What's your web niche?

Sometimes self employment comes after retirement. That was true for my dad; he was an engineer of various sorts all of his working life. His last business was selling boilers and other industrial heating equipment, but he always did wood-working as a hobby. When he "retired", he starting doing custom carpentry full time. For him, that was a natural thing to do.

One possible source of post retirement income is "blogging" - that is, creating a web site about your hobby or interests. You don't necessarily have to be selling anything (though that can be a source of income too) because you can make money just from advertising.

If you can write reasonably well about any given subject, you can probably attract readers. There are two paths to success here: raw volume and extreme popularity. To take it to the extremes, you might write one article that ends up being read by millions of people. On the other hand, you might write millions of articles, many of which get read by a few people each. Either way works; though for most of us something in the middle is more achievable: we write a lot, and hope that some of it becomes moderately popular.

How many articles does it take? That will vary with your subject matter and how interesting you are, but typically several thousand is the magic number.

The time to start building something like that is before retirement. My father didn't learn carpentry skills on the day he retired; he'd been learning all his life. When he retired, he could start earning immediately.

It takes time to build a popular site. Aside from your time to write all this, it can take time to get noticed, to get in-bound links that drive people to your site. It might be years before you see a dime of income, and it literally might only be a dime or two at first. Many bloggers report advertising earnings of only a dollar or two a day, and some are a long way from making that much! On the other hand, there are many of us who make significant income this way, and even some super-stars who make six figure incomes.

It takes time to create enough raw volume or popularity to make much money. If you will need income later, now is the time to start preparing for it, and blogging is one possibility.

So what's your niche? What hobby of yours could be turned into a blog?

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