The goal is to find a blogging niche that is going to help people and help ourselves by making a lot of money. So, it seems like a pretty important thing to be able to recognize a blogging opportunity: they don’t come around often, and when they do, you gotta be ready.
Assessing The Blog Reader Landscape
You have to know which way the wind is blowing, and the way the wind is blowing is right now many people are craving long-form human-written content.
What do readers want?
- Readers have social media fatigue: Readers (including me) are sick and tired of social media; the algorithms’ only purpose seems to be serving OUTRAGE and p05n. Two Things I abhor, but that’s all I get. Doesn’t matter how much I mute and block. Social media platforms could be such an interesting place to debate, learn, and build others up. Instead, it’s turned into a cesspool.
- Readers crave long-form content: Tiring of short, brain dead social media hot takes, readers are searching for articles that are longer and smarter. That’s why Substack has exploded. It’s a platform where smart people (mostly) are writing about smart stuff (mostly). Also, there has been an explosion of articles being posted on X. Let’s see if that trend continues.
- Readers are exhausted of AI articles: Everywhere we go all we see is AI slop. People can’t even be bothered to write their own 100 word tweets anymore! We are close to the point of “My AI will respond to your AI.” Everybody hates this. People are turning back to blogs for human-written content.
- Readers Are Nostalgic For The Golden Age Of Blogging: Like how vinyl records have made a massive comeback in response to streaming, blogs are making a comeback in response to toxic social media.
It Adds Up: A New Blogging Opportunity Is Upon Us, But…
This is going to be different than the 2010s. In the 2010s a lot of bloggers dominated a niche with a single blog and made big money. With rare exceptions, I don’t think this will be possible today. The business oligarchy has too many resources and too much power for solo-bloggers to compete.
In the past, the business oligarchy had mostly left the niche website / blogging game alone, seeing it as not worth their time. That has changed. Similar to how the oligarchy smashed the local home-builders, putting up 100 houses a year while a local home-builder crew can only do maybe 2 or 3. Can’t compete. The local home-building crews that survived shifted to home remodels and flips because the oligarchy doesn’t have that skill set and isn’t interested in that niche…yet. (For reference, I’m a carpenter’s son and get the inside story on the current state of the home-building game).
It’s a similar game for today’s solo-bloggers. While there is practically a dozen blogs or websites in every single niche in existence, the difference is it makes more sense to build your blog to the point where return on effort isn’t worth it because you will not overcome the mega website in your niche that has teams of people working on it. It’s best to maintain it and build out a new website, and then do the same thing again and again. The oligarchy won’t be interested in building websites that bring in small change of $3,000 or $4,000 per month, but that is life-changing money for a solo-blogger who has 5 blogs making “small change” numbers.
What Is The Blogging Strategy For The Current Opportunity?
- Readers are craving old-fashioned, human-written blogs. The audience is returning and as more people around the world get online, the audience of new readers is growing.
- Solo-Bloggers cannot beat the business oligarchy that have huge teams and resources which have moved into the niche blogging / website game.
- Solo-Bloggers can grow niche blogs to a point. But will not be able to displace a mega website in the same niche.
- There is still a ton of room for solo-bloggers to successfully make $3k – $4k per month blogs, but it is not worth it to try to run up the blog after hitting a huge plateau. Effort is better used spinning up a new blog and running it up to the plateau instead of trying to unseat the king in the niche. Repeat.
- A solo-blogger can probably successfully manage to get 5 blogs into the $3k per month range, obviously it becomes much easier to spin up the blogs the more you do it. Then a solo-blogger is looking at around $15k per month in blogging income, but the amounts that each individual blog is making is too small for the oligarchy to chase, thus a solo-blogger is pretty protected building these small, niche blogs making amounts to small for others to want to chase.
- Don’t forget to flip your blogs. Once you establish a blog making $3k per month over the course of one or two years, it’s time to cash it in (assuming it’s one of the blogs you are not particularly attached to). Blogs typically sell for 20x their monthly income. A $3k per month blog becomes a $60k payday. And then afterward you spin up another blog because you know how to.
- Substack is another blogging opportunity right now for those who have a very strong expertise in a field.
Recognizing Blogging Opportunity In The Future
Above, I layed out the current blogging opportunity. Humans love to read and will always love to read, so there will always be opportunities out there for blogmasters and writers.
But how does one recognize opportunities in the future?
- Pay Attention: If you simply pay attention to the trends out there it’s not that hard to predict where the best places for blogmasters to go to are going to be, like Gretzky skating to where the puck is going to be, blogmasters need to build blogs and newsletters for where the readers are heading.
- Listen To Your Own Gut: You are a reader so pay attention to what you wish existed. “I’m so freakin’ sick of social media I just wish there were good blogs again!” If you are saying that, you are not the only one. There are probably a ton of people thinking the same thing you are thinking. Trust your gut. It will tell you where the readers are going and what they want.
- Get On New Writing Platforms: When a new writing platform emerges, be an early adopter. I’m not saying to 100% go in on the platform, but you should know how it works and you should post some articles on it. Then if the platform takes off you will be positioned to quickly take advantage of it because while others are trying to figure out how to use it, you will be publishing a ton of articles which will give you a huge early edge. Often times, you don’t need to be the best, you just need to be early.
- Use The Google Trends Tool: Where is the puck going? Google trends can help you answer that question. Once you build a few blogs, you’ll be amazed that you can build a blog and post several posts in a single weekend. You’ll be able to move quick to jump on the trends.
The world is your oyster! A new blogging opportunity is upon us but you need to put in the work! I don’t know how long the opportunity will last, but I’d guess we have 5 years before the landscape drastically changed again, the most likely outcome being the oligarchy decides to move into the lower niche blogs that we are building. So the strategy I outlined above may not always work, but it works now! In 5 years you’ll be able to build up enough blogging income to become financially secure and completely changed the trajectory of your life. So get to work!