What is a niche?

A niche is a defined group of people with shared interests or demographics. When you niche down, you're no longer trying to appeal to everyone and their interests. You’re catering to a specific group of people with similar commonalities.A niche is the overlap between your topic, you, and your audience.

• Your topic: The specific content you’re talking about, where you’re talking about it, and what you’re saying.

• You: Your personality, your past experiences, your knowledge, and your skills. How do you approach your topic? Interact with the topic in a way that shows who you are. ‍

• Your audience: Your audience informs you of what they need and how to best serve them. Where are they located? What feedback do they give you? Use that to help you refine yourself and your content.

A niche is about building trust with your audience. In order to grow you need to show your audience that you're an expert in your field — you need to give people a reason to listen to you. It’s much easier to do when you're tackling a smaller part of a given market, rather than trying to build credibility on a larger scale.

We're going to take you step by step through the process: how to find your niche, how to build trust with your audience, and how to capitalize on both.

Explore

Your first step is to explore all the possibilities of your content.  What are you interested in? What do you like talking about? What content makes you happy to create? What does your ideal audience look like? These questions will help you get started.

As you begin to explore, focus on areas in which your skills and passions overlap. Your skills will ensure that your content is bringing value to your audience, while your passion will keep you consistent. Start testing out different platforms to find what works best for you.

• Do you feel more comfortable on TikTok, creating short digestible videos?

• Are you more of a photographer, setting up shoots for Instagram?

• Or are you better at writing long-form blog posts?

Narrow it Down

Start with some easy-market research.  This can be as simple as a Google search or delving into social media groups. As you begin to post content, focus on what is and isn't working. What's gaining the most traction and why? Follow your positive feedback to give you inspiration and encouragement.Remember that your niche is not just your topic. It's your topic plus you. Your creativity when applied to a subject is always enough to differentiate yourself from the crowd. You just have to work at it and stay consistent.

Consistent Content Creation

Now that you have a niche, it's time to start creating content! This is where you get to show your audience what you're made of.Take your top performing content and find some follow-up content that could perform similarly.

• Example: If you've gotten positive feedback regarding a video on ways to save money when booking flights, gear your creative energy towards more budget friendly travel videos.

Whatever is working, double down on it. Choose a quantity over quality goal that will allow you to lower the expectations around your content, allowing you to create more. Try to set a goal for 20, 30, or 50 pieces of content. Once you've created those, you can step back and judge them.

The benefit of creating a huge amount of content is that you now have a library of public content to share and get feedback on. You can listen to your audience in real time as they help you refine your work even more.

Listen to your Audience

This brings us to the most crucial step of finding your niche: listening to your audience. The creator economy is a service based industry which means you have to make sure your content benefiting people.As you continue posting, you have an entirely free network of feedback to guide you in your career: your audience. What does your audience need? What can you provide for them?

Finding and solving problems for your community, creates an authentic opportunity for monetization. This is the real work of being creator: making quality content that benefits your audience. Continue to listen and follow where your audience guides you to go.

Expansion

If you’re worried about being trapped in one niche forever, don’t worry! Once you’ve built trust with your audience, it’s a lot easier to diversify your content. When you have a track record solving problems for your community, you can experiment with showing them new sides to your content. A lot of your audience will want to follow where you go, because they are loyal to you and your opinions!In good time, you can branch out even more, creating content for other interests of yours either on the same platform or with a different account.