Blogging Isn’t Dead: How Niche Blogs Still Make Money With SEO

Apparently blogging is not dead. I started making money blogging when I stopped listening to people saying blogging is dead. This is on the blogging subreddit by Michael Vinny. We're going to be sharing people making money from blogging, how they're doing it, niches that they're doing it in, and where I think the opportunity is with blogging and with top of funnel content for SEO. So, this poster on the blogging subreddit said, "I started making money from blogging when I stopped listening to people who kept saying blogging is dead, SEO is dead, don't start a blog, blogs are trash, it's impossible to make money blogging, and all the other negative stuff that gets repeated over and over." The funny thing is a lot of the people saying these things have never built a successful blog themselves. I just want to stop there. You see this all over X, all over LinkedIn, all over Instagram. People are saying SEO is dead who never succeeded at SEO themselves. Next time you see somebody preaching and screaming SEO is dead, say, "Did you ever crush it with SEO years ago before SEO was not dead? Like, what success did you have with SEO?" So much fearmongering going on that's an easy way to tell that people are just full of BS. All right, just say, "Yeah, you never actually had any success with SEO. If you did, you wouldn't be saying SEO is dead." So, this poster continues, "I even have a friend who couldn't sit down and write a single article, but would go around online yapping about how blogging is dead just because he failed at it." Yes, I blog. Yes, I make money from it, and it takes a lot. I don't really feel the need to validate that to anyone. For anyone feeling discouraged, just keep going. Blogging isn't easy, but discipline and consistency are still the biggest weapons you have. Most people quit way too early than blame blogging instead of their lack of patience. That's just my experience. Now, to be fair, there were a lot of people who got hit by Google's helpful content update who were blogging. Somebody in the comments said, "My traffic dropped 90% after the helpful content update at the end of April. I'm so sad. I was loving it." A lot of these people were doing wrong things with their blog though. They never diversified their backlinks, optimized for brand mentions, they had very templated top of funnel content. They were targeting just the same types of keywords. There were a lot of patterns in their rankings. Just going after again the same types of keywords with identical content, bad user signals. A lot of people are coming to their articles and going back to the search results because they don't trust the pages that they're on. All sorts of stuff. We covered this [clears throat] on a two-hour episode, Google's helpful content update destroyed the internet, what actually happened, episode 989 in the show. That was a great episode. And there were blogs that got hit that came back, like House Fresh, which is now I think House Fresh, which I also covered on this show. From 1,000 to 200,000 clicks, the insane SEO comeback of housefresh.com, episode 832. House Fresh is five times above what they were before getting hit by Google's helpful content update. They rebuilt their traffic. They optimized for more brand mentions, branded searches, a more natural backlink profile, things that a normal brand would do. Oh my god, it's it's crazy. They are now at 275,000 clicks a month from Google. Before getting hit by the Google helpful content update, they were at 51,000 clicks. So, House Fresh went Get this. House Fresh went from 51,000 clicks a month in September 2023 down to in May 2024, 1,000 clicks a month. Got absolutely annihilated by the helpful content update. Now they are at 275,000 clicks a month. Comebacks are possible. The original poster for this thread, this person Michael Vinny who's making money blogging on the blogging subreddit said, "Blogging takes a lot more effort and attention these days and many people just are not ready for that." Somebody asked him, "When did you start blogging? How long did it take you to start making money from it?" He said, "I started an affiliate site in 2022 and saw my first affiliate commission about 9 months later. To be fair, I wasn't giving it much attention back then because I was still working a 9-to-5 job. I quit my job in August 2023 and started taking blogging seriously from that point on." He was asked, "What is an affiliate site? Is it the same as Google AdSense?" He explained, "An affiliate site is a dedicated website that mainly makes money by recommending products or services and earning a commission when somebody buys through your affiliate link. Google AdSense is different. You're getting paid for ad views and clicks on your website whether visitors buy anything or not." This person asked, "Is it better than AdSense in terms of revenue?" And Michael Vinny said, "Yes, way better." There's this post from Peter Levels, this famous indie hacker, from March of this year. Peter Levels said, "AdSense is incredibly low amounts of money." His SaaS Photo AI would make $150 a month with his 156,000 monthly visitors, a $1 CPM. Instead, it makes $110,000 a month with subscriptions, so that's about 700 times more. Somebody else in the comments said, "I 100% agree that blogging is not dead. It took me a year to see the first proper income, but with a lot of dedication and always adapting to the new rules of search, it kept growing. People who say blogging is dead may not be disciplined or passionate enough." Another person, "I'm also blogging and I actually love it." And the last part of this thread I want to share is this person Quiet Arbitrage who said, "Good to hear. That is what I am doing. Blog posts with affiliate links. I started in December 2025 and I'm making a little bit of money from it." This person was asked, "What is your niche and traffic sources for your website?" And Quiet Arbitrage responded, "A golf site and traffic is mostly from Google, so SEO." Some other niches, home coffee setups, pet health or pet gear, that's a big one, remote work and home office gear, outdoor hobbies for adults. Those niches are great for affiliate SEO with top of funnel. Here's my take on if you want to dominate starting with top of funnel content, so a blog. There is a huge opportunity to optimize for relevance in a tight niche. So, that means you are very niche down like the examples I just gave and your pages are specifically targeting keywords. Like I always talk about on this show, you have your keywords, they are in your page title, URL slug, H1, and beginning of the first sentence. You're not putting up garbage lazy content, you're actually trying to satisfy search intent right away before people even have to start scrolling. This is going to give you great user signals with Google and then you're going to have pages that rank and keep ranking and this is going to build your topical authority. You're going to be seen algorithmically by Google as more of an authority in your niche. You don't have to make several thousand-word blog posts, you just have to focus on satisfying search intent with your blog posts. Then, when you have blog posts that are ranking, you predict what the searchers who are arriving on your post will want next. You actually put yourself in their shoes and you link to other things that they will find interesting within your blog. So, now you are internal linking from pages that are ranking. These are the best internal links and they pass authority onto the pages that you link to which makes those pages more able to rank and get their own traffic which then they can pass on as well to other pages. You would avoid targeting the same types of keywords and having obvious patterns with content like just doing a million best X for Y listicles. You wouldn't do that. You could do some non-commodity content. Google shared this in a presentation about how they want more non-commodity content. Commodity content is top 10 things to consider when buying running shoes. Non-commodity content is why this customer shoes collapsed after 400 miles, a wear pattern analysis. I went deep on what this means and how to do it while still targeting keywords on episode 1028 of the show, Google's new SEO reality why non-commodity content is taking over. For your blog, when you're building links, you would have a mix of link types. It's not just guest posts. It's not just directories. It's not just HARO answers. It's all of them and more and you have a natural backlink profile. You're not just getting exact match anchor text. You have naked URLs, links to your homepage, links with your brand name, links that say like click here. You're also getting brand mentions even ones that don't link to you. Rand Fishkin was on the show a few weeks ago. He said that he believes brand mentions are actually more powerful than backlinks which is a crazy thing. Links matter more than mentions. I don't think they do. I think mentions matter more than links. And then you're also getting branded searches. People are searching for your brand name. You could also mix it up between your blog still with top of funnel content, informational content. Mix it up with blog posts but also the people also ask trick. This is a really awesome trick for top of funnel content. Do it sparingly. If you do it too much, you will stretch your authority too thin. It's kind of like a rubber band stretching too thin and then breaking. But, you could go to alsoask.com. This gives you people also ask questions in your niche. These questions are straight from Google search results. Then, go to Perplexity. Use the prompt, write around 120-word plain text answers for each question returned inside a single code block with no citations. Edit for your brand voice, for accuracy, remove em dashes and other AI giveaways. Create a subfolder for these questions. So, if your niche is 3D printing, you would do like 3D printing FAQ as a subfolder. The slug is the question, and then you have your answer in the page. And then, once you're ranking, you internal link these pages to other pages on your site or like blog posts that you want to rank more. Same thing that we talked about earlier. And as these rank, these also build your topical authority. But again, you also need external authority or else you're just going to stretch that topical authority too thin. For monetization, affiliate, like these people are saying. But, next level for a blog, vibe code your own product for your niche. It is the craziest thing because now your blog can rank. You can put up a page, you can target a keyword, or you can put up a blog post, you can target a keyword, and within a day or two you're going to be ranking, and then within the end of the month you're going to be ranking in the top three. So, you can rank. Vibe code a product to your niche, and then get users to that product with top of funnel content, but also with high-intent SEO landing pages. These are pages, conversion-based SEO landing pages that target high-intent keywords. And the conversions on them is so high because literally the people searching for these keywords are looking for what you have made. And you can rank. So, it it's just you're basically printing users for your vibe coded tool at this point. And you will then a paid tier or several paid tiers, and then these users become customers. And that's a much better source of income, like Peter Levels talked about, than AdSense, but even than affiliates, because you don't have to depend on another company to keep giving you affiliate commissions. You're your own show. And then once you're doing well from Google, you diversify. Hire somebody to do short-form video, hire somebody to do long-form YouTube videos, or a podcast. Hire somebody to do a newsletter. Eventually, you can get into paid media, and you can just overall, over the years, dominate your niche. But you need a long-term perspective, and you got to have consistency, like all the comments in this thread were saying. Your long-term goal will be for it to be undeniable that when somebody thinks of your niche, they think of you. That will just happen, because you are so active, you have you are so niched down, you've covered all of your SERPs, you're printing interesting content to new people, growing your TAM, your total addressable market, and then you have crazy top-of-mind awareness. When I think of fast food, I think of McDonald's or KFC. When I think of extreme sports, I think of Red Bull because of their TikToks always showing up in my FYP, in my for you page, and because of their viral stunts. So, that's my take on doing a blog and top-of-funnel content. Eventually, you still want to get into bottom-of-funnel content, it just converts so much better, and have your own product, but you can absolutely succeed with a blog. If you want to learn how to find these high-intent keywords and how to make these conversion-based SEO landing pages, I have an entire course on this at compactkeywords.com. I also share how to build a variety of links, how to get brand mentions and branded searches, how to have a natural backlink profile, how to do a technical site audit for SEO. So much is in this course. I give examples in every niche with the weekly breakdowns, templates, Google Docs, Google Sheets, written portions, images, lots of videos, examples. It is a great course. If you have not checked it out yet, you're going to love it, and that is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,074 of the Edward Show podcast and my daily search engine optimization show. I do this thing every day, 7 days a week. I've not missed a single day doing this podcast in 1,074 days. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. Let's do some awesome things with SEO, some awesome things with marketing, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.