Is it possible to run such small blogs profitably even in 2023
yep! I've had one of these 2-3 years ago, I sold it last year and the new owner has improved it and it's ranking for more keywords (I don't know how he found those keywords, though because I struggled to find anything meaningful) and gets more traffic than I did.
So, small blogs still work, but...
What are the limitations of owning such blog ?
that's the thing, that there are limitations! The biggest one is probably the keywords, you don't have a lot of them to target, which means little traffic and little money.
But there's an upside to going with small niches: not many people go into it. If you find a small niche (let's say, one that only has 20-30 keywords maximum that have at least 10 visitors a month) and you don't see any affiliate site ranking in top 10 for any of those keywords you can be the 1st to create one (on an EMD, too since EMDs have made a comeback into google's graces) and dominate the SERPs for years if no one finds this niche or can't be bothered to get into it because of the low traffic volumes.
Of course, the trick is monetizing such blogs because obscure niches = less monetization options. When I owned this site I was promoting an ebook and for this niche (crafts & hobbies) it worked great because it was teaching people the ins and outs of that particular craft, but if you don't have an ebook you'd need to find something better (I don't think Adsense would work very well because of the little traffic, you'd have to find really high paying keywords and hope for insane CTRs of 20-30% to make a good profit)... But the thing is that you can find a lot of PLR ebooks on dead sites, grab one of those for like $7 or $4.95 or whatever the cost of the membership is and sell it on your small blog for $19.99 or something and even at a 5% conversion rate, if you manage to get 200-300 visitors a month to that website you'd make about $200 / month in ebook sales, which is way better than Adsense.
But anyway, I digress... the point is that small blogs can still work now with the comeback of EMDs and if you manage to find even 1 small niche a month for which there's no affiliate site in google's top 10 you can make some decent dough, quietly for years. Set up 10-15 such sites a year and even at a $50 revenue per site per month, that's $500+ per month in easy money. It's not much, but not everyone wants to get rich off SEO, some of us are happy with just $200-300 a month
And it's really easy money because you set up 10-12 content pages once, set the domains to auto-renew for the next 5 years and you never touch those sites ever again (unless they fall off the SERPs)
