Choosing your niche (important)

One of the things I end up having to do with a lot of new students to the Blog Marketing Academy is UNTRAIN them. 🙂

See, a lot of “blogging gurus” out there give a lot of the same advice. And honestly, if it worked well, we’d have a lot more bloggers makin’ bank. But, we don’t. The average income of a blogger is pretty much zero.

Case in point, when it comes to choosing a niche, the “gurus” will talk about keyword research, “follow your passion” and all this other yik-yak. All it does is confuse people… or bury them in the complexities of keyword research. Which is honestly about as enjoyable as dropping a bowling bowl on your toe.

The problem comes, really, in the entire framing of the word “blogging”. Because, the idea of “choosing your niche” then becomes the equivalent of asking what your topic is going to be.

Is this what you think niche means? Your topic? A determination of what your subject matter will be?

Let me ask you this…

When you go out into the real world and look at businesses you see or know of, do you think the founder of that business started out with the question “What should my NICHE be?”

Hehe… I giggle just imagining that. 🙂

No. Because, in the real world, a business owner isn’t thinking about their “topic”. They’re not thinking about what they’re going to write about.

No, a business owner thinks in terms of what they will DO for other people in exchange for some of their money. Period. End of story.

A blogger? Well, they write. That’s about it. And like any writer, they need a topic to write about. But, you know what? None of that gets ya paid.

First, you must ask yourself what your true intentions are. If you want to be a blogger and write posts and try to seek some recognition for that, then that’s a different thing than creating an online business where you will make real money.

A blogger needs a topic. A business owner needs customers.

And so…

Niche selection isn’t about your topic. It is about what you will DO.

Define yourself not by what you write about, but by what you DO for others. What will you deliver. What is the transformation that you enable in their lives? What’s the outcome?

Case in point, one of my Lab members is interested in copywriting. She was thinking of getting into “the copywriting niche”, and she was asking me if that was specific enough. Thoughts about niches being “too broad” or “specific enough” is classic symptom of thinking of this like a blogger and not a business owner. She was thinking of blogging about copywriting.

But, I asked her…

What did she want to DO for people? As opposed to what she wanted to talk about…

She wanted to offer copywriting services. She wanted to solve the problem for busy business owners who know they need content for their marketing but don’t have the time for it or don’t know how to create good content. Perfect! That’s a transformation. That’s an actual service she can sell. Then, her blog won’t talk “about copywriting”… instead it becomes much more strategic about simply attracting that clientele and moving them to action.

So, niche selection is about what you intend to DO. Not your topic or subject matter.

Talking about things doesn’t make you money. Only solving people’s problems does.

And I don’t care what other “blogging gurus” say about this. Honestly, that’s like being a guru of talking. Yay for them, I guess.

Around here, I want to focus on what actually works.

– David