FAQS: How I Make Money Writing About Boring Topics

Answers to your amazing questions

When I posted my article, How I Make Up to $5,000 Each Month Writing About Boring Topics, I had no idea it would receive such an overwhelmingly positive response.

As of this writing, the article has 4.7K views and 77 comments.

Reading through all of the kind comments is deeply meaningful to me. I tried to answer every single comment to the best of my ability.

Since many people had similar questions, I thought I’d answer those ones here in more depth.

Questions like:

• Do you write boring topics on Medium?
• How do you actually make money from boring topics on your website?
• How do you know if something is too boring?
• Do all boring topics make money?
• Do I have to start a website to make money from boring topics?
• How many boring websites do you need?
• Do you build one boring website per niche?
• Can you make money writing about important or exciting topics?
• Isn’t writing about boring topics for money selling your soul?
• Why do you recommend WordPress.org over WordPress.com?
• What are some boring blogging tools you use?

Let’s take each of these one at a time — get ready to get bored!

Do You Write Boring Topics on Medium?

This is one of the most common questions from the first boring article, so I want to address it first.

My answers, as clearly as I know how to state them:

• I write 99.9% of my boring articles on my personal portfolio of websites.
• On Medium, I almost never intend to write boring articles.

When I first started writing on Medium, I experimented with boring articles on boring topics, but they did not go over well. So I try to keep my topics fresh and entertaining on this platform.

Therefore, I try to avoid publishing boring articles on Medium. The boring niche and boring topic strategy seem to work best on your own self-hosted website.

A self-hosted website is your own website on your domain, so you have full control over the content and format of your articles. The majority of self-hosted websites use WordPress and a hosting company, like Bluehost or Siteground (there are many others).

It’s really up to you which platform and hosting you want to use for your own site.

Caveats: I saved the exceptions for the end of this answer to hopefully not confuse the issue. I do still experiment with boring topics on Medium from time to time, mostly to drive traffic to my external, personal sites.

I might also rarely backlink to one of my websites from a Medium article, especially when it makes sense from a topical point of view.

This helps with my website authority, which results in higher and quicker rankings in Google. With the launch of the Medium referral program, there is also the possibility of converting organic Google traffic into monthly commissions.

How Do You Actually Make Money From Boring Topics on Your Website?

This is the second most common question, so let’s tackle it second.

Since I publish boring content on my personal portfolio of four websites, I make money through affiliate marketing and display advertising. Once you write enough articles and get enough traffic, you can sign up for advertising networks like Ezoic, Ad Thrive, and Mediavine.

My two eligible websites currently use Ezoic.

When website visitors read my articles, I get paid a small amount for the ads displayed on my sites. If those visitors click my affiliate links and buy something, I earn a small commission there, too.

The small earnings add up with hundreds of articles and thousands of visitors to my websites each month.

Once you join Ezoic (or another ad network), there are ways to make more money

How Do You Know if Something Is Too Boring?

I really like this question.

To me, a topic is only “too boring” if there are not enough people searching for answers about it online. You can still make money from very micro niche websites targeting a very small pool of people, but I think it’s rather risky.

Especially for beginners going at it for the first time (that sounds unnecessarily sexual, but let’s move on).

I’d rather write boring topics in a big boring niche with a bigger pool of people.

You can figure out the rough size of a niche by using Google Trends and Keyword tools such as Ahrefs. If a topic is something a big group of people is interested in or need — like cars, hiking, or yarn — then you know it’s not “too” boring.

In this case, “too boring” means “too small.”

Therefore, a niche is only too boring if not enough people search for answers about it (searches lead to website visitors and visitors lead to display ad revenue).

The bottom line: There are no topics that are too boring, only topics that are too small.

Do All Boring Topics Make Money?

While I try to find boring topics, the relative excitement of a niche or topic is not the only factor. Not all boring topics make money.

Once I target a boring topic, I also look for:

• Search volume
• Competition

You want boring topics, not dying topics.

The Boring Guide to Search Volume

You can estimate search volume using most keyword tools, but they usually get it wrong anyway. The best method I use is to see if the question or topic shows up early in the Google autocomplete method (also called the Alphabet Soup method).

Here’s a nice video showing you exactly how to do it:

The earlier and easier a keyword (or topic) appears using this method, the more search volume it usually gets each month. Bonus points if you find several variations of the same question or phrase.

If you rank high for one of those variations, you usually rank high for all of them.

The Boring Guide to Competitor Analysis

Once you find a boring topic with a big search volume, you still need to see if you can compete for it in search.

You do that by Googling the phrase, question, or topic.

Then, you follow these yawn-worthy steps:

• See if any of the top 10 articles directly answer the question or address the topic (you’re looking for an exact match for searcher intent).
• See how long the top articles are (usually, you need to match or exceed their word count). I tend to double the word count of the top articles, as long as I’m adding value and not fluff.
• See if the top articles include images, downloadable, videos, charts, etc (If not, you can add those things to write an even more boring article that beats them in search).

Do I Have To Start a Website To Make Money From Boring Topics?

No, you don’t have to start a website.

However, I recommend that you do start your own website in a boring niche, but it’s not 100% necessary.

You can get paid well to write boring topics for other bloggers.

But keep in mind that they will ultimately make more money from the content. If they pay you $20–$200 to write the article, they will still make more than $200 over the life of the article on their site.

Some of the articles on my websites make $100-$200 per month. Most of my articles make an average of between $10-$50 per month right now across my websites.

Multiply those numbers by a hundred or more and you can easily see that it generally makes a lot more sense to start your own website.

That’s why I recommend that you create your own website where you publish your own boring content.

I like creating my content and leaving it alone for years to earn me money.

Eventually, you’ll need to go back and update old content, but you can keep high-quality evergreen articles the same for a long time.

Do You Build One Boring Website Per Niche?

I like to build broad websites under a broad domain name (URL) that allows me to write about many subtopics or sub-niches.

For example, let’s say I created a website called BackyardGuru.com (as far as I know, it’s not a real, active site). I can write about anything and everything that has to do with the backyard.

I follow this basic boring formula: Broad domain name + micro sub-niche.

On this made-up website, I’d pick one sub-niche — grills, maybe — and write 100 to 1,000 life-draining articles about grills.

Once I exhausted that topic, I’d move on to another sub-niche that still fits into the backyard theme.

Therefore, if you name your website broadly, you can write about several related topics on the same site. However, I wouldn’t write about sowing machines on my backyard website.

Unless Google tells me that people ask about building a backyard sowing retreat.

That sounds pretty boring, so they probably do.

How Many Boring Websites Do You Need?

Technically, you only need one boring website to follow the boring niche + boring topic process.

For beginners, I strongly suggest only building one so that you can learn the ropes.

Keep the process as simple as possible:

1. Build one cheap, simple, and boring website.
2. Write boring but clear and accurate answers to boring questions about your niche.
3. As soon as you are eligible, sign up for the Ezoic display network (You can switch to other ad networks later if you want).
4. Add affiliate links to about 80% of your boring, informational articles.

Then wait a super-boring 8–12 months for your website to grow, start getting traffic from Google, and make money.

How much money?

That depends on the niche you chose, the topics you select, and how many articles you put on your site.

If you want to earn the most amount of money as fast as possible, check out my article on growing a blog from 0–100,000 page views per month:

Can You Make Money Writing About Important or Exciting Topics?

Yes, you can make a lot of money writing about almost any type of topic, including exciting topics that interest you.

But generally, I recommend that you avoid very exciting topics because it is almost always harder to find a way to break into the niche. Of course, if earning a living is not your primary focus, then go with your heart and passion.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach.

There are usually boring topics within very lucrative niches (like health and fitness or finance).

For now, I’d avoid investing a lot of time into new topics that could easily collapse or change in the future. Instead, focus on boring but massively popular topics instead.

Why Do You Recommend WordPress.org Over WordPress.com?

I know this is a boring question, but I got it more than once, so I felt obligated to answer it.

It also happens to be a very important boring question: I made this mistake when I first started blogging because I didn’t know the difference.

The TL;DR version: WordPress.org is where you can build your self-hosted website so you can make money.

WordPress.com is where you can build a free blog for anybody to read (but generally, the site does not make money).

To be more specific:

You want to make and keep as much of the money you earn as possible. The easiest way to do that is by building a self-hosted website in WordPress.org and keeping 100% ownership of that site for yourself.

What Boring Blogging Tools Do You Use?

What’s more nap-inducing than talking about tools? I can’t think of anything. Just bringing up the topics makes me want to close my eyes and surrender to the sweet release of sleep.

So, I’ll keep this answer short and sweet.

Here are my three favorite tools for blogging that I use every single day (None of the links are affiliate links):

• Passive Income Geek Blogging Program — This is a simple blogging program that actually taught me how to make money from my websites.
• Jarvis (Conversion.ai) — I use this boring AI writer every day to help create content for all of my personal websites.
• Ahrefs — I keep coming back to this boring keyword research tool to find boring topics.

Here is an expanded list of blogging tools I use.

Final Thoughts

I’m sure some of my answers raised even more questions. I suppose that’s the nature of the game.

You can find a ton of answers in my list on How To Build Money-Making Websites.

Thank you for your questions! :)