Do You Need a Niche?

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Avatar for JonicaBradley
3 years ago

When I was first starting my journey as a professional blogger, defined as a person who earns money from blogging, I read everything I could find on how to become a successful professional blogger.

Almost everything I read told me to find my niche.

I did a quick Google search to find the best definition of niche.

Screenshot from Google Dictionary

For our purposes today I want to focus on definition 2.

2.

1. a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.

  1. "he believes he has found a niche in the market"

adjective

  1. denoting products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.

    "other companies in this space had to adapt to being niche players"

Many of the things I read relegated "niche writing" to the purview of copywriting. Copywriting is used for sales.

But other blogging how-to articles used the same advice.

"Find your niche."

A niche is essential to marketing. And if you want to become a successful professional blogger, you need to market yourself.

I'm terrible at sales and marketing.

I'm especially terrible at marketing myself. It feels tacky. I'm not sure if this is because my mom was a lawyer. I remember growing up hearing about how tacky "ambulance chasers" were. Those are the people that follow the ambulance to the hospital to hand out their business cards.

I have a vague memory of my mother saying advertising legal services was frowned upon.

By whom? No idea.

I don't really think that's why I have trouble promoting myself. I think it has more to do with self-confidence. Self-worth. And the fact that in my eyes, my life is relatively boring.

The "experts" tell us to find our niche by asking ourselves what were are most passionate about. What skills do we have? What kind of knowledge do we have to impart?

And then they want us to choose just one thing.

But what if you are passionate about many things? What if you have a "vast amount of knowledge about trivial things," (as my dad used to say about himself and about me, too)?

I know a little about a lot of things. I know a lot about many things. Anything I've ever had a passing interest in, I've studied. Sometimes in-depth but sometimes just enough to not sound like an idiot talking about it.

I'm passionate about a lot of things, too. I have a hard time just picking one.

Homesteading

Survival skills

Goats

Milk Goats

Cooking

Film

Books

TV (well, TV I can stream because I hate commercials)

History

Religion

The history of religion

Politics

Philosophy

And much much more!

Which to choose? How to start?

I've figured some things out.

Another oft-repeated refrain is, "know your audience."

license free from Unsplash

Just imagine if this audience was suddenly subjected to The Magic Flute by Mozart instead of the football game they paid to see.

That would be one unhappy audience. And they likely would never again pay for tickets to that stadium.

Writing is the same.

Imagine you are a devout Christian. And you want to write about all the ways in which you feel Christ is King.

Imagine further that your audience is primarily Hindi, Muslim, or Jewish.

Your story would fall on flat ears.

One of the things I've figured out is that it is more important to know your audience than to find your niche.

I write differently depending on the platform on which I'm blogging. My voice is different from platform to platform but still distinctly me.

On Medium for example I tend to go deeper into my personal essays. I let more out. I vent a bit more. I curse much much more.

Here on read.cash I tend to keep in mind my audience is likely to have English sad their second language. I keep in mind we are from entirely different cultures and entirely different parts of the world. Some things need more explanation here.

On Medium, I tend to be much more precise in my grammar and language. The editors there are much more critical than moderators here.

There is a great deal of competition on Medium. Lots of stories covering similar subjects. A writer has to find a way to stand out. Excellence in writing is an absolute must.

My subject matter is different, too. On Medium my essays tend to be political or involve social justice somehow. Or in the publication I help edit, The Bad Influence, I mostly write introductions and roundups for our Thrifty Words Challenge.

It's kind of like PromptlyJonica, but writers must write either exactly 50 words or exactly 100 words in response to the prompt. It can be very challenging.

How do writers figure out who their audience is?

First, the writer must establish an audience. These days, many writers use social media to get a following. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTock are all common social media platforms where a writer can introduce themselves and their writing. Also, Quora and Reddit.

There are many more blogging platforms that pay for writing, but they are more obscure, less well known. I figured out is best to have a following and then promote some of the more obscure platform blogs

Writers will find their audience by trial and error. Your audience will let you know whether your writing is or isn't for them. The stadium of football fans will boo the opera singers right off the field.

When I began my professional blogging career I believed I could only write to one type of audience. I could only write in one niche.

FALSE!

As I mentioned above, I have many passions. I have gained enough followers from different cultures, different walks of life, different countries that I can find an audience for almost any niche.

Other writers are different to me, however. Other writers are in different places on their writing journey.

So, to answer the titular question, "Do you need a niche?" I answer you don't need one, but it helps.

It also really helps to actually have a solid grip on what you are writing about. That's where the passion part comes in.

I speak from personal experience when I say it is incredibly difficult to write about something for which you have no interest, no passion.

Not only is it difficult to write about it, but it is also more difficult to learn about it. And readers call always tell when writers are half-assing it. When they don't care. When they don't know enough.

There's an expression for that in my country. "Phone it in."

"During the early 1930s, a popular joke among theater actors alluded to having a role that was so small it was possible to call on the phone, rather than appear on the stage in person." - from Grammarist.com

Good writing can't be phoned in. I don't care if you have the perfect money-making niche (Bitcoin Cash?), if you aren't passionate about it, if you don't have knowledge about it, you most likely won't write well in that niche.

In conclusion, finding a niche is helpful. You can have more than one niche. Knowing your audience is critical. You can have more than one type of audience. Gaining a following is important, too.

I'll write more about how to gain a following in another article.

Screenshot of Google Dictionary - Google’s English dictionary is provided by Oxford Languages.

All other images license free from Unsplash

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3 years ago

Comments

Niche and audience, two things for which we are new in this world of blogging that is somewhat difficult to assimilate and to achieve.

I have been writing here in read since last month, I was encouraged because I started writing in Spanish. But I see that I am not progressing at all, that is, I am not seen by other users. A friend here recommended that I write in English, or at least use a translator. It's what I did today on his channel to see how it goes.

I speak and write in Spanish and most of the articles I read are in English and I translate them. Hopefully they would also give me the opportunity and read my articles.

I still don't have a niche or audience, I'm writing mostly about my experiences.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

There are many others here who write each article in both. Maybe you could write your article in Spanish and translate it and have both the Spanish and the English.

I don't have a niche either.

Writing about our own experiences is called personal essay.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

The best advice I have always held onto is simply, "write what you know." Often times if you focus mainly on that, it winds up that you are writing in an "unintended niche" of sorts. Could be money, politics, life...and all of those things intertwined together. Because when you write what you know you are simply writing YOU. And regardless of the topic, the "you" is a part of everything you are writing about. Your ideas, your thoughts, your perspective, your own introspection.

So to me, one's niche is not necessarily about a topic or a thing, although it certainly often becomes that. It's your take on a topic that is the niche sometimes.

I say it often about ghost stories. Many have been told a million times, and it's the same story mostly. But how one tells the story is what makes each one both similar AND unique at the same time.

$ 0.04
3 years ago

Do you need a niche? Hmmm?? I am not sure if anyone has ever written this. In other words, maybe somebody else did what I did so I'm not that original. But I'll tell you my story because it's what happened to me.

When I first started blogging there were a bazillion articles on finding your niche. It discouraged me because I don't really have an expertise or a passion in a particular area. Nevetheless, since the blogging platform was FREE, I started blogging anyway and wrote about WHATEVER!! My posts were about history, movies, food, opinion pieces on current events, etc. In other words, I wrote about what I knew to write about.

I wondered if I could monetize my content. To my surprise, Google approved the blog for Ad Sense and Amazon approve me as an affiliate so that I could place their ads on my blog.

As time passed, I found another blogger who wrote about ANYTHING! In fact, her blog's tagline was something to the effect “500 words about whatever I want to write about.” This blogger had subscribers and lots of people would leave comments. Her blog posts would be a topic that a lot of people wanted to talk about. She published on a wide range of topics. Even though my blog did not seem to be attracting as many visitors as that blog, I was still motivated and inspired and I decided to keep publishing my “no niche” blog. HOWEVER, I created niche blogs also for food, entertainment, culture & lifestyle, etc.

Because I started republishing my content at sites like YAHOO Voices and Medium, I learned about the "canonical link" which basically allows you to publish your content in various places on the web and not get penalized for "duplicate content" or flagged as a spammer or plagiarizer. Let's face it! You can not plagiarize yourself! 😄

So making use of the canonical link, I took the content at my “no niche” blog and started moving it over to the blogs set up for the specific niches. You'll never if something works if you don't try it. I applied for Ad Sense approval. To my surprise, I managed to get Google Ad Sense approval for my “niche blogs” as well. 😲😲

I guess the lesson I learned “accidentally” from my experience is:
~ Why earn advertising revenues for one blog when you can earn advertising revenue for more than one blog? 😉😉

$ 0.05
3 years ago

Right there with you. You really can't plagiarize yourself. lol. If I had more places to publish without penalty I would do it as well. Why NOT allow other eyes to see something they may not see if it is only published in one place? And why not be able to capitalize more on it if you can?

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Yes. All of this is true.

$ 0.01
3 years ago

As I am a new writer here in the platform, I have found that sharing personal experiences resonates well with other readers, probably because they can relate to it and connections form. Even better, the audience suggests what topics or stories they expect next which makes it "easy" for the writer.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

I love the quotation marks around "easy"

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3 years ago

It is necessary to know the interest of your audience,in this way you can understand to write on what subject.choosing a particular niche is also necessary to be focused but we can also choose as much as we have power to work on.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

Yes!

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I loved your post and it also served me well. I am the type of person who likes so many things and I don't know which niche to choose, what I have thought is to write about a group of things that I like, such as flowers, poetry, opinion articles and personal stories. With regard to knowing my audience is something that still costs me a lot. Well, I also wrote on other platforms, but what I do is copy and paste the same content in all, my question is, is it okay to do that?

$ 0.03
3 years ago

If you wrote it you own it. So. yes. However, online it is really bad for Search Engine Optimization to have duplicate content. So always provide links to your work. Say something like, "This work previously appeared here, here, and here." This also removes any doubt about plagiarism.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

now I've just learn something new one. Thank you for sharing this article of yours :>

$ 0.03
3 years ago

I need to find my niche, I have so many interest too just like you and I'm passionate about all of them, will that work out? Someone once told me a jack of all trades is no trader at all. I'm a bit conflicted, I can not stick to only one passion when I have other options

$ 0.03
3 years ago

So in your case it would be vital to find your audience. I am off the opinion people who are multi talented do much better in life than those with the talent for only one thing. When the zombies take over the world, nobody is going to need accountants unless the accountant can also be plumbers and carpenters.

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3 years ago

I am not sure if you mean it as a joke to drive home a point but I do have this believe that Zombies will take over the world sometime in the future.. .hhaha On a more serious note, thanks for the advice, I get your point, it makes a lot of sense

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I like the fact you mentioned been considerate of others when you write🤔, like you rightly said we are from diffently culture, race ....that should be put into consideration when we write.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

I think a niche is important, but most importantly you have to be yourself and write about things you care about or are passionate about. You can't expect people to read your stuff if you don't care about it yourself!

$ 0.03
3 years ago

As I stated in the article.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Hi guys. I'm having trouble giving y'all a thumbs up and a tip. I can reply, but I can't do the rest. I'm sorry.

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3 years ago

The post was great 👍 even though it wasn't what I expected 😃.

But love you it though

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3 years ago

Yes..niche is important but the best is your audience. Once they got to know you and how you write, they can always stay waiting for your posts. So, when you builds up your niche, you can be able to have good audience and to build them up means you have to deliver something quality.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Agreed.

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3 years ago

I had the same problem when I was starting out, I watched so many writing videos and they all said the same thing "FIND YOUR NICHE" for a beginner that is confusing especially when you don't have any writing experience. Your article is really good for people looking to get into writing. NICE ONE

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I'm working on a series. If my mess of a life allows me to follow through.

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3 years ago

Lol, I have been there just go through with it and do your best, being a writer isn't easy but when you know you're doing something you love no matter how busy or tired I am When I am typing on my laptop or Phone. It really is peaceful and amazing.

I would love to see your series so please try your best because I will be waiting 😊

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Here I don't think it matters as much, but other platforms is required for sure. Here it is more the audience I feel.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

There are niches here. Crypto, crypto gaming, nft, BCH, investing, the love life of @MarcDeMesel, and so forth.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Oh there are lots of niches, especially people going after tips from Marc, I choose not to be confined here and just write fun nonsense.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I am not a professional blogger but I have my own travel blog with my own domain at https://www.itravelrox.com. But I am still new on Read.Cash so my niche here is just about personal life. :)

$ 0.03
3 years ago

Do you earn money from your writing? If you do, you are a professional.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I earned a few some of the articles I write for others like a ghostwriter.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

That counts as professional.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I think what we are doing is a niche anyway ... until global adoption

$ 0.00
3 years ago

I agree there, too.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Thank you so much dear. This is really informative for me. And i am waiting for the next part about how to gain. Hope it comes soon.

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3 years ago

A great article. Finding your niche places you in a good reach a wider spectre of audience. It is a foothold on attraction.

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3 years ago

Great to read like this,learning more and more from reading more deeper and understand the content can lead us to know things we need to know mostly on like me.than. Thank you

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3 years ago

As a freelancer I know how important a niche can be into classifying your topic effectively, I like the way you wrote it out. This is helpful to the new users that would come

$ 0.03
3 years ago

Thanks ma'am. Its always good to find one's niche. I learnt from this article.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

I'm always happy when I can provide some kind of value.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Thank you for this Jonica. This will be a great help to us who are still learning our ways in blogging. ❤

$ 0.03
3 years ago

I'm working up a series of articles about blogging. All from my own experience, of course.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Great! I look forward to reading and learning from them :) Thank you

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Thanks for this awesome discussion about niche and audience. I learned a lot from this article. So, it doesn't matter that you have more than one niche since you have diverse audience. Although, it needs to know more about the audience.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

yup.

$ 0.00
3 years ago

Niche definitely helps because in a site, I wrote Paranormal blogs and everybody seemed to be loving them... I'm kind of okay with those because I'm obsessed with the other world, but surprisingly, when I was writing comedy related posts, they also did well... I guess visibility depends on the writer regardless of what they choose :) have a wonderful day

$ 0.03
3 years ago

That's where the following comes in.

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3 years ago

I am still studying my niche I love to write true stories that gives lesson. That is my first niche and then reviews. I found out some people here loves these topics.

$ 0.03
3 years ago

So you have a niche and an audience. Yay!

$ 0.00
3 years ago