Last week I wrote about using YouTube to build an audience but there’s a question that comes before deciding where you’re going to find that audience…
What are you actually going to talk to them about?
This is where we’re usually told to “pick a niche”, which tends to mean finding a profitable market and wedging ourselves into one corner of it. Personal finance, dogs, gardening, weight loss…Whatever the latest research says people are buying. And I’ve never been entirely convinced by that approach.
Obviously, there needs to be a market for whatever you’re doing if you want to make money from it. I’m not suggesting you devote the next five years to becoming the world’s leading authority on something nobody else cares about. But I do think the idea of a niche is changing.
There is now an almost infinite amount of perfectly competent information available about almost anything. If I want ten tips for growing tomatoes, planning a city break or writing a sales page, I can have them in seconds.
So the information itself isn’t necessarily the reason I choose to follow one person rather than another.
The person is.
Think about the newsletters you actually open, the YouTube channels you return to or the people whose recommendations you trust. Chances are there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other people covering the same broad subject. You choose that particular person because you like the way they think about it.
Perhaps they’re funny or obsessive about research. Maybe they try things and tell you what really happened rather than regurgitating what everyone else says. They might have decades of experience or it could simply be that they’re gloriously opinionated.
That’s what I mean by the niche of personality. And I think it’s going to become considerably more valuable as AI makes generic information easier and easier to produce.
So instead of starting with:
What’s a profitable niche?
I’d start with:
What could I talk about in a way that nobody else can quite replicate?
Your answer might lie in something you’ve done for years and barely think of as expertise any more. It could be an obsession your friends are sick of hearing about or it may come from the strange combination of things you’ve done in your life. And it doesn’t mean choosing one subject and promising never to stray outside it.
Your niche can be the lens through which you look at things, rather than a tiny box you have to stay inside. Of course, once you’ve found that, you still need to discover whether anybody else is interested. That’s where research comes in.
Google Trends is still one of my favourite free places to start. Put in the subjects you’re interested in, compare them and follow the related searches. You’re not asking Google to choose a niche for you. You’re looking for the places where your interests collide with other people’s.
https://trends.google.com/trends
SparkToro approaches it from the other direction. It lets you investigate an audience and see what they follow, watch, read and talk about. There’s a limited free version and it’s particularly useful when you know roughly who you’re interested in reaching but haven’t quite worked out what they want from you.
There’s also a completely different kind of research you can do.
The free VIA Character Strengths Survey is worth taking, but don’t just read your results and forget about them. Look at whether those characteristics show up in the people and businesses you’re drawn to, and whether you’re allowing enough of them to show up in your own work.
https://www.viacharacter.org/account/register
I also like Buffer’s guide to building a personal brand because it gets into positioning and what you want to be known for, rather than simply telling you to choose some brand colours and take a new photograph.
https://buffer.com/resources/how-to-build-a-personal-brand
And if writing is going to be part of how you build your audience, have a look at Mailchimp’s guide to voice and tone and Buffer’s guide to finding your brand voice. You don’t need to manufacture a personality for the internet. The most useful part is recognising the characteristics that already make you sound like you and deliberately keeping them.
https://mailchimp.com/resources/establish-your-voice-and-tone
https://buffer.com/resources/brand-voice-on-social-media
Your TED talk this week is David Kelley’s How to Build Your Creative Confidence, It’s only about twelve minutes long and his argument is that creativity isn’t something bestowed on a special group of creative people, it’s something we can all recover and develop.
Finding a niche isn’t only a data exercise. It takes a certain amount of confidence to stop copying what appears to be working for everybody else and decide that your experience, interests and particular way of seeing things might actually be an asset.
So by all means research markets, find out what people are buying and look for opportunities. Just don’t research yourself out of the equation.
Because the most interesting niche you have may be the one nobody else can occupy.
You.