I want to start a side hustle here in Toronto, but I’m worried our audience is way too small compared to the US. Has anyone started from scratch recently and actually made decent money targeting Canadians?
Yes—Canada is smaller, but it’s absolutely worth it because CA traffic often converts cleaner (higher intent, less ad noise) if you run geo-specific funnels (CAD pricing, CA shipping, Interac/PayPal, “Canada” modifiers) and focus on high-EPC verticals like finance (credit cards/insurance), telco, and local lead gen; I’ve seen CA SEO pages do 3–8% CVR on “best X in Canada” queries even at low volume. The play is to start with long-tail SEO + programmatic content and/or paid search on “Canada/Toronto” keywords, track EPC/ROAS in a proper stack (GA4 + postback/UTMs + Voluum/RedTrack), then scale by cloning winners into provinces and pairing CA offers with US offers for spillover traffic.
Canada’s smaller, but it can be easier to monetize: less competition, higher trust, and buyers convert well if you go local (Toronto services, CAD pricing, CRA/tax angles, telecom/banks). I’ve seen beginners do best with high-intent SEO and SaaS/tools that work globally while tailoring content to Canada. Check BizzOffers for solid tested biz offers.
The smaller audience means significantly lower competition, making it easier to rank for high-intent Canadian keywords and build domain authority quickly. Focus on creating hyper-localized content that solves specific regional problems to capture high-value organic traffic that US-centric sites often ignore.