How To Make Money Selling Coffee Online

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You can make money online with just about anything. Any commodity or product has a customer base that you can tap into. That got me thinking. How many of them are used every single day by over half the adult population of The United States? Coffee. You guessed it.

It is ubiquitous with daily life in the US and around the world. While not as popular worldwide as Tea, it is still one of the most consumed products you could possibly start a business in. But How do you get your online coffee business started with the most efficiency and least friction?

Can You Make Money Selling Coffee Online? You can make money with coffee in a variety of ways. It is a great niche for a blog or Youtube channel and can generate a good sustainable income for you.

There Is Just Something About Owning Your Own Business. Being Your Own Boss. Building Something From The Ground Up With Your Own Hands. Especially When It Is This Easy To Get Started.

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How To Make Money Selling Coffee?

There are many ways you can make money with coffee online. It is a broad niche with a lot of content possibilities. You can start your own coffee line and sell it through a website, or you could use Amazon to sell it. You can even try dropshipping and similar methods.

But the main way we are going to look at in this article is making money with affiliate marketing for your coffee blog. It is one of the most reliable ways to start out an online business. The big advantage is that you don’t need to deal with inventory or customer service you just need to worry about promoting someones else products. It is ideal when you are just starting out.

The first step to this is to figure out where you want to build your blog. Do you want a written blog? Maybe you feel comfortable with a video blog on Youtube? Either way, the monetization methods are very similar.

The last ingredient you need for a successful blog is a good industry and the coffee industry is booming with no signs of slowing down(source). Read on to get the full scoop.

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Make Money With A Coffee Blog

This is the first big choice you are going to need to make for your brand new coffee business. Where to create content for it. Ideally, you will want to use both but you need to pick one as your main focus.

The reason for this is that you need to focus most of your attention of one or the other and become extremely proficient at it before trying to branch out into a new medium. It is incredibly difficult for a new blogger to put out 3 articles and 4 videos a week.

It is just spreading yourself to thin in the beginning. Jack of all trades master of none is not the best way to go about it. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each one starting with a blog.

A Coffee Blog

A blog is simply a website where you write and post an article in your niche. That’s it. a place to display your content for the world to see.

It does not need to be more complicated than that. You want your blog to load fast get right to the point and give out the best information you possibly can in each and every article.

Your content should be the focus of a new blogger. For the first few months of your coffee blog, you are going to be writing to a ghost town.

No one is going to read it and noon is going to care what you have to say about coffee. The search engines will barely acknowledge your existence.

It is a brutal truth but that is the fact of the matter.

However, after a while, your articles will start to get the recognition they deserve and then you are off. Continue writing great coffee content and you will be on the top of the SERP’s in no time, relatively speaking.

So let’s look at the Blog Pros and Cons:

This is what I recommend for a new blogger. The majority of your content should be written on a blog.

Ideally, you want to create videos to complement your written content. But for starters, nothing is better than just writing and publishing articles to get your brand off the ground.

A Coffee Youtube Channel

This is another great way to start out, but it does come with some caveats and some added expenses, although not nearly as much as you might imagine in this day and age.

You don’t need sophisticated audio-video equipment to start with, a smartphone works just fine.

So the barrier to entry is somewhat reduced. You will need to know at least a little bit in regards to video editing.

You can learn as you work but keep in mind that it can be a time-consuming process, especially for beginners. The biggest hurdle is being on camera for most people, however.

Some people are naturals and if that is you a Youtube channel as the primary content platform might be the best option for you.

Getting traffic to your channel is a little easier than fight for SERP ranking mainly due to the suggested video section of Youtube. Plus there doesn’t seem to be a sandboxing period for Youtube channels.

Let’s take a looks at some of the pros and cons of a Youtube Coffee Channel.

These are the main pluses and minuses for a Youtube Channel. The main thing here is consistency. You need to be pushing out 2 or 3 videos a week at a minimum if this is your main content source.

If you use it as a complementary source of content and traffic to your written blog then once a week or so is perfectly fine and you can tie it in with the topics of some of your written content.

One is not better than the other and using them together along with something like Pinterest is the best way to move forward in the coffee niche.

I want to touch briefly on Pinterest as a complimentary traffic source for both of these mediums.

A Note On Pinterest

Most social media are a waste of time for bloggers. The big ones want to keep you on their site. You can be successful on Facebook or Instagram but it is much tougher and the effort is often not worth the reward.

Pinterest is different, however. It is really at its core a visual search engine. So your content stays relevant on there much longer and it can be a great place to generate additional traffic for your blog.

Some people have cracked the code and generate 10’s of 1000’s of visitors from Pinterest Each month. You want to start leveraging it as soon as possible for your coffee blog.

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Micro-Niche Focus For A Coffee Blog

Like many large industries, coffee is probably too big to tackle all at once. A scattershot approach to content is going to leave you in limbo for quite a long time while the search engines try and figure out exactly what the focus of your blog is on.

That is why we break it down into micro-niches. In the past, the micro-niche was the website. Everything was tied into the little micro-niche.

Starting a blog about Kona Coffee? Then you would brand your website with Kona Coffee in the domain somewhere and everything would be geared around it.

It is still a viable tactic and you can do well with just the one micro-niche. But it is limiting. These days when I talk about micro-niches it is the type of content you are producing at any given time.

So let’s take the Kona coffee example I used earlier. A modern blogger would register a general coffee domain name and brand themselves more generally.

But they would start their blog in the Kona coffee micro-niche. The first 10 or 30 or 50 pieces of content for you coffee blog would be focused on just Kona coffee.

Once you are confident you have everything you want to write about taken care of you move onto something else in the coffee niche. Maybe Columbian coffee as the next niche to tackle.

I call them niche campaigns. You are essentially creating a marketing or promotion campaign around a micro-niche and putting it in its own section or category on your blog. The general theme needs to stay relevant to coffee.

The campaigns can be as varied as you want them to be. The only caveat that I adhere to is that I finish one campaign before starting another.

Micro-Niche Ideas

• Coffee Machines — This is probably the first thing people want to jump into then they start a coffee blog. Why? Because coffee machines can be expensive and you can make good commissions on them. It also makes it one of the most competitive in the coffee niche.
• Regional Coffee — Pick a region and go to work on everything about the coffee from the area. The history, the taste, how it’s grown, what makes it unique. When you finish with the content you should have the ultimate resource for that region. Then do it all over again with a new coffee-growing region.
• Specific Type Of Coffee — This niche is actually a bunch of niches, too many to list really. Basically, you take a specific type of coffee, sat French Roast and write every piece of content you can on the subject. Then expand to a new type of coffee, maybe mocha coffee. And so on. Lots of content for this niche.
• Coffee Presses — This is a small niche but a nice one to get started on. You will need to expand at some point to really get the most out of it. But you can still generate a ton of content on just these coffee presses alone.
• Coffee Pod And Espresso Pod Machines — The niche is an offshoot of coffee machines really. The popularity of coffee pods makes this an incredibly popular niche to tackle. You can review the machines as well as the pods themselves.
• Coffee Roasting And DIY Coffee — Another great option to start a coffee business, but you will need some decent upfront investment to buy a roasting machine and get your supply stream of raw coffee beans. Plus inventory and bagging costs. This is a more advanced business model.
• Coffee Mugs — This is kind of an offshoot of the coffee niche more than a micro-niche. But You can make money selling coffee mugs without a doubt. Coffee mugs that you can design yourself with your art or catchphrases or inspirational sayings is a great little niche for a blog. And Etsy would be a great place to sell your products.

You can also check out some of our coffee niche research here.

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Monetize Your Coffee Blog

In this section, I am going to take a look at some of the best ways to monetize your coffee blog. Ideally, you will want to add more than one of these.

But do it gradually because each one has its pluses and minuses.

A word about monetization in general. Do not worry about it for the first 3 to 6 months. You can add some basic monetization but you want to get your content out there first before you really try and monetize your site.

Have a solid content base makes it easier to link to your money pages and gives you an idea of what your audience expects of you. With that out of the way let’s have a look at a few ways to make money with your coffee blog, shall we?

Some Of The Best Online Coffee Business Ideas Include:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Building Your Own Coffee Shop Online
• Drop-Shipping Coffee Business
• Amazon Reseller or FBA Seller
• Roast and Sell Your Own Coffee Brand

Advertisements

Ads are the first thing everyone goes to when starting a new website. This is the wrong way to go about it, however. Ads are not going to generate any income on a brand new site and putting them up as soon as you can is just going to be a distraction.

I recommend waiting until you can join an ad network before even worrying about advertisements. Adsense is simply not worth it on its own. They have too many draconian rules that can get you banned permanently from their service.

What I have found is that waiting until you get 5-10 thousand page views a month and then joining a network like Ezoic really reduces the chance you breaking an Adsense rule and these premium networks actually pay a decent amount per 1000 views.

That 5 bucks you could earn from dropping ads in early is just not worth the risks. In short, it is safer and more profitable to wait.

Information Products

Information products are fantastic earners in certain niches. For the coffee niche, I don’t think they are really that great. There are certainly opportunities for creating one.

“How to roast and bag your own coffee beans” could certainly work as an info product. But you have to ask yourself what the size of the audience is for that type of product. Coffee just isn’t the type of niche that really lends itself well to an info product.

A niche like woodworking where you have multiple projects and techniques that people would pay to learn is an example of a niche that does very well with info products. You can read more on the woodworking niche in my article here.

Affiliate Marketing

This is where you want to start when you are just beginning your coffee blog. Affiliate marketing is the easiest and most efficient way to earn a nice income online with a blog. Add in adverts and info products later or just focus on affiliate marketing for the duration.

Starting is simple, find affiliate programs, write relevant content and put a link or 2 in that content.

Then let is rank of a few months and you have just built yourself a passive income. It is a simple concept but it takes a lot of work, patience and time to get the foundation of an affiliate marketing business started.

There are plenty of places to find coffee partner programs. We have quite a few resources on the subject on this site. You can start with our big list of affiliates. Every coffee program we could find at the time.

Search Analysis is the basis for all your content. Finding a keyword and just writing an article is simply not enough anymore. Many of the old ways of ranking for affiliate marketing are just plain outdated.

Focusing on a single keyword is still a great way to find a topic but only using exact match keyword research is laughable at this point. The great thing is you don’t need to spend 100 dollars a month to do research.

Google autosuggest and competitive analysis of the first page SERP’s is the best way to find topics to write about.

Long gone are the days of stuffing exact keywords into every paragraph of your content. In fact, this will hurt your ranking in the search engines more than help at this point. So keep it simple.

Write about what people are searching for.

“What is Kona Coffee”? Seems reasonable for a search query. It is something that someone looking for coffee online will probably search for.

But what is the search volume? I have no idea. But here is the thing, none of the expensive keyword tools have any idea either.

Your guess is as good as theirs. So just write the definitive article on Kona coffee and let the search engines find it and bring you the traffic.

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Sell Your Own Coffee

Shopify Store Front

I use Shopify as the example here because it is the most well-known product for building your own web-store. You can use it to sell your own coffee products if your bag and roast your own. Or you could use dropshipping to sell unique niche coffee.

However, I would not recommend coffee for a dropshipping business. Dropshipping really needs a huge mark-up to be successful and coffee rarely affords you that option. Can it be done? Sure but it is going to be a tough road and there are better and easier solutions.

Amazon and Amazon FBA

Another option for selling coffee is on Amazon and Amazon FBA. While it is certainly possible to sell coffee on Amazon you have to approach it as a niche product. Reselling wholesale coffee you picked up cheap at Wal-Mart is not going to cut it here.

What you need to find are small niche coffees that don’t have a ton of exposure and then sell them through Amazon. The trick is getting your products in front of people. Using a blog to promote them and then having Amazon deal with the inventory is the best solution for this.

Simply putting items up for sale on Amazon and hoping for the best is not going to really generate the sales you need to be successful in the coffee niche. You have to find an audience and send them to your products.

eBay

I don’t really think this is going to be a great place to sell coffee. But I thought I would add it in here. eBay doesn’t do really well with food products and there are much better options to get your coffee brand out there. I would pass on eBay for this particular niche.

Roast and Bag Your Own Coffee Brand

Creating your own coffee brand and producing and bagging the roasted coffee is a great idea for a coffee business. You can even use your blog to promote and sell your coffee directly.

This actually might be the most profitable way to expand a coffee business. instead of an information product, you sell the physical products.

Here is the rub though.

You need a lot of upfront capital to get started. Coffee roasters can run close to 10 grand for a very good one. Plus you need the beans delivered quite often and the bags and power and inventory and any manpower you need to hire.

It becomes a huge investment very quickly. If this is your goal I would start with a blog and affiliate marketing and build your way up to a full-blown coffee business. You can even use your blog to document your progress. Heck, there are even affiliate programs for coffee roasters, like this one.

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Related Questions

#1 Can I roast coffee in my garage? Maybe. I know that is not much of an answer but I’ll explain. Many people do roast their own coffee in their garages.

However, some municipalities may have codes or regulations against that type of thing. Find out if you are legally allowed and then decide if it is worth the risk.

But in general, you probably can without incident. You can smoke a whole side of beef in your back yard with some of the great smokers out there today. I don’t think roasting coffee is out of the questions.

One thing to keep in mind though, it is tough to sell your coffee if you don’t have a place to sell it. Build a blog up first before jumping into roasting your own beans unless you just want to do it for fun.

#2 How Long Does It Take To See Results For A Coffee Blog? As I mentioned in the article it will take months before you start to get decent traffic. There is little you can do to speed up the traffic from search engines, but you can supplement it with traffic from other sources.

Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, and coffee forums can help you get some traffic rolling in but the big numbers really need search results and that just takes time.

6 months to a year is a decent estimate on getting sizable traffic. And a lot depends on the quality of your content and your search analysis.

#3 Can You White Label Your Own coffee Brand? Absolutely. This is one of the best ways to expand your coffee business. White-Labeling your own branded coffee can help build your brand past that of a simple blog.

Using your blog to promote and sell your white-label coffee is actually one of the bests ways to increase the income of your coffee business. Just keep in mind that you need a sizable audience to make it worth the investment.

#4 Do I need a food permit to sell coffee? If it is coffee through affiliate marketing, then you don’t need a license since you will not be handling the product directly. The same applies to a white-label coffee business.

Someone else produces the coffee then puts your branding on it for you to sell. The answer changes somewhat if you are roasting and selling your own coffee. The answer is you might need a license.

The laws will differ from region to region and country to country. Are you selling coffee with milk or cream for example? You will probably need a food license.

Just selling bags of roasted beans? Maybe not but check with your local governing body for any licenses you might need.

#5 Is Coffee Selling A Good Business? It sure is. If this article hasn’t convinced you of that there are plenty of other resources online that you can check to find out if it is something that you would like to do. Something that you can make a real business out of.

But it is a great business for something ranging from affiliate marketing right up to a brick and mortar storefront.

#6 How much money do you need to open a coffee shop? This is a difficult one to answer, but it comes up all the time.

To answer it you would need to ask yourself a bunch of questions. Opening a coffee shop in New York City is going to cost a lot more than one in Mumbai. So there is no real way to give a concrete answer for this.

For an online business, it could actually range from a few hundred dollars to 10 thousand or more. A Coffee blog focused on affiliate marketing can be starting with a $100 bucks for web hosting and a few hundred more for some decent training in online marketing.

Want to roast your own beans and sell them online? You’ll need a few thousand at least to get started. Plus shipping and inventory space. It can add up quickly.

You can start a Youtube channel about coffee with your smartphone and a trip to Starbucks. So let’s just say there is a range of opportunities for all levels of startup investments.

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The Big Finish

We have covered a lot of ground here today. I won’t bore you with a traditional recap. Just some words of advice and encouragement.

Building a blog, even a bad one, takes a lot of time and hard work. A successful one takes a little luck and some good planning. You need to treat your blog like a business. Because that is exactly what it is.

Your coffee blog needs to be a professional website. Not a stuffy one, but it needs to look like someone actually cared when they were putting it together. That means you might need to buy a theme or a plugin.

But in the grand scheme of things a few hundred dollars of investment into a business start-up is a small price to pay.

The best way to spend that money, in my opinion, is with a little training. It will save you a ton of time, help you avoid a lot of mistakes, and generally make your business start a heck of a lot cleaner.

Don’t go it alone. Get the best learning tools and community to help you build your online dream. Check it out here.

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day.

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