Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
If you're despairing of finding a niche you can be passionate about that has the potential to earn you a six-figure yearly income, have no fear...
Below, I've assembled a massive list of the top hobbies with monthly search volumes and their Keyword Competitiveness calculated.
The goal here is to help you discover a lucrative hobby niche- whether it be a popular sport like tennis or something more arcane like beachcombing.
A Tale Of Two Niches
Tennis: Good Niche
Beachcombing: Bad Niche
Obviously, some niches are better than others. In this post we'll dive into the hobby niche and examine some of the different opportunities. In a nutshell, when you evaluate a niche's potential, you want there to be search volume, problems to solve and products to promote.
So, in the case of beachcombing, it's really not a lucrative opportunity since it somewhat resembles seaside garbage collection.
It has a small search volume, few products to promote, and an audience who probably doesn't need a marketer to help them figure out how to comb a beach or buy a trash picker.
I've made the mistake, in the early days, of choosing niches (how to become a crossing guard) that are just lousy profit-making opportunities- so my advice comes from experience.
As opposed to tennis, where there's a lot more volume, tons of expensive products to promote, and generally a more 'passionate' audience whose 'problems' primarily regard upping their athletic performance.
Though, you'll want to niche down a bit with tennis- it's such a popular topic that you'll have a tough time gaining traction if you don't laser-target a niche audience that's under-served by the ESPNs and Bleacher Reports of the world.
Monetization Options
Advertising
Display ads can be dynamically inserted throughout your content once you have some decent traffic on your site.
Affiliate
You can market others' physical or information products to your audience in a variety of hobby niches.
Products
Create your own physical or info product and capitalize on higher margins than display ads or affiliate marketing.
A good way to examine niches is to run the keyword "Tennis" through LongTailPro or a free tool like this one. I ran "Tennis" through LongTailPro and as you can see there are lots of sub-niches you can explore: "tennis rackets", "tennis bags", "tennis outfits", "tennis camps", "tennis coaches", etc.
Tennis Keyword Research
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Besides just ranking in Google, there's opportunities on social media platforms to become the voice of the hobby. Even if you never rank in Google for your keyword, you can still own a portion of the audience's attention on a social media platform.
Let's take a look at this list of hobbies- scroll through and see if anything strikes you. (The Keyword Competitiveness score is explained beneath the table).
List Of Hobbies
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Alternative Table Format
Keyword Competitiveness Scores
- 0-10 (No Competition),
- 10-20 (Extremely Low Competition),
- 20-30 (Low Competition),
- 30-40 (Moderate Competition),
- 40-50 (Somewhat High Competition),
- 60-70 (Very High Competition),
- 70-100 (Don't Even Think About It).
*Read more about their scoring.
Niche Facts Overview
- Hobbies have passionate audiences, problems to solve, and oftentimes expensive products to market.
- Choosing a hobby niche can be a conservative way to approach niche-marketing, ensuring that there will be an audience interested in your content, as long as it's good.
- If you yourself are passionate about one of these hobbies, it's a great way to ensure you don't get bored or discouraged by the process of building and marketing your authority niche site.
- Broad niches like "body building" and "tennis" have large sub-niches you can explore and build an audience around.
*If Google Trends doesn't load- just refresh the page.
The Opportunity
Hobbies are a great niche to consider building a site around. By their very nature they generally have engaged audiences who are typically involved employing some type of product. A tennis player has physical products like rackets, elbow braces, balls shoes, etc.
As of this writing, Clickbank has 73 tennis information products you can promote.
A kayaker has physical products like paddles, life vests, carts, seats and the vessels themselves, though no Clickbank information products.
Perhaps there's a hobby out there that you enjoy- if you can monetize a passion, it's much less likely that you'll get discouraged during the grind. There's something to be said, though, for having a passion for the process of building and monetizing an authority site. In that case, the topic of your site is somewhat immaterial.
What I Did...
What I chose to do when choosing a niche was create a general review site- this means that I can dabble in any product (niche) vertical. While this enables me to publish and profit from any type of product, it also limits the site's ability to attract a core following because it doesn't have a true focus.
Though, mega product review sites like Consumer Reports and the WireCutter pull it off- but they also are physically reviewing the products they write-up, which is something that I've only done a handful of times.
It should be said, though, that I do strive to provide valuable information to my site's readers- publishing content that reflects the buyer experience of online reviewers who have actually purchased and use the products.
All that said- investigating the hobby angle can hopefully prime your imagination.
How to get traffic
SEO
Depending on the hobby, your approach will probably differ.
Some of these hobby niches will lend themselves to video, some to imagery, some to long-form content.
Some will have engaged audiences on Facebook that you can tap into for promotion purposes. Indeed, some will have greater keyword volume and more or less competition in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
These are all things you should investigate prior to selecting a niche.
A Quick Niche Exercise
Niches require vetting. In the near future, I'll be writing up a niche validation guide. In the meantime, you'll want to perform some research prior to diving into a niche.
Choose a niche right now, just as an exercise, and use the keyword to search social media: scour Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Facebook, Instagram. Begin documenting your findings in a spreadsheet- listing out communities, influencers, popular keywords, pain points.
Use LongTailPro or a free keyword research tool that shows search volume to see how popular a query it is.
Go to Google Trends and research how the keyword is trending. Is it seasonal?
Try Googling it and finding forums- assess its popularity and its pain points.
Go on Amazon and see what products are available for sale in the niche- examine how many reviews they have. Do they have hundreds? Or do the primary products only have a couple?
Check out oDigger and Clickbank to see what sort of information products are out there.
Google your keyword plus the word "affiliate" and see if you can dig up some affiliate programs for that keyword. For example, "tennis affiliate".
Find other niche sites and see what they're doing- this is a great way to help validate the niche, while also fueling your creative instinct regarding traffic acquisition.
Doing this sort of deep dive provides you some intimate knowledge regarding the niche. Maybe the people in the niche annoy the hell out of you and you realize it's not for you!
Or maybe you realize you've stumbled across a hobby you care about, that has lots of traffic and monetization opportunities.
For example, starting a golf blog could be an exceptional idea, even if you're just a beginning golfer. It has a ton of affiliate keywords and I see even low DR sites getting massive amounts of traffic.
Back to the topic of getting traffic: your research might show you that a particular hobby has a huge Pinterest audience. Pinterest, then, would be a logical place to focus on getting traffic from.
Social media can be a great traffic source, especially since search engine traffic can take months, if ever, to get flowing. That said, you'll always want to have a website.
Search traffic is the most passive way of receiving web visitors and these searchers are often the most engaged form of traffic you will find. Social media traffic can be fickle and it can require constant maintenance to upkeep (i.e. posting multiple times a day).
Though there are some automation and scheduling solutions you can use to drive traffic, especially once you have an audience. HootSuite, Buffer and ViralTag are options I've used.
The Short Answer
The short answer here is that there's always an SEO play for any of these hobbies, but there will also be different opportunities for alternative traffic sources depending on the niche you choose.
Study the content harvesting graphic below- this gives you an idea of how you can multiply the reach of your content across channels by adapting it to different platforms.
How To Harvest Content For More Traffic
How to make money
Depending on the hobby, this could be display ads, affiliate marketing, or your own products.
Display ads require tons of traffic- think at least a 1,000 a day before you see any decent money. Affiliate marketing will likely be your bread and butter, at least initially.
Though, as a caveat, say you're an ace tennis pro and you have an information product (a video course, an e-book) you're dying to promote- there's no reason you can't experiment selling it using paid traffic, rather than wait for SEO or social media traffic to trickle in.
That's a whole other conversation. If you're looking to learn about product validation, check out Patt Flynn's thoughts on the matter. LearnWorld also has some useful information if you're trying to create an online course. You can also validate a product by building out a landing page and sending traffic to it (link).
Back to the point- affiliate marketing is probably the best early play. Your initial research should have ensured that there are products to promote- you don't want to be left high and dry in a niche like beachcombing where the only products people use are $12 trash pickers, for example.
The Amazon Associates affiliate program will doubtless have physical products your hobbyists use and sites like ClickBank will potentially have information products you can also market to your audience.
As well, ODigger, which is a search engine for affiliate programs, is another good resource to explore.
How To Get Started
- Use our hobby keyword list to help select a hobby niche
- Validate the hobby niche- make sure there is sizable search volume by running the primary keyword through a keyword tool like LongTailPro. Also ensure that there are products you can market to your audience- both physical and (ideally) informational.
- Choose a fun, brandable domain name
- Dive into keyword research- I recommend using LongTailPro to figure out what people are searching for and the content that will appeal to your audience.
- Start publishing content and then harvesting it for cross-platform promotion.
- Engage and interact with your audience- be where they hang out online, or even in person- become an authority in the space.
- Once you've got 10-15 posts, apply to Amazon Associates (if you aren't already enrolled) to get some money rolling in.
- Begin capturing emails from the get-go and marketing your content to your fan base.
- Consider hiring writers or virtual assistants to help you automate and scale.
- Investigate different affiliate programs and alternative monetization strategies. If you can profit from it, explore running Facebook Ads- capturing emails sending them down a profitable funnel.
Pros
- Opportunity to build a cross-channel brand for the hobby and subscriber base
- Can be a great SEO play, especially if the hobby isn't extensively covered online
- Hobbies have engaged audiences- especially if you can address their 'pain points'
- A great opportunity to distinguish yourself by providing unique media, i.e., shooting videos, taking pictures of the hobby in action
- Solid way to get started if you feel stuck choosing a niche
Cons
- Some hobbies like beachcombing have no products, don't need a lot of explication- be careful you select a hobby that isn't a 'dead-end'
- If a hobby is 'too niche', there might not be enough interest to scale up the opportunity- for example, pool bicycling might be narrow, but you could expand a category up into 'aquatic exercise'
Last Updated on September 16, 2022 by Ryan Nelson
