Blog
1. Greatist
A health and fitness blog backed by science.
Greatist is a blog that I’ve followed deeply over the years. Their focus on creating only the highest quality, science-backed health and fitness articles for millennials has paid off greatly.
On the surface, they’re a regular health and fitness blog. Behind the scenes, they’re a full-blown media startup with over 10 million visitors per month and an estimated yearly revenue in the 8-figure range. They make this money through ads and by selling sponsored content.
What they do well: Creating reputable, trust-worthy health content backed by science. This is hard to come by in an industry full of misinformation.
2. Nerd Wallet
A giant affiliate site that dominates SEO in the personal finance niche.
To build a website like Nerd Wallet is every affiliate marketer’s dream. They are the leading example of a successful SEO blog that crushes affiliate marketing, and they’re doing so in one of the most profitable (and competitive) industries in the world – personal finance.
Nerd Wallet reviews everything from credit cards, mortgages, insurance, and all things finance. The affiliate commissions for financial products like these can get into the hundreds of dollars per referral, which is why they’re worth over $500M.
What they do well: Understanding search intent and creating the best TYPE of content and user experience depending on the keyword.
3. Nomadic Matt
A travel blog with strong personal branding.
There are a ton of travel blogs on the internet. Most are personal blogs. They write about their travels and build up a small audience over time. Nomadic Matt also started as a personal blog about his own travels.
Today, he’s built up a HUGE resource with everything you need to know about travelling. What’s crazy is that it’s still a personal blog with only one main author. Even to this day, he writes most of the content himself.
And he ranks for nearly every keyword based around travel you can think of. There aren’t many single author blogs out there that grow to this size. It takes an incredible amount of time, focus, and persistence to continue pumping out content like he does.
What they do well: Diversifying income streams by creating and selling their own products. Staying small, lean, and extremely profitable.
4. Nerd Fitness
Health and fitness advice for nerds and ordinary, everyday people.
Steve Kamb started Nerd Fitness nearly 10 years ago when he noticed that there were a ton of health and fitness blogs, but nothing catering specifically to him. So he decided to build it himself.
Instead of targeting anyone and everyone, his blog was directly for… nerds! The interesting part is that the definition of the term “nerd” evolved as the site grew. At first, his audience consisted of people like him – nerds who played computer games and just wanted to get fit.
Today, his brand has grown into a massive community of regular people who just want to learn how to get fit and have fun doing it.
What they do well: Differentiating themselves from all the other health blogs by going extremely specific in their audience targeting.
5. Art Of Manliness
Honest tips and tutorials for becoming a better, more centered man.
I first heard of The Art Of Manliness after listening to a Mixergy interview. They are a true content site, producing mainly informational blog posts around men’s interests and lifestyle topics.
They make money through ads, and they’ve later started selling physical products like mugs, t-shirts, and posters. Usually, branded physical products can only work when you have a loyal audience, which obviously they have because 30% of their traffic comes is direct.
What they do well: Great branding, original design, and sticking to their origin topics of content even a decade after existence.
6. CSS Tricks
A giant design and development resource centered around one big influencer.
Chris Coyier is one of the most well-known designers on the internet. And it’s all thanks to his wildly popular design blog, CSS Tricks. Like Nomadic Matt, a large percentage of the articles are written by Chris.
He started the website in 2007. At the time, it was purely about CSS – hence the name. Today, it’s grown into a huge resource for all things web design and development. I visit this site several times a month myself, mainly to copy and paste in CSS lines that he shares in his blog posts.
What they do well: Using his existing audience to launch new products/companies. For example, his website CodePen now has 1M users and traffic is double that of CSS-Tricks.
7. The Penny Hoarder
A finance content site that teaches people how to put more money in their pockets.
The Penny Hoarder is a blog around money. Their mission is to teach people tons of ways to make more money. It started out as the personal blog of founder, Kyle Taylor. Once it started to take off, he started to bring on new writers, and transition into more of a media company.
The most fascinating thing about The Penny Hoarder is the amount of money they make, and how they make it.
Last year, they generated close to $40M. And unlike other media companies, they did it without any advertising.
Instead, they use affiliate marketing by forming partnerships with the right companies.
What they do well: Using storytelling to write their content to make it more engaging and relatable. They’ll feature or interview interesting people on their site and share how they’re making money.
They also do a great job at not coming off as scammy, which is very easy to fall into in the “make money” niche.