$1 MILLION Boring Business Ideas | Make Money Online

Most business ideas that go viral on social media have one thing in common: they look exciting and they are genuinely difficult to pull off. You need capital, connections, an accounting background, or the ability to spot undervalued assets most people miss. The boring business Alston covers in this video has none of those requirements. No face required. No office. No meetings. No genius-level market analysis.

The idea is a blog. Not a personal journal, not a lifestyle diary, but a buyer-intent information site that answers the questions people are already searching millions of times a day and earns commissions when those readers click through and buy. Alston runs one himself. It has been three years since he added a single post, and it still deposits money into his account every day. In this post you will learn exactly how the model works, how to find low-competition keywords, and every way to turn that traffic into income.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why a blog beats most “exciting” online business ideas for the average person starting from zero
The real-world proof that a boring niche blog can reach a $16.6 million traffic value
How to use the “Best X Under Y” and “Best X For Y” keyword formulas to find topics you can actually rank for
The exact setup steps to get a blog live in 15 minutes
Eight distinct ways to turn blog traffic into money
Honest drawbacks so you go in with realistic expectations
A step-by-step launch plan you can start executing today
If you want a shortcut to finding the right online income model for your specific skills, try the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com

Why Boring Beats Brilliant Every Time

When people talk about “boring business ideas” they usually mean buying laundromats, vending machines, or parking lots. Those ideas are boring and profitable but they require real capital and some operational skill. The blog model is boring in a different way: it is repetitive, unglamorous, and slow to start. Those are exactly the qualities that make it sustainable.

Exciting business models attract crowded markets. The moment something appears to be an easy win on TikTok or YouTube, a thousand people copy it within weeks. A blog about the best vacuum cleaner for pet hair is not going to trend on social media. It is also not going to attract ten thousand competitors this month. The search traffic that finds it comes from people who are already in buying mode. They are not browsing for entertainment. They have a real need, they opened Google, and now they are clicking links. That is the environment where a well-researched blog post earns commissions day after day without you doing anything.

Alston is transparent about his own feelings on this. He finds writing boring. He does not say that to seem relatable. He means it. And yet his blog keeps producing income because the work was done once, the content lives online permanently, and search engines keep sending new readers to it. That asymmetry between effort and reward is the whole point.

Tom’s Guide: A $16.6 Million Traffic Value from a “Boring” Blog

Alston uses a real-world example to show how big this can get. He typed “best vacuum cleaner” into Google. That is not a glamorous keyword. It is exactly the kind of search that happens millions of times per day because people’s vacuums break, because they buy houses with pets, because they move into their first apartment and need to figure out what to get. The search results that came back were not from Home Depot or Walmart. The second result was from tomsguide.com.

Tom’s Guide is a site that publishes “best of” lists across electronics, home appliances, cameras, laptops, and dozens of other product categories. The site has been adding content since 2015. Alston pulled the data: the traffic value of that site, which represents the dollar equivalent of the organic search traffic it receives, is over $16.6 million. That is not revenue. That is the value of the traffic itself. The actual revenue could be higher or lower, but in Alston’s estimation it is likely higher given the volume of affiliate links and the density of ads on every page.

Look at what Tom’s Guide has on any given article page. There are display ads at the top. Display ads on each side. Video ads embedded mid-page. Sponsored placements. And then throughout the article there are links to Amazon. Every time a reader clicks one of those Amazon links and buys anything within 24 hours, even if they end up buying something completely different from the product the article was reviewing, Tom earns an Amazon affiliate commission. The content does not need to go viral. It does not need to be shared on social media. It just needs to show up when someone types a question into Google.

Another example Alston found: pixafocus.com and lapsoftheshutter.com, both niche camera blogs. Nobody has heard of these sites. They are not influencer channels. They are information blogs that answer specific questions about cameras, and they earn affiliate commissions every time a reader buys through their links. You do not need a famous brand to build this. You need content that answers real questions.

How to Find Keywords Anyone Can Rank For

The biggest mistake most new bloggers make is writing about topics they care about rather than topics people are searching for. Those two categories can overlap, but caring about something does not automatically mean search volume exists. The solution is keyword research.

Alston uses Ahrefs, a paid keyword research tool. He acknowledges there are free alternatives but says Ahrefs saves him enough time that the subscription is worth it. In Ahrefs, every keyword gets a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score on a scale of 0 to 100. The closer to 100, the harder it is to rank because major publications or established sites already dominate the results. New blogs need to target keywords with low KD scores, ideally 20 or below, while still getting meaningful search volume.

The smart move is not to search for random keywords and hope for the best. Alston shows two specific keyword formulas that consistently produce buyer-intent, low-competition opportunities. Both are simple enough to execute on day one.

The “Best X Under Y” Formula

This formula captures people who have already decided they want something and are just trying to fit it into a budget. “Best bourbon under $50.” “Best office chair under $200.” “Best gaming laptop under $1,500.” These searchers are not casually browsing. They have money to spend and they want someone to tell them what to buy. That is the ideal reader for an affiliate marketing blog.

In Ahrefs, Alston searched the pattern “best … under” and found over 2.3 million searches per month across more than 314,000 keywords. That number includes high-competition keywords that an established site like Tom’s Guide would dominate. But when he filtered for keyword difficulty of 20 or below, a massive pool of opportunity remained. Fresh product categories, niche variations, and regional searches all have lower competition because fewer people have bothered to write a careful, well-researched article about them yet.

The research process for one of these articles is not complicated. Take “best office chair under $200.” You go to Amazon, Office Depot, and a few other retailers. You read product descriptions. You read customer reviews. You identify the three to five chairs that consistently come up as favorites in that price range and you write a comparison article that explains what makes each one good, who it is best for, and how to pick between them. You include your affiliate links. You publish. You move on to the next article.

Alston notes that going to the store to physically test a product like an office chair is not required but can be useful for getting original photos for your blog. Photos from your own testing make an article feel more authoritative and help differentiate it from thin content that just copies specs from a product page.

The “Best X For Y” Formula

This formula captures people who have a specific situation rather than a specific budget. “Best shoes for standing all day.” “Best shampoo for dry scalp.” “Best foundation for oily skin.” These are high-volume, high-intent searches where the reader often cares more about solving a problem than about price.

The numbers here are even larger. Alston searched “best … for” in Ahrefs and found the pattern generates over 70 million searches per month across more than 9 million keywords. When filtered to keyword difficulty 20 or below, the pool narrows to about 25 million searches per month across 232,000 keywords. That is an enormous amount of opportunity for any blogger willing to do the research.

Specific examples Alston highlighted: “best shoes for standing all day” gets 39,000 searches per month with a keyword difficulty of 32. That is slightly above the 20-or-below threshold but still accessible for a well-built site with some existing content. “Best shampoo for dry scalp” gets 11,000 searches per month with a keyword difficulty of only 19, making it a realistic target even for a brand-new blog. “Best foundation for oily skin” falls into the beauty niche, which Alston flags as particularly strong for affiliate commissions because cosmetics carry high average order values and Amazon’s beauty category drives significant affiliate income.

The research method is the same: go to Amazon, read top-rated products in the category, read customer reviews, identify what real buyers praise and complain about, and write the most useful comparison article that currently exists for that keyword. You are not inventing opinions. You are synthesizing publicly available information in a format that saves the reader time.

Setting Up Your Blog in 15 Minutes

Alston walks through the technical setup and deliberately keeps it fast. The reason is that new bloggers often spend weeks agonizing over the perfect domain name instead of writing their first article. The domain name matters far less than the content. Tom’s Guide is called Tom’s Guide. Alston’s own main blog is austingodbolt.com, which is just his name. He also mentions thesecuritycameraguy.com as an example of a straightforward niche domain. Either approach works. Pick something and move on.

The setup process breaks down into three steps:

Register a domain name and get web hosting. Web hosting is the service that keeps your website files on a server so people can find them. You are essentially renting hard drive space on a company’s servers. Alston links to his recommended beginner-friendly hosting provider in the video description. These providers typically offer a free domain name for the first year bundled with the hosting plan.
Install WordPress. WordPress is a content management system that handles the technical structure of your website so you never have to write HTML or CSS. Almost every beginner blog runs on WordPress. The hosting provider Alston recommends includes a one-click WordPress installation so there is no manual setup required.
Choose a WordPress theme. A theme controls how your blog looks. Free themes are included with most hosting plans and are more than adequate for a new site. Appearance matters less than content quality at the start. Once your site gets traffic you can think about design. Until then, write.

From signing up for hosting to having a live, functional WordPress blog takes about 10 to 15 minutes. The hard part is not the setup. The hard part is committing to writing consistently after that.

Every Way to Make Money from Your Blog

Alston says there are seven, eight, maybe ten ways to monetize a blog. The ones he covers directly in the video are the most practical starting points, but the full list is worth knowing so you understand the total potential of what you are building.

Affiliate marketing. This is Alston’s preferred monetization method and the one he recommends most highly for beginners. You partner with companies, get unique tracking links, embed those links in your articles, and earn a commission every time a reader clicks through and buys. Amazon Associates is the most accessible program because it covers almost any physical product category and most readers already trust Amazon. Other retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and smaller specialty retailers all run their own affiliate programs with varying commission rates. There are also dedicated affiliate networks like Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Impact that connect bloggers with thousands of brands in every niche imaginable.

Display advertising. This means running ads on your site and earning money every time visitors see or click them. Google AdSense is the most well-known ad network and has the lowest barrier to entry, but it pays relatively low rates per thousand visitors. Once your blog reaches a traffic threshold, you can apply to premium ad networks. Alston mentions AdThrive and Mediavine (which he refers to as Zoic in the video) as examples. These networks pay significantly higher rates than AdSense, often five to ten times more per visitor, but they require minimum traffic numbers before they will approve your site.

Selling your own course or digital product. Once your blog establishes you as a resource in a niche, you can create a paid course, guide, or template that goes deeper than your free articles. Readers who have already trusted your content enough to use your recommendations are the ideal audience for a paid product. The blog becomes a free funnel that pre-qualifies buyers.

Sponsored posts and guest posting fees. As your blog’s domain authority grows, other companies in your niche will pay to have their content or links appear on your site. This is passive in the sense that they come to you rather than you chasing them.

These four methods alone can generate multiple income streams from a single piece of content. A well-ranked article earns affiliate commissions, generates ad revenue, and can eventually attract sponsored placement offers, all from one URL that you wrote once.

Not sure if a blog is the right model for you?

Answer six questions and get a clear recommendation based on your skills and schedule at finder.platformproof.com.

Honest Drawbacks You Should Know Before You Start

Alston is straightforward about the limitations of this model. He calls blogging boring and means it. If you are hoping for quick results or public recognition, a blog will frustrate you. Here is what actually gets hard:

It takes time to rank. Google does not immediately trust new websites. A brand-new blog can take six to twelve months before articles start showing up on the first page of search results, even for low-competition keywords. That means you could be writing consistently for nearly a year before you see meaningful income. Most people quit during this window, which is actually why the opportunity remains: the people who stay are rewarded because there is less competition from people willing to wait.

It requires consistent output. Alston says three times per week is ideal but that consistency matters more than frequency. A blog with 200 articles has far more chances to rank for profitable keywords than a blog with 20 articles, regardless of how good each individual article is. Volume of useful content is the core competitive advantage in this model.

Not every keyword is worth targeting. The “best X under Y” and “best X for Y” formulas generate enormous keyword lists but not every keyword in those lists has commercial value. “Best bread for French toast” might get searches but the buyer intent is unclear and the affiliate opportunity is weak unless you are in a cooking affiliate program. Part of keyword research is filtering out the searches that are high volume but low monetization potential.

Writing is not optional, but you do not have to write yourself. Alston mentions multiple times that you can hire writers to create content for you. This changes the economics. Instead of trading your time for articles, you are trading money for articles and betting that the affiliate income will exceed your content costs. This is a real business model that some bloggers use to scale far beyond what they could produce alone, but it requires upfront investment and careful quality control so you are not publishing thin content that will not rank.

Your Step-by-Step Launch Plan

Pick a niche. Choose a topic area that has products people buy online. Electronics, home appliances, beauty, fitness equipment, pet products, kitchen tools, and outdoor gear are all strong starting categories. You do not need to be an expert. You need to be willing to research.
Register your domain and set up hosting. Do not spend more than 30 minutes on the domain name. Pick something reasonable and move forward. Get your hosting plan and install WordPress.
Do keyword research before writing a single article. Open Ahrefs or a free alternative like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest. Use the “best X under Y” and “best X for Y” patterns. Filter for keyword difficulty under 20. Build a list of 20 to 30 article ideas before you write anything.
Write your first 10 articles. These will not be perfect. Publish them anyway. The goal is to establish that your site has content and starts accumulating age and authority in Google’s eyes. Target your lowest-competition keywords first.
Apply for affiliate programs. Start with Amazon Associates. Then look for specialty programs in your niche. The affiliate link for a keyword like “best gaming laptop under $1,500” might come from Amazon, Newegg, or Best Buy depending on which has the best commission structure.
Add content consistently. One article per week is the minimum sustainable pace if you are writing yourself. Three per week will compound your results faster. Set a schedule and protect it.
Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console. After three to six months you will start seeing which articles are attracting impressions and clicks. Update and expand the articles that are gaining traction. Add internal links between related articles to help Google understand your site’s structure.
Apply for display ad networks when traffic grows. Once your monthly visitors reach the threshold required by premium networks, add display ads as a second income layer on top of your affiliate commissions.

This is the same basic process Alston followed. His oldest blog has been earning daily income for years with no new content added in the last two to three years. The work done in the early months continues paying out indefinitely.

Find Your X

A blog works best when you match the niche to something you can write about with enough depth and consistency to publish for at least a year. The right niche for you depends on your existing knowledge, your interests, and the commercial potential in that space. If you want a structured way to figure out which online income model fits your actual situation, the free tool at finder.platformproof.com asks you six questions and gives you a clear recommendation based on your answers. It takes about two minutes and it cuts out the guesswork that stalls most people before they ever write a single article.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to start making money from a blog?

Most blogs take six to twelve months before search traffic becomes consistent enough to generate meaningful affiliate income. Some niches with very low competition can see earlier results, but planning for a full year of content creation before significant income is the realistic expectation. The blogs that reach the numbers Alston describes, like Tom’s Guide with its $16.6 million traffic value, took years to build.

Do I need to be a good writer to start a blog?

No. Affiliate blog posts are not creative writing. They are structured comparisons and buyer guides. The skills you need are basic research ability, the capacity to read product reviews and specs, and the ability to organize that information clearly. If you genuinely dislike writing, you can hire freelance writers from platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to create content for you while you handle the keyword research and publishing.

What niche should I pick for my blog?

Pick a niche where people regularly buy products online and where those products have a wide enough range that you can write 50 to 100 articles without running out of topics. Electronics, home appliances, beauty and skincare, fitness gear, pet supplies, and kitchen equipment are all strong starting points. Avoid niches where the primary products are extremely cheap, since commissions on low-priced items rarely add up to meaningful income.

Is Amazon Associates the best affiliate program for a new blog?

Amazon Associates is the most practical starting point because it covers almost any physical product and readers trust Amazon enough to buy confidently. The trade-off is that Amazon’s commission rates have been cut multiple times over the years and are lower than some specialty programs. As your blog grows, add affiliate programs from direct retailers and specialty networks to increase your average commission rate. Many successful bloggers use Amazon as a baseline and layer higher-commission programs on top.

What keyword research tools work if I can’t afford Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is the tool Alston uses and recommends because it saves research time, but free alternatives exist. Google Keyword Planner is free with a Google Ads account and shows search volume data. Ubersuggest has a limited free tier. Answer the Public shows the questions people ask around any topic, which can surface article ideas even without precise volume numbers. For a new blogger, starting with free tools and upgrading to Ahrefs after the blog generates some income is a reasonable approach.

How many articles do I need before a blog becomes profitable?

There is no fixed number, but 50 to 100 well-researched articles targeting low-competition buyer keywords is typically when blogs start seeing consistent search traffic. Some bloggers see earlier results with fewer, longer articles. The key variable is whether your articles are actually ranking. Use Google Search Console to monitor your rankings and focus your next articles on keywords where you are already showing up on page two or three, since those are the easiest to push to page one.

Can I run multiple blogs at the same time?

Yes, and Alston mentions this as one of the structural advantages of the model. Because blogs can be partially outsourced to freelance writers, you can operate blogs in multiple niches simultaneously. The risk is spreading your attention too thin before any single blog reaches critical mass. The typical advice is to build one blog to the point where it generates regular income before starting a second, unless you have the resources to hire writers for both from the beginning.

Does a blog still work in a world where AI can generate content instantly?

The rise of AI content tools has increased competition in generic informational articles, but buyer-intent content that includes original research, real product comparisons, and specific recommendations still performs well in search. Google has stated that helpful, accurate content written for humans rather than search engines is what it wants to surface. Blogs that publish thin, low-effort AI content are struggling. Blogs that use AI as a research and drafting aid while maintaining accuracy and genuine usefulness for buyers are still viable. The fundamentals Alston describes, finding real buyer-intent keywords and writing honest comparisons, remain sound.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “$1 MILLION Boring Business Ideas | Make Money Online,” YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=VHwzp_ASFUU
Tom’s Guide, tomsguide.com, example niche blog with $16.6M traffic value cited in video
Ahrefs keyword research data referenced in video: “best X under Y” (2.3M monthly searches, 314K keywords), “best X for Y” (70M monthly searches, 9M+ keywords)
Amazon Associates affiliate program, affiliate-program.amazon.com
Google Keyword Planner, ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/