's a lot of affiliate potential there. So when you think of, you know, a niche for blogging, think of product categories, think of like Amazon.com, and then think of what does it categorize. All right, there's like home, there's electronics, there's baby products, right? What are some of those? And then based on those, which ones are really competitive? Like, for example, technology, laptops, TVs, tech—I don't want to do that; it's too hard. Baby stuff—some of it's not quite as hard as that—or pet supplies, like what, you know, all of these different areas of opportunity. And again, if I put in "best baby" in here, we can see all the different keywords: best baby monitor, carrier, bottles, formula—there's 50,000 of them. I'll drop the difficulty down to five. One thing I would look for is like if you're going to write an article, get the—have a difficulty under five, the first articles you ever write if you're
Just starting should be like zero or one, zero one here. But we can see best baby books, wipes, gifts, bouncer, food makers, monitors, swings, bottle warmers, Activity Center. I mean, it's just endless, an endless supply of low competition keywords to rank for in the baby niche.
All right, moving on from lifestyle to hobbies. This is actually probably my favorite area and the one that, in my opinion, is best for blogging and websites in 2025 and beyond, because we have a lot of categories here. There's things like gardening, homesteading, fishing, kayaking, boating, knitting, crocheting, playing musical instruments—all kinds of different things related to hobbies. And people spend a lot of money on their hobbies, golf, sports.
When you think about creating a blog, there's only two types of content we ever write: there's how to do stuff in a niche like a hobby—like how to golf, so how to swing, how to chip, how to putt—and then transactional things, the products that they actually need to do those said things, the best irons, putters, drivers, all of that. Those are the only two types of articles you ever need to write. And what you find is that with hobbies, it's not as competitive as like technology or software or business or finance. Because it's my question is, has it passed the Forbes test? Until Forbes has articles about the best ice fishing tents, right? Which maybe they will in 10 years, but they don't right now. So a lot of these outdoor hobby-based uh niches are some of my personal favorites because of the affiliate potential and the low competition.
So let's just look at a couple of ideas. For example, here's a site called WiredToofish.com. There's ice fishing essential gear guide, so you can see they have a lot of ads on their site, multiple ads, lots of ads here. But then they also have all these different things and affiliate links to different products like base, mid layers—all these different things you'll need. So with ice fishing, you put in like "best plus ice fishing," you've got all the different products you can write about: the best boots, fishing rods, fish finders, bibs, gloves, lines—uh, 1,900 of them. And then if you just put in a niche but by itself, what if I just put in "ice fishing," right? You still have gear; some of these are more product-focused. So you might have more people searching for the gear and the products in a niche than you do for how to do stuff. That's true of the baby niche; not everybody is, you know, Googling "how do I put my baby into a stroller," "how do I," you know, it's like, no, they're searching for the safest baby strollers. They're usually looking—some niches there actually are more searches for the products than for the actual information. Not true of a lot of niches, but it's true for some. So with ice fishing and gear, it is probably more focused on the actual gear, 'cause you can see when I was putting in ice fishing, it's still showing me all the products. So there's always a ratio of informational to transactional content; it's going to be dictated by the niche. You have a site like Baby Gear Lab, for example, that's mostly all transactional affiliate articles, but they still rank really well because they have topical authority around all of those things. Whereas if you're talking about something else, another niche like tattoos, for example, you're not going to have a whole a lot of tattoo products like tattoo gun, tattoo—like no, like no one's searching for that as much as they're searching for the millions and billions of tattoo ideas: arm, chest, back, Viking, Roman god, whatever it is. So that has 99% informational search, whereas ice fishing, kayaking, boating—some of these hobbies might be more like 80 to 90% transactional, product-based searches. So you just really have to like kind of think about all this stuff before you're getting started. That's why I'm covering all of these in depth, so it'll help you choose in the long run what you're going after.
Let's look at another example: The Craft Blogger.com, "How to pick the best knitting needles for any project." Individual uh woman named Sarah, nice-looking blog, good images; it's a knitting blog. Okay. Now if we look at knitting in general, it's a hobby: best knitting, best knitting machine, best knitting needles, best knitting books. It's not a ton of products though, right? Because some niches have a ton of products, some have a few. Knitting, you just need the needles and the yarn—all the different types of yarn, there's a lot of different types, but there's not going to be a ton of searches. There's 1,100 keywords related to best knitting, but if I put in "how to knit," this one will have actually more informational. So how to knit a sweater, how to knit a hat, scarf, how to knit in the round, how to knit a beanie, finger knit a blanket, socks—so all kinds of different keywords. So that one, for this niche, I would do uh mostly informational articles to make ad revenue, build an email list, sell your own course on knitting.
Now to make this even a little bit more complicated when it comes to how every niche is different, let's talk about gardening. So this is a really cool site, MiGardener.com. The Michigan Gardener. He's from Michigan, and he has a YouTube channel and a blog teaching people how to garden, all types of different stuff. And then on his website he actually sells seeds; he has a shop, so he sells different things as well. It's like an e-commerce brand plus all of that. But when it comes to the actual blog posts, is it—and I try to, you know, put it in here—is it like, is it "best gardening," is it "best how to garden"? It's not always that. If you look at actually the most top pages on this guy's site, with uh, this is what I've seen across the board for gardening: the biggest traffic is coming from the individual vegetables and plants themselves, creating guides on purple dragon fruit and banana melons, muncher cucumbers, honeydew melons, black watermelons, big red peppers—a lot of these different ones. So some niches also are just harder to find the seed keywords because you can't just blanket one seed word in there and find all your articles. So sometimes you have to know like, all right, in gardening, if I'm going to create a garden blog, I know that like I can write some affiliate articles on like the best raised planters and the best, you know, micro green kits and like these certain things that you might know about when it comes to affiliate revenue. But then if it comes to the informational like blog content that you're writing, yes, there's things like how to plant strawberries, how to plant potatoes and asparagus and all of those different things. But a lot of the times you have to find keywords that you're just individually manually looking for, like if you want to rank for purple dragon fruit, right? You can't find that by putting in "how to garden" or "best gardening," you just have to kind of know the niche. So this comes from having some knowledge of the niche you're entering. Now you don't have to be an expert, but you can't be making up BS on your website trying to hack your way to the top with just, "I'm only going to create this little tiny niche thing." That's why again I'm telling you you have to become a brand in 2025; you have to be known for one thing, not just with the blog or website, but also maybe have a secondary platform, a YouTube channel talking about it, an Instagram account, an X account, something depending on the niche. So if you're in gardening, the main thing that you would do is you'd get a lot of informational content because that's mostly what gardening is. People are searching for information; not there's not, again, not a lot of products; there are some things like greenhouses and raised garden beds and different products you need, but it's mostly information. Because the amount of information, just think about it, just think of your gut reaction to it: like is there more informational content or more transactional? Well, with gardening, there's seeds, there's some tools, but there's years of knowledge that you would need to be able to do this stuff based on seasons, weather patterns, how to set things up in the house, like it's mostly informational. So with that, again, when there's a lot of information like that, you create blog content based on that information in one area, and you ultimately you'd want to sell a course. So you build your email list up, give a lead magnet out, and then sell your own course on or community, you know, it could be like a $10, $20 a month community on certain types of gardening.
So let's just take a quick second to—I'm going to come up with a random niche and I want you to think to yourself what the strategy would be. So I'm going to say music. Okay, if there was a website strategy for music, what would it be? Well, okay, let's take—let's think about it first. We have to realize there's lots of different types of music: are we talking about rap music? Are we talking about the guitar, piano? Are we talking about audio, being an audio file? Are you talking about buying vinyl albums? Are we talking about audio engineering and all the products you need there? So first we have to dictate, well, okay, we think of a a big niche, but then what do we want to talk about? So for example, one area there be there's two I want to cover in music: one would be the guitar. So how to play something on the guitar. So you' want to—yes, you could have a blog, but you'd want to couple a YouTube channel with this if you're trying to teach music. Any hobby requires teaching because people want to go from beginner to intermediate to advanced. So a course is the best way to do that, whether it's gardening or beekeeping or playing the guitar; your content needs to lead to an eventual product. Now you don't obviously you don't need a course right away, but think about it in a year or two: can I have a course that people will buy through my website and also through a secondary platform like YouTube? So for that, it's like "how to play blank on the guitar," that would be a lot of search there. So like "how to play on guitar" would be a good seed phrase because there's 15,000 of them: how to play F chord on guitar, how to play Sweet Home Alabama on guitar, how to play G, B, Wonderwall—all these different things. So that's like, again, the informational intent is always there. So if it's what's searched the most in the niche, if it's food, it's going to be recipes; if it's music, it's going to be how to play stuff on the piano or the guitar, right? So that is one thing: how to play things on an instrument, selling your own course, product—that's one avenue. Then there's another one that like could be a good affiliate angle, and that's just the best like audio products, audio engineering. So if I put in "best audio," you're going to see a lot of different stuff: best audio interface—you might not know the terms like best DAW, DAW—digital audio workstation. So this again where some niche expertise comes in, where you at least have to know a little bit about it to even find the keywords in the first place that might be hidden from the majority of people that don't know about the niche. But then you can go deep on it: best offer PC, iPad, Mac, Windows for beginners, Linux—there's so many different for live performances. Every niche goes super deep, so you just have to find that pocket of opportunity you want to go after. So this one would be better for affiliate revenue. If you're talking about audio engineering and the products and all that, you wouldn't be talking about how to engineer Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody on a digital audio work—like no one searches for the information as much; again, they're looking for the gear. So if it's gear, focus on the gear; if it's teaching, focus on the teaching. So with hobbies, definitely a good one for blogging; you just have to know kind of the ratio of content and the monetization streams.
Let's get to the next one, and that is fitness. Now fitness is a pretty broad one as well; there's tons of different things, right? There's losing weight, there's gaining muscle, there's all the different body parts you can do attached to fitness, all kinds of different stuff. Ultimately, you know, when we think about the informational intent, like the most searched things in fitness, it's much like recipes where recipes are food's biggest search. Well, for fitness, the informational intent is going to be exercises and workouts. So if you put in "workouts," you'll see 95,000. Then we want to just like narrow it down a little bit because what tends to happen, again, people go really broad; they try to write everything around fitness and they can't do it. Now this is a quick distinction I want to make because if you look at a really successful fitness site, Garage Gym Reviews.com, it looks like, well, they cover everything, why can't I? They have equipment, everything from apparel, strength equipment, conditioning, supplements, reviews, barbells, body weight training, kettle bells, everything, right? Comparisons, gym resources, all of it—hundreds, if not thousands of articles on this stuff. So why can't you do that? Well, much similar reason as like The Spruce Pets are ranking for everything related to dogs, cats, birds, small pets, aquariums, our beautiful hamster, the reptile, the horse, and everything. They can go broad because they're they're not like Forbes where they're the biggest media site on Earth, but they're like the big media site of the N—of the niche. So they have tons of topical authority, thousands of articles, tons of backlinks, so they can afford to do it. So when you're just starting out, you need to pick one; you need to pick one thing within here. You start with something like the beautiful hamster, and then maybe you move to guinea pigs, and then the wonderful hedgehog, and then the you know any the prickly pokey pets, and then you can move on to other stuff. But you have to get one area of topical authority before you expand to others. So for example, if you're in fitness, going back to fitness, let's just say it's like bicep is your thing, then you can do—there's still 987 possible things you could do about bicep. So like bicep workouts with dumbbells, bicep and tricep workouts, cable workouts at home—lots of different opportunities there, back and bicep. So you want to narrow it down to why does your site exist? What is the one area of fitness you want to cover? Is it build a bigger back? Is it strengthen your shoulders? Is it lose weight? You need to find something specific; the more specific the better. Everybody hitting your website, all the content should be helpful to that one person. If you have a blog about losing weight, but then you have like this super intense CrossFit type of article, they might not be interested in that, right? So we have to figure out the sub-niche, area of expertise. Again, the AI Niche Hunter—if you click the link in the description, get that—it's the bottom of email one. A lot of people, people ask me where is it? It's the bottom of email one. You can use it, make a copy yourself; it's a Google doc, so you can just copy and paste that into ChatGPT, your Claude, helps you come up with these sub-niches that'll be helpful to you. So the main way to monetize a fitness site at the beginning is ranking simple workout articles, getting ad revenue. Ultimately though, again, we want to sell our own product; that's the biggest way that you can make the most money. You want to be a millionaire in the fitness industry, you got to sell your own program; you can't just be pedaling affiliate links on a kettlebell; you have to actually get an audience, sell your own program, probably do it through YouTube.
All right, let's get into the next niche, and that is finance. So finance, I'm almost going to wave a magic marker over the whole thing and just say avoid, don't do it. 'Cause yes, there might be a little bit of opportunities around like certain types of insurance or a little keyword area that you find here or there and there, something related to crypto that might be good, but really it's just so competitive. Think about Google when it comes to finance versus like something like YouTube. So in Google, it's like there's 10 results for each thing, and that's it. So if you want to rank for the best credit cards, the best boat insurance—Mo—even like some of the ones that look easier. So for example, if I put in something like "best motorcycle insurance," 'cause I found it—I'll show you—I just put in "best insurance," and you'll see like pet, car, all that—like what looks like the easiest on this first page, motorcycle is lower than all of these. So like it's 22 difficulty. So if I go to it, it's like, okay, it's a medium difficulty, doesn't look too bad. But then when you actually go to the sites that are ranking for it, it's Reddit, Forbes, MarketWatch, Geico, CNBC, Liberty Mutual, Allstate, and Insuranceopedia, ValuePenguin, Progressive. I mean, you just go down this list—like yes, there's this one anomaly site that's probably sales insurance themselves. You have to get to page like five or six before you start seeing a small blog in here. So I say a blanket across the board, whether it's credit cards, checking accounts, all that, it's just so much easier on YouTube. Set up a simple talking head studio like this and just review the best motorcycle insurance. If you look at the videos here, there's some videos like this, YamyNoob, who's got 67,000, or this one, motorcycle insurance, motorcycle insurance—there's tons of different people here with not a whole lot of subscribers talking about motorcycle insurance. So again, if we're talking about insurance products, whether it's credit cards, business accounts, anything, just do it on YouTube; avoid blogging for now unless something changes.
Another set of niches that I had here is the outdoors. So that kind of falls under hobbies, and I really like these if you're just starting out. Things like, again, homesteading—so that could be anything from home defense and guns and weapons and archery and anything like that to kayaking, boating, hunting, ATVs, UTVs—there's tons of low competition stuff out there that you could rank for, a lot of different affiliate content. Even if there's not affiliate programs, you get sponsors in those articles. So if you're an outdoor man or woman, that it's a really good blogging niche. I want to get into a couple though that are a little bit harder, so like software, for example. Software was the one that I was in, and most sites got decimated that were ranking for software terms because Forbes, media sites, and the software tools themselves kind of took over the search results over time. We didn't couldn't really see it coming, but it is what it is; that's why I pivoted my strategy to different things. But um, software is really good for YouTube. So do YouTube tutorials if you want to rank for—rank on Google for "how to build a website"—that article was written 20 plus years ago; the top 10 results are solidified; it's not going to happen. But if you make a video on how to build a website and you say, "Sign up for Wix, this is step one," and you do that, it's a really good affiliate marketing machine. Software, best affiliate marketing machine for YouTube right now.
Another example of something that's really hard is indoor tech and just home products. So if I put in something like "humidifiers," this is probably the worst Google result you will ever see in your entire life. Put in "humidifiers"—first, they're sponsored results, so all these—these are Google shopping ads that brands pay to be put here. Then we have an ad for Amazon, so that's paid, another ad. All right, then we have—let's just do this here—New York Times, Amazon, another brand, more sponsored results, Home Depot, buying guide, questions, more sponsor results and products, The Spruce. So again, they have authority, years of testing humidifiers in here, the nine best. But to get to this fifth result, you have to get through like a lot; that's the fifth result, more discussions and forums, Medics—I actually used to work for this company back in the day as their e-commerce manager back in like 2015 or 16—humidifiers, Target, Walmart, P—what I'm saying here is no blog is even in here, and it's not going to rank. Even if I go to page like five, you're still going to see more sponsor results and more things, Pure Air System, CNN—CNN ranks on page five or six for the best humidifiers. So this stuff just not going to happen. So that that kind of goes across a lot of these very, very common products, so like humidifiers, mattresses—it's just like really, really hard now because a lot of big media sites are in there; it's not really going to happen. Again, do it on YouTube.
Don't do it through a blog because you might think it looks not that competitive, like best blenders or something. But then you see Rolling Stone is writing articles; a lame magazine that used to be maybe cool, like decades ago, is now writing articles about blenders. It's because what happened: a lot of these big media sites, like Forbes, CNET, TechRadar, Rolling Stone—all of them—they ended up hiring instead of having like journalists, they just hired a bunch of SEO people that just created a bunch of crappy AI content. They just swarmed a bunch of these product niches with tons and tons and tons and tons of content. Now they rank on Google because Google changed their algorithm to reward them. I think it sucks; I think it's lame, but again, we're not going to be going after humidifiers anyway.
So ultimately, when we think about these niches that are really hard that we could shift to YouTube or not, the things that were competitive got a lot more competitive: business, finance, technology. The things that weren't that competitive to begin with—hobbies, outdoor goods, different types of niche products—did not get that much more complicated. But as you see from this video about monetizing a website, you can potentially choose the wrong niche, so you could choose something that is really hard. The idea here is that you just create content in a way that's consistent every single week, every single month, and you build this in the background of your life. You don't hate doing it; you enjoy it, and it can eventually make you money, and you can pivot enough until you find success. So that's going to be the key, which is why I always recommend personal branding.
So you need to do in 2025 and beyond is to have a blog strategy: write down 20 articles within a sub-niche that are low competition, informational, probably in nature, that you can create. Then you can use AI to plan your niche. Again, all of the 10 free system prompts are linked in the description; you can get those and use them all to—it'll basically give you your niche, give you the sub-niches, give you the first 20 articles, create the outlines, and write them for you. Now, again, I've talked about this a lot; we're not just publishing these; there's a whole business strategy behind it, but it'll get you pretty far. And then you want to think about coupling this with a secondary platform. I do not trust putting all my eggs in the Google basket. It's why I started this YouTube channel three years ago, knowing that if my website were to collapse or something were to happen with the blog, it wouldn't really matter because I've already made millions with it. I need to create other platforms, so that's why YouTube happened three years ago; podcast will be starting again. So it's just layering in these systems in the background of your life. But just think of a secondary platform. If you're talking about business stuff, it's probably X or LinkedIn, to have, you know, build an audience on there. If it's more related to hobbies, it could be Pinterest, or if it's—it could be YouTube. Basically, usually it's like if it's women's hobbies, it's going to be Instagram; more women are typically on there. If it's men's hobbies, like video games or things like that, more men are on YouTube; it's like 80% men on YouTube or something like that.
But ultimately, you need to build a true brand. A blog is central, but it is just the sales engine. Google is one source of traffic for your blog posts, but there's other sources of traffic: there's YouTube, going to sales pages, getting people into your email list; there's X, there's LinkedIn, there's Pinterest, there's Twitter; there's all kinds of stuff. Uh, traffic needs to come from multiple places; I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, ultimately in 2025. So if you want to monetize a site, you can do it in a number of different ways: add revenue for the info posts, so having banner ads—that's very passive—adding affiliate links into your content for those product-based ones—the best baby strollers, right—adding all those affiliate links in, adding sponsors in, so brands will pay you as well. And then eventually, of course, the Holy Grail, the one that you eventually want to get to is, once we built this audience up enough, you sell your own product, and that's typically a course, information, in a community, right? So those are the different things you need to think about.
So if you're ready to get started, you're—you know, if you're interested in this, the first thing to do again is to click the Bluehost link below. You can start for $1.99 a month, figure out your website name, just get it up and running with WordPress; it's really easy. I've got full other tutorials on like setting it up and how to do in-depth affiliate marketing, how to join programs, all that stuff. I didn't want to cover it in this video, but there's really tons of options out there. You can get started with AI; AI is text-based stuff, so you can actually use it better than a lot of other business strategies. Get the frameworks; click the link below to get that. It's an outsource-able business where you can—you know, I currently spend a lot more time on YouTube than I do on my blog, but again, I enjoy teaching; I enjoy having this other subset of a business separated from my blog. But again, if you want to start a blog and you want to monetize it, you have to kind of pick a niche that you're familiar with, that you want to teach in, because teaching opens up the door for all the different revenue streams over time, and you want to make sure you choose the right one. So if you need any help, you have any questions on niches, like, "Hey, I'm choosing between these two," let me know in the comments below, like any questions that you have on, "Is this a good one or is that a good one?" Use the AI prompts and then ask me, like, you know, I'll tell you, like, "I'd probably go with this one over this one, and here's why." So again, I hope you like the video. Um, lots of different niches; I can't cover every single one in one video; I'd be talking for like 5 hours, 6 hours, and I don't want to bore you to tears with that. So again, if you haven't yet, I hope you subscribe to the channel, check out other videos on my channel, and I will talk to you in the next video.