How To Start a Humor Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your humor blog today.

Recommended Course

Adam Enfroy’s Blog Growth Engine offers practical tools and strategies on discovering your writing niche and generating a substantial income. 

Explore the Course

What Is Your Blog About?

If you’re here, the answer to this question seems obvious. You’re writing a blog about humor! Having a topic in mind is an excellent first step, but to succeed you’ll need to think a little deeper about what, specifically, you’re looking to accomplish with your blog. Are you starting a blog about comedians or a specific comedian? Are you starting a toilet humor blog? A sophisticated humor blog? 

Knowing on a deeper level the kind of blog you want to create will help direct your tone and your content.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on The Chive all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

The key is to find a subject that is more narrow than, “humor”, but wider than “telling a joke in a single sentence”. If your topic is too wide, you won’t stand out. If it’s too narrow you’ll quickly run out of things to say or never establish a large enough audience to sustain your blog. 

Some examples of niche humor blogs are:

• Meme Blog - I Can Has CheezBurger?
• Hyperbolic Comics Blog - Hyperbole and a Half
• Developer Humor Blog - Dev Humor

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to an audience that wants to engage in a carefully paced comedic story, or are you writing to an audience that wants to flip through as many memes as possible on a work break? Whatever the core focus of your blog is, you need to consider the people you want to read the blog so you can set the right tone and write appropriate content.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect humor blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your humor blog may include:

• CollegeHumor.com
• 9Gag.com
• Funnyordie.com
• TheChive.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your humor blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

A great option for evergreen content on a humor blog is reviews of stand up specials and comedy movies. While it will probably be most exciting to rip into the latest specials and films, focusing on classics will often net the most benefit for attracting new visitors to your blog. There will always be people looking for reviews of things that everyone loves - while reviews for many mediocre comedies may not attract much traffic a few years from now.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

There are plenty of options for video content on a humor blog. While your videos will need to be based on the niche you choose and the demands of your audience, there are some main areas you can focus on for your blog - like skits, standup, and pranks. All three of these subjects need to be recorded to be shared with your audience, and any of them you like doing will provide plenty of opportunities for creating video content. Don’t be too hard on yourself if your videos are not great at first - few are. With practice, you will get much better.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

News-type content on a humor blog may seem challenging at first, but you can figure out a method to produce news content with a little brainstorming. Look at your niche and the way that you find information about that niche. Are you always checking out the upcoming comedy film releases or stand-up specials on the horizon? You can write news-type content about the things you are looking forward to or are interested in.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

Deciding how you are going to incorporate images into your humor site may take a little thought, but the effort will be worthwhile over the long-term. Depending on your niche, you may collect images online, take photographs, or both. You can post memes, take photos of events you attend, and so on. 

As a blogger, you will develop a system for collecting images for your blogs as part of your research process. Eventually, you will know where to look for good images and you may decide you like taking photos. Since it is a humor blog, there is not necessarily a requirement for high-quality images all the time - if it seems funny to use bad photos, you may not need to even gain much proficiency in photography.

Mix and Match

Your blog doesn’t have to stick to one type of content delivery system - in fact, you should try to mix it up more and more as you go along. By tackling new types of content, like video, you can gain skills that will serve you and your audience later on. You may find that you still prefer one type of content over another, but you will have the ability to change things up when you feel it is appropriate to do so. Step out of your comfort zone to diversify your blog and keep your audience coming back.

How To Make Money From A Humor Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a humor blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

The Amazon Affiliate program is a good fit for humor blogs because it is easy to add to your blog and you make money with every transaction you facilitate. 

Blogging about humor can give you a variety of ways to add links to Amazon for various products. You can review books and other media and add links where your readers can purchase that media. You can also link to products that you find funny and build blogs around those recommendations. Every time a reader clicks a link and makes a purchase, you get a small commission from the sale. 

Many humor blogs start with Amazon Affiliates as their first source of income, and many stick with it for years. Small blogs can make a few dollars a month from the program, while bigger blogs can make thousands with this model.

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

A great example of a digital product that a humor blogger could sell is an Ebook. You can create a collection of jokes, comics, memes, or anything else that you like creating that you believe your audience will find appealing. You can even survey your audience to find out what kind of content they are most eager to see from you and base your Ebook off of their suggestions. A well-made Ebook in this niche could easily sell for $20 or more per sale.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

Product sales through a humor blog may seem difficult, but there are a few options that can work for you - which you choose will depend on your niche. Humor bloggers that create comics will often produce hard copies of their comics in book form and sell them to eager audiences. If you focus more on live humor, you could sell branded products that carry your logos, such as joke notebooks, stickers, apparel, and more. You can typically purchase smaller products like these for a few dollars a piece and sell them at a considerable mark up.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

If your humor blog focuses on stand up and live performance, you may offer to put on live shows for your audience. If you focus your blog on teaching people how to write jokes, you could offer coaching services. It all depends on the niche and the way you approach your blog. 

Since you have positioned yourself as an expert, you can charge a premium for your time. However, you want to be careful to avoid overextending yourself. It can be easy to overcommit, especially when demand is high and the payments are substantial. Remember, your blog is what drives your business, so you need to keep it well-maintained. With the right approach, you can make a good income with your services without sacrificing your blog.

Next Steps To Get Your Humor Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

Get your blog up and running today with our step-by-step course.