How to choose a topic that makes money

It’s official.

Everyone is telling you that you must create content—either as a company or as an individual in the company.

Here’s the fundamental problem where a lot of companies and creators get stuck:

Content that gets a lot of likes often doesn’t generate purchase intent.

Let's dive into how to create content that makes money 🪝

– Neal

Insight from Neal's Newsletter and UNIGNORABLE.

As I said, content that gets a lot of likes often doesn’t generate purchase intent.

Let’s use a somewhat extreme case to illustrate this.

There are a lot of really popular Instagram accounts that share things like:

Funny animal videos
Victorian Era homes
Hilarious fake products/signs
History facts or videos

Yet they make basically no money.

It turns out that just because you have 1M followers who love funny cat videos doesn’t mean they’ll ever buy anything you recommend or sell.

Even if they’re cat-related.

They trust you to make them laugh. They don’t trust you for financial/life decisions.

Whereas creators like Linus Tech Tips and MKBHD can make or break products with the power of their recommendations.

Choosing the right topic and angle is one of the most critical steps in the process. With the same effort, you can achieve significantly different business results.

Let’s dive into how to identify the right topic for your (or your startup’s) content:

Characteristics of monetizable content

There are a few variables here that all need to mingle in just the right way:

Audience
Topic
Content

Four characteristics of a monetizable AUDIENCE:

#1. Pain

They must desperately want what you’re offering. Your content must help them relieve the pain (or at least, make them feel like it’s relieving that pain).

#2. Purchasing power

They have money to pay to relieve the pain.

No purchasing power: Students hate spending money.
Lots of purchasing power:
- Venture capitalists will pay a lot if you can make them more.
- Rich audiophiles will buy expensive hifi audio equipment you recommend.

This can be overcome if the audience is very large, much like MrBeast makes a lot of money from a lot of eyeballs despite most of them being broke teenagers.

#3. Social presence

They exist on the channels you plan to target, and it’s normal to talk about that thing on that channel.

For example, LinkedIn isn’t the right place if you talk about gardening even if there were a lot of gardeners on it. But it is the right place to talk about startups and leadership.

#4. It’s growing (and large ofc)

In the past several years, the fastest-growing content creators have written about crypto and AI, two booming industries on an uptrend.

Another example is someone scaling a pickleball newsletter to 150,000 subscribers in record time thanks to the sudden and rising popularity of the sport:

Find the next trend, or at least one going in the right direction.

#5. Underserved

Ideally, the audience doesn’t have a lot of options already. AI newsletters grew the fastest right as the world started to wake up to AI. Now, there’s a lot more competition for AI newsletters, so it’s harder to grow.

Three characteristics of a monetizable TOPIC:

#1. Specific/niche

Leadership is a broadly appealing topic. It’s a problem for many, and it means a lot of different things. Don’t just talk about “leadership;” instead, focus on being a better startup CEO.

Help a specific buyer solve their specific problems.

Here are three ways you can niche down:

Subtopic: Not general copywriting, but writing ad copy.
Audience: Not “leaders” but CEOs of 100+ person companies.
Outcome: Not “build an audience” but “make 5-figures a month from LinkedIn."

Here are some examples of each.

#2. Matches what you sell

If you sell or want to sell SEO services or software, the buyers are anything from local stores, dentists, tiny startups, and massive companies.

You need content that gets in front of your target buyer, like simple “how to” guides. If you talk about nitty gritty, nerdy SEO details, you’ll attract your peers, not buyers.

But if you sell advanced SEO training or software, or are looking for a job as the Head of SEO, then nerdy talking about SEO details is perfect.

How you approach the topic changes whose trust you’ll build.

#3. Infinite game

Your content cannot solve a finite discrete task.

For example, fundraising for a startup. It’s a painful problem for someone who can pay a lot. But, once that person finishes raising money, they never want to think about it again. Your content will be interesting to them for that brief moment.

Instead, you need a game that never ends. People never stop striving to be better CEOs, parents, creators, marketers, programmers, designers, storytellers, or product managers.

Nor do people stop being interested in cars, tech, fashion, etc.

Two characteristics of monetizable CONTENT:

#1. It builds trust

Sharing memes, funny videos, and lists of hot AI tools is great and all, but in no ways does it make people trust you.

Linus Tech Tips and MKBHD have done a great job making engaging content that gives you informed and honest recommendations of tech products, and haven’t lost people’s trust by doing anything shady like take on Apple as a sponsor and then talk about how perfect their new products are.

They’re taken conflicts of interest seriously by not accepting a sponsor from a product category they review, not taking compensation to do a review, and trying to always give honest, critical and (hopefully) unbiased recommendations.

To build and keep trust:

Have morals and stick to them
Do right by people
Create content that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise
Avoid cringe things like clickbaity hooks or thumbnails of you crying that may help in the short term but make people lose respect for you

#2. Different

The exact method you use to address a topic needs to be different. You can’t just copy how another creator or company does it.

If you started posting videos identical to MKBHDs why would anyone care?

They’re going to go with the more established folks already doing it. So you need to approach it in your own unique way that’s true to you or your company.

For example, Hot Ones is just an interview podcast, but they made it completely different by forcing guests to eat spicy food.

Once you nail the fundamentals, the rest is easier

Take some serious time to pause and reflect on:

Who you’re creating content for
What you’re talking about
And how you’re talking about it

Because if you nail that, growth will come—even if the content isn't perfect.

If you want to go deeper into my advice for choosing a topic, read my full article.

And if you want a ton of help building your audience, consider joining the final cohort of our popular audience building course UNIGNORABLE. Enrollment closes next Tuesday.

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How to choose a topic that makes money