Blogging is increasingly looked at as a legitimate entrepreneurial pursuit. While it remains a hobby for many, others are able to turn it into a legitimate business with regular income — either as a side hustle or, in some cases, as a full-time job.
As any successful blogger will tell you, part of reaching that point comes down to doing something you want to do. This is a concept that has come up in prior articles like “How to Change Your Career and Go After Your Dreams”, and it’s an important point to remember both in blogging and otherwise. The passion and drive to succeed simply won’t be there if you aren’t attempting a business venture you know you’re interested in and excited about.
With that said, it’s also important in the blogging space to choose a pursuit that will have an audience big enough to support a business. This doesn’t mean you simply have to pander to the biggest crowd. But there is something to be said for matching a personal interest or passion with a popular or up-and-coming topic. That way, you can approach your blog with love and enthusiasm and benefit from an inherently broader audience! Given this notion, I want to take a look at some topic examples. The following ideas are among those most likely to lead to profitable blogging in the next few years and over the course of this decade.
Travel
Travel blogging is essentially a business unto itself, and one that seems able to support endless sites and platforms. This alone makes it a perpetually intriguing category for those with an interest in turning blogs into business. On top of this though, travel may also command inordinate attention in the next few years. All over the world, people have put travel plans and ambitions on hold in 2020, as a result of the pandemic. But if anything
this only seems to have boosted enthusiasm for travel moving forward. In looking ahead to 2021 travel deals, Condé Nast Traveller put it best: “As flights look set to take off again in December onwards, grand plans are being made.” People around the world are eager to travel and planning to do so, which should make this industry all the more lucrative for the next few years. A well-executed travel blog that speaks to people’s desires, plans, and ambitions may just be able to reap great success!
Food & Drink
Here too we have a category that seems to inspire perpetual interest and support unlimited capacity. That is, there is always interest in food and drink developments, and there are never too many websites and blogs in the space. Additionally, as with travel, there may be something of a post-pandemic boost coming for this category. Sadly, the conditions of 2020 have led to restaurants, bars, and breweries all over the world either suspending operations or closing down altogether. But as some establishments reopen and some new ones are born, public interest in food and drink will be sky
high. By keeping up a blog that showcases and reviews establishments — possibly in some particular areas you choose to “niche down” to — you’ll be likely to generate significant attention.
Online Gaming
Online gaming, specifically in the casino space, is extraordinarily popular in certain parts of the world — most notably the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as in Canada to some extent. But this is also a form of entertainment that’s constantly expanding through new games and changing gaming laws, and which remains unfamiliar to a great many people. Consider the United States as a target market, for instance. It’s a country of hundreds of millions of people, of whom a vast percentage
adore video games, but where online casino gaming is only just scratching the surface.
Establishing a blog aimed at these markets is likely to be a profitable idea for the years ahead, simply because there’s so much to reveal to people who are newly exposed to this form of gaming. Someone who hasn’t played an online casino, for instance, might expect that digital games consist only of lazy animations of dull hotel lobby slots. But in reality, this is quite far from the truth. Foxy Games, one of the more reputable platforms in the online gaming space, demonstrates by its collection of titles that the games go far beyond the basics. There are fun themes, high-quality animations, new titles, and even hybrid gaming methods (like Slingo, which combines bingo and slots). Showcasing and explaining all of this, and reviewing games
for people new to the medium could make for a lot of attention on your blog.
Film & Television
Film and television are perpetually popular and interesting to millions of people all over the world. So, as with travel and restaurants, there’s essentially no such thing as exhausting this category. But there may also be an opportunity to try something relatively new with a blog in this space. Unfortunately, the pandemic has led to what could be the beginning of the end for the cinema business as we know it. This will lead to an even more frenzied atmosphere in the streaming business — such that the collection of new films and television shows available for streaming may become nothing short of dizzying. A blog that tracks releases and reviews new
content in a way that’s helpful to viewers will have a chance to become a go-to blog for an untold number of film and TV lovers.
Podcasting & New Media
Of all the categories described here, this is perhaps the only one that’s not adequately covered in the blog space just yet. The media landscape has shifted dramatically in the past few years, and as a result, we’re seeing more people rely on podcasts and various other audio and visual mediums for everything from day-to-day news, to critical commentary, to fictional storytelling. Whether or not podcasting and YouTube videos remain dominant in this space over the course of the next decade remains to be seen. It may be, for instance, that virtual reality ultimately takes over our media and storytelling needs.
But whatever may happen, setting up a blog that covers these changes, comments on new developments, and reviews podcasts and video channels could certainly be a profitable endeavor.
To be clear, there are dozens if not hundreds of other topics that could yield profitable blogs. The best idea is to take some time to figure out a few options that may work for you and sift through which one speaks to you most. This may even be the sort of thing your own life coach can help you to work through. But in the end, if you really want to turn blogging into a business, there will be a suitable answer for you. You just have to explore what it is.
