How To Start A Music Blog [Niche Report]

Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.

If you’re a musician, or an enthusiast that just wants to start a music blog, this next niche could be an excellent opportunity for you.

The idea is: musical instruments.

According to Statista, 18.08 million Americans play a musical instrument. Gallup also reports that more than one in two households (54%) have a member who plays a musical instrument.

The most popular instruments, according to FirstTutors are as follows:

Electric guitar
Keyboard
Piano
Guitar
Drums
Violin
Saxophone
Flute
Cello
Clarinet

These are expensive, complex purchases that people heavily research before buying. This is a solid recipe for a music blogger who wants to start a profitable niche site. And there are tons of different instruments out there.

The Oboe (An Example)

Take the oboe, for instance.

While the oboe might not be an incredibly sexy topic, that’s precisely what I look for when choosing a niche.

Sure, everyone wants to start websites about iPhones and drones because they’re high-tech and cool.

The oboe, however, is a comparatively neglected SEO opportunity.

Music Blog Keyword Research

But, if you check out my Musical Instrument Keyword Research below, you’ll see that “oboe” gets 49,500 searches a month.

Scroll through- there are so many musical instruments you can build a music blog around. You don’t necessarily need to be a music industry veteran or experienced musician. Hiring on Upwork makes it easy to find musician bloggers with stellar writing skills to create content for you.

(Keyword Competitiveness Scores are explained in the key below the table.)

I next ran “oboe” through LongTailPro to deep dive into this primary keyword. There are some solid informational and affiliate keyword opportunities.

For example, “what is an oboe” or “english horn vs oboe”. Affiliate opportunities are represented by keywords like “oboe case” and “yamaha oboe”.

Oboe Keyword Research

While LongTailPro says that it’s a moderately competitive keyword at “50”, when I Google it, the second result is a YouTube video (weak). Another top 5 result is a music school’s oboe page, 4 layers deep into the site.

And then there are a couple eCommerce pages (another sign of weakness) and some dictionary site defining what an oboe is (really weak).

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.

Expensive Products

Besides high search volume, a quick Google Shopping search shows me that oboes commonly cost over $2,000, with some priced at $5,000! Check out my antique niche report there are lots of music instrument collectibles that sell tens of thousands of dollars.

This is a magic formula for creating a high-earning affiliate site. Lots of search volume, not a lot of great content.

Affiliate Opportunities

Below, I’ve highlighted some music affiliate programs. This isn’t a comprehensive list- but should help you visualize the opportunity:

Amazon Associates: 6% on musical instruments
GuitarCity: 6% site-wide
TakeLessons: $30 for completed lessons
SheetMusicPlus: 8%-12% on sheet music purchases
Spotify Affiliate Program
Skillshare Affiliate Program: “$10 for every new customer you refer to Skillshare”.
Fiverr Affiliate Program
Udemy Affiliate Program

What’s The Big Idea?

The idea here is to create a truly authoritative WordPress music blog around a musical instrument or a class of musical instruments (think oboe vs double reed woodwind musical instruments).

This blog post content will feature affiliate reviews of oboes, informational content that attracts traffic and links, and can even do lead-generation for oboe lessons.

Understanding The Opportunity In Music Blogging

The 2 biggest mistakes niche marketers make is going too big or going to small with the niche they choose.

For instance, if you start a music blog called OboeProfessor.com, you’re basically locked in to oboe-related content. Going up a level, referring to this helpful Wikipedia entry, I learn that oboes are a type of “reed instrument”.

Perhaps it makes sense to create a music blog focusing on reed instruments. You can cover a lot more ground that way, but the broader you go, the more work you’ll have to do to cover all the different content areas, and the more difficult it will be to focus your music blog towards serving a target audience.

One way I would approach determining the scope of the site, besides eye-balling the search volume using LongTailPro or Ahrefs, would be to use a spreadsheet to list out all of the different content ideas. Check out AnswerThePublic for really long-tail keywords.

You’ll get a feel of whether the topic of the site is too narrow or too broad just by pre-examining the breadth of the content you’ll be publishing. It makes sense to take an organized approach like this before diving into a niche.

Having some sense of the niche’s peculiarities and problems will also help you figure out if it’s something you’ll have the wherewithal to pursue.

What I Would Do

I’d pour over the keyword list above and deep dive into these instruments. I’d run individual keywords through LongTailPro or a free keyword research tool to see how much long-tail search volume there is.

I’d search affiliate networks for eCommerce music stores that sell oboes.

While Amazon does have some oboes, you’ll find niche music stores online with affiliate programs that have tons more oboes than Amazon does. I’d want to see several potential affiliate partners I could depend on- you don’t want to be left high and dry if an affiliate program expires.

A quick Google search turned up this eCommerce store where I see oboes selling for between 3 and $5,000.

Once I know there’s enough volume, the competition is beatable, there are expensive products, and affiliate programs to join, I’d buy a brandable domain name (i.e. OboePro.com) and begin churning out WordPress blog posts.

As I mentioned previously, I’d want to balance my content strategy between informational and affiliate content. I’d either hire writers or write it myself. I’d focus on informational pieces like “oboe vs clarinet”, which has a 1,300/month search volume.

And write up individual affiliate reviews of oboes compiling them by brand (“bulgheroni oboe”), or however it makes sense to disambiguate the different oboes on the market.

Video Content

Now, this will lend itself to video content. You can get by, to an extent, using oboe videos from YouTube and embedding them on your music blog. But, as I’ve advised in my other write-ups, the real win will be generating unique and original content- both written and visual.

Perhaps a cheap way to get this done is by visiting a local music store and have the oboes demonstrated for me in exchange for giving the business some promotion on the site.

Maybe I pay a musician $50 for an hour of his time to demonstrate something on the oboe. I’d want to be creating written, visual and video content and distributing it across platforms to increase the site’s discoverability.

Promotion

Once I have, say, 15 posts up on the music blog,I’d be comfortable promoting it as a resource. Now, site promotion is a bit beyond the scope of this report, but I’ll link to some resources I think have it nailed down:

Below I’ve created a graphic that describes how you can convert written content into different types of media for different platforms. It’s a handy way to visualize how you can disseminate your content across the internet.

Yes, outreach can be a grind, but if you’ve created a genuine resource for oboists, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get backlinks, which will help you compete for high-value search rankings.

That’s it in a nutshell- obviously, if you’re new to internet marketing working with WordPress (my preferred CMS), choosing a hosting plan (I use SiteGround), understanding how to manage affiliate links- these are all (fun) challenges that are part and parcel of the entrepreneurial journey.

My real goal here is to provide motivational research- ideas that get you pumped to quit the rat race!

How To Get Traffic

SEO will be a great play here- lots of low competition words for musical instruments. Affiliate and informational content will both rank over time, if done well.

Getting some backlinks will also help- outreach that markets your informational (i.e. non-money-making content) will be the link-bait.

You could also consider publishing YouTube videos- though that will be a greater investment of time. There’s lots of white space in the two biggest search engines, Google and YouTube for these terms.

How To Make Money

As I’ve touched on above, this will be a strong affiliate marketing play.

Besides affiliating with a music store like Guitar City, there are sheet music affiliate opportunities like this one, Udemy oboe courses, and TakeLessons has an affiliate program for remote and in-person musical instruction.

You can even promote concert tickets through something like TicketNetwork.

I’d initially monetize with Amazon affiliate reviews of oboes and with some traffic reach out to places like Guitar City and TakeLessons- if you try to get into those affiliate programs without a decent site you risk getting rejected at first glance.

Doing A Music Blog Affiliate Site Right

Some best-in-class examples of affiliate sites for inspiration:

You should also read my post on writing product reviews that convert.

Pros

Great SEO play
Can be a solid affiliate + display ad opportunity for passive income
A successful music blog is a fun topic if you’re an enthusiast- there are many different angles, including music genres, you can focus on- not just instruments

Cons

You might need to rely on writers with expertise in the instrument
Amazon instrument availability varies- though it’s smart to have non-Amazon product options available to promote in smaller eCommerce stores.

Last Updated on February 28, 2021 by Ryan Nelson