There are a few reasons why I decided to make this.
First, a lot of people are unfamiliar (or unconvinced) that a blog can make a lot of money. And if you take a look at the blogs below, you’ll see that they’re just normal content websites.
Second, I wanted this to help with niche selection. I’ve found from experience that finding a blog niche is easiest when you have examples to look through. It’s not by scrolling through a long list of random words. Instead, it’s by analyzing successful blogs that already exist.
Each example shown is one of the biggest and most profitable blogs in their given industries.
1. Greatist
A health and fitness blog backed by science.
Greatist is a blog that I’ve followed deeply over the years. Their focus on creating only the highest quality, science-backed health and fitness articles for millennials has paid off greatly. On the surface, they’re a regular health and fitness blog. Behind the scenes, they’re a full-blown media startup with over 10 million visitors per month and an estimated yearly revenue in the 8-figure range. They make this money through ads and by selling sponsored content.
What they do well: Creating reputable, trust-worthy health content backed by science. This is hard to come by in an industry full of misinformation.
2. Nerd Wallet
A giant affiliate site that dominates SEO in the personal finance niche.
To build a website like Nerd Wallet is every affiliate marketer’s dream. They are the leading example of a successful SEO blog that crushes affiliate marketing, and they’re doing so in one of the most profitable (and competitive) industries in the world – personal finance. Nerd Wallet reviews everything from credit cards, mortgages, insurance, and all things finance. The affiliate commissions for financial products like these can get into the hundreds of dollars per referral, which is why they’re worth over $500M.
What they do well: Understanding search intent and creating the best TYPE of content and user experience depending on the keyword.
3. Nomadic Matt
A travel blog with strong personal branding.
There are a ton of travel blogs on the internet. Most are personal blogs. They write about their travels and build up a small audience over time. Nomadic Matt also started as a personal blog about his own travels. Today, he’s built up a HUGE resource with everything you need to know about travelling. What’s crazy is that it’s still a personal blog with only one main author. Even to this day, he writes most of the content himself. And he ranks for nearly every keyword based around travel you can think of. There aren’t many single author blogs out there that grow to this size. It takes an incredible amount of time, focus, and persistence to continue pumping out content like he does.
What they do well: Diversifying income streams by creating and selling their own products. Staying small, lean, and extremely profitable.
4. Nerd Fitness
Health and fitness advice for nerds and ordinary, everyday people.
Steve Kamb started Nerd Fitness nearly 10 years ago when he noticed that there were a ton of health and fitness blogs, but nothing catering specifically to him. So he decided to build it himself. Instead of targeting anyone and everyone, his blog was directly for… nerds! The interesting part is that the definition of the term “nerd” evolved as the site grew. At first, his audience consisted of people like him – nerds who played computer games and just wanted to get fit. Today, his brand has grown into a massive community of regular people who just want to learn how to get fit and have fun doing it.
What they do well: Differentiating themselves from all the other health blogs by going extremely specific in their audience targeting.
5. Art Of Manliness
Honest tips and tutorials for becoming a better, more centered man.
I first heard of The Art Of Manliness after listening to a Mixergy interview. They are a true content site, producing mainly informational blog posts around men’s interests and lifestyle topics. They make money through ads, and they’ve later started selling physical products like mugs, t-shirts, and posters. Usually, branded physical products can only work when you have a loyal audience, which obviously they have because 30% of their traffic comes is direct.
What they do well: Great branding, original design, and sticking to their origin topics of content even a decade after existence.
6. CSS Tricks
A giant design and development resource centered around one big influencer.
Chris Coyier is one of the most well-known designers on the internet. And it’s all thanks to his wildly popular design blog, CSS Tricks. Like Nomadic Matt, a large percentage of the articles are written by Chris. He started the website in 2007. At the time, it was purely about CSS – hence the name. Today, it’s grown into a huge resource for all things web design and development. I visit this site several times a month myself, mainly to copy and paste in CSS lines that he shares in his blog posts.
What they do well: Using his existing audience to launch new products/companies. For example, his website CodePen now has 1M users and traffic is double that of CSS-Tricks.
7. The Penny Hoarder
A finance content site that teaches people how to put more money in their pockets.
The Penny Hoarder is a blog around money. Their mission is to teach people tons of ways to make more money. It started out as the personal blog of founder, Kyle Taylor. Once it started to take off, he started to bring on new writers, and transition into more of a media company. The most fascinating thing about The Penny Hoarder is the amount of money they make, and how they make it. Last year, they generated close to $40M. And unlike other media companies, they did it without any advertising. Instead, they use affilaite marketing by forming partnerships with the right companies.
What they do well: Using storytelling to write their content to make it more engaging and relatable. They’ll feature or interview interesting people on their site and share how they’re making money. They also do a great job at not coming off as scammy, which is very easy to fall into in the “make money” niche.
8. CoinDesk
The leading cryptocurrency blog.
CoinDesk is a website I visit at least 3 times a week. It’s the most successful cryptocurrency blog in the world, getting over 10 million visitors per month. It was started in 2013 by Shakil Kha, and then acquired by Digital Currency Group in 2016 for an amount rumored to be around $500,000. Today, they’re the go-to source for all news and updates in the blockchain world. They make money through advertising, publishing paid reports, and selling tickets to their conferences.
What they do well: Establishing themselves as a leader in a new industry.
9. ArsTechnica
A tech blog that people trust.
When I’m really interested in new tech (like new MacBooks being released), I’m always happy to see Ars Technica do a piece about it. It was founded a long time ago, in 1998. Ten years later, in 2008, it was sold to Conde Naste for $25M. Although they’ve lost readers’ trust a few years back when they attempted to block any visitors using an ad blocker, they’ve rebuilt their reputation by hiring smart writers (most of whom are post-graduates) and writing in-depth pieces of information in the tech world.
What they do well: Writing really detailed news stories. While most tech blogs merely “report” the news, Ars Technica analyzes it.
10. Bustle
A women’s publication about everything.
The Bustle is a site that I study constantly. It was founded by Bryan Goldberg after he built and sold Bleacher Report (a sports blog) for $175M. The reason I’m so interested in Bustle is because of Bryan’s infamous announcement before starting the company. He claimed that he would build something that’s never been done before: A women’s site that not only talked about fashion but news and pop culture as well. This brought on a fury of haters (which brought in a ton of free links and press coverage 🙂 ), who wrote about the dozens of companies that are already doing just that. Another thing that’s interesting is the reason WHY Bryan decided to create this site. After running Bleacher Report, he realized that a female audience attracted the most advertisers. So he received funding, hired a bunch of people, and created one of the biggest women’s blogs in the world.
What they do well: Covering every aspect of every story that people are interested in.
Conclusion
This list will be ever growing, meaning I’ll continue to add more examples of blogs when I stumble upon them during my own research.
Hopefully by analyzing the examples shared above, you got to see what six and seven figure blogs look like, how they’re monetizing, what kind of content they publish, etc. But most importantly, I hope it helps spark some niche ideas for your own blogging projects.
Most of the blog niche ideas I get myself are from analyzing and researching other successful blogs.
Yes, it’s true that most of the blogs shared in this list have a huge editorial staff and a ginormous budget to work with, making it impossible for a single-person to compete with directly. But that’s not the point. The point isn’t to copy them directly. The point is to identify what you can build for yourself based on what others are doing successfully.
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