This article is part 2 of the series, you can read

In part 1 mentioned above, we looked at general advice and an overview of how one can start the journey to making money with Adsense. Adsense works on several types of content, from Mobile Apps (as Admob), to videos and blogs. This article will be focused on blogs and try to guide you on which blog topics to start. In the next edition, we will look at the top performing app categories.

Keeping with the advice from part 1 about finding yourself, finding your niche; remember not to try and jump into a blog category you know nothing about. Just because Finance is the best paying category in Adsense, it doesn’t mean you and your form 2 Accounts knowledge can run a financial blog that makes any sense.

The top paying Adsense Blog Categories

Some blogs are more equal than others. You will make up to twice as much money from a certain blog category than another with Adsense. The way it works is with keywords. Some industries are willing to pay an arm and a leg to acquire new customers. Running Ads for those industries will earn you the big bucks. But you can only do this if your blog covers those keywords.

On Google search, people bid for keywords and the higher the bids, the higher the payouts if you include those keywords in your blog. By this, I am not saying spam. Because if you over-include keywords in your blogs, the Google bots will penalise you.

Here are the top paying keywords with Adsense from highest to lowest:

  • Insurance
  • Online Education
  • Marketing and Advertising
  • Legal
  • Internet and Telecom
  • Online Banking
  • Home and Garden
  • Automobile Dealership

Looking at the above list, we can see that the bigger brands in the economy spend more on advertising. For example in Zimbabwe, Old Mutual and Zimnat have more money to throw at customer acquisition, followed by Econet, ZOL and their competitors. Online education seems to be on the rise but be careful as you try to take this on. You are going against the giant that is Age-X and we will eat you for breakfast without leftovers.

What our list above means if you can start a blog on Insurance or related and if Google Adsense approves the blog, you are likely to be swimming in money in a few months. The tricky part now, is who will read a nobody’s Banking and Finance blog? The answer is nobody. What we now need to pick are the top famous blog types that people read most. The choice for you becomes: do you try to become Lamborghini and sell three $300,000 cars a year, or you become Honda and sell one hundred thousand $400 cars? I would say lets be Honda!

Most popular blog types

Here is what people are reading about the most online:

Health and Fitness

Health and Fitness also tops Google search traffic in Africa, meaning you have even more chances of getting high traffic. This makes sense too when we look at demographics. If your blog can focus on types of workouts, dietary plans and scientific factoids on working out, you will hit the mother lode.

Sporting Blogs

Sports amuse me. So what happens on Twitter if you watch the trends is, during the week, politics will be very high. From Tuesday to Friday all trends will be political with a bit of social or celebrity stuff. Then comes Saturday and Liverpool will trend until Monday afternoon. Sports, soccer in particular, is so popular it makes people forget all of their political frustrations for three whole days. So if you can create a sports centric blog and try to focus on publishing content near the weekend, you should get very high traffic.

Do not overlook other top sports too. For example if you are to target a South Africa audience, try to blog about cricket and rugby as well.

Financial Blogs

Quick experiment. Stand in the streets and start shouting, “Money Money Money.” Did you notice people started paying attention? There is a way to make a finance blog work. Try to target smaller items like saving and retirement planning, personal budgeting and expense planning and personal investment planning. You will face a lot of competition in this category but if you can find your own niche, you will gain sizeable traffic.

Fashion and Lifestyle

These are two separate categories but you can combine them with ease. This will also gain you a much larger audience than normal. Women tend to read a little more than men so a women’s fashion blog also covering a feminine lifestyle niche would kill it. A great idea I got about lifestyle is reviewing Chinese made products versus their more expensive counterparts to see which has better value for money in the long run. If you review products women tend to buy more, and also have fashion topics, you will be able to cater for and build a loyal audience.

Politics

The news comprises of 60% political reports. This is a treasure trove of blogging materials for you to pick from. Politics happens everyday and can interest everyone. You are also guaranteed active participation in the comments as people become very passionate airing their political views.

The above listed blogs are the ones I believe are both popular and one can enter easily. There are some categories like Music and Musicians, Gaming. The challenge though is these categories already have powerhouses behind them and competing with them to try and snag some of their traffic would be a David vs Goliath task. I would strongly advise staying away from them.

Special Mention – File download blogs

Adsense pays you for each 1,000 Ads you display even if people do not click on the Ads. If people do click however, you get even more money. For example, a click on an Insurance Ad can earn you $14! With this, there is one category where people will be doing nothing but clicking on a website instead of just reading – A File Download Website.

Now slow down, I am not saying trick people into clicking your Ads because the Google Bots will get you. The way it works is psychological. Visitors to file download blogs are there to click on something to get an action. They are paying attention to more than just the words because a download button can be placed anywhere.

Before you start your download site, be 100% certain you are not promoting piracy. Because Google will ban you. Not just your blog, but you could lose your entire Google Account. You can host free music, free books, free movies for people who can’t spare money to buy the not free stuff on Amazon, Google Play etc.

You also do not need to host the downloads on your own webhost platform. You can use AWS or other file hosting sites.

Thats it for this edition of making money with Adsense. In the next part, we will look at which SEO tools you should use as you write your articles so that you rank high on Google Search Results. See you next time!

You can now check out Part 3 of Paying the Bills with Adsense – African Edition here.