You don’t FIND a Niche. :-)

As you might imagine, I get a lot of questions about “finding your niche”. A lot of people confused on what niche to blog in… or how to “narrow down your niche”.

Ugh.

I honestly hate the topic. I know, I know… I shouldn’t say that because it happens to be one of the most common problems for my market. And I totally understand. But, at the same time, it just gets so… psychological. It’s almost like people are waiting for a niche to jump out and smack them in the face with a “this is the one!” sign. That never happens.

One doesn’t FIND a niche. One simply decides what their niche will be.

Besides, finding a niche is just… well… stupid. It’s the wrong mindset.

Instead, you should find a problem and address that problem. Find a problem people are having… and you solve it for them.

Sure, work that backwards and it puts you into a niche. But, at the same time, this mindset of “choosing a niche” is too much like choosing a topic. Topics don’t make money. Solving problems does.

And how passionate you are about it doesn’t matter two s**ts..

Profit isn’t in the passion. It’s in the need… and the popularity.

“Follow your passion” is just dumb advice that make-money bloggers spew, but it means nothing. There’s a reason that THEY are teaching you how to make money. It’s because it’s a real market.

A niche is an audience… not a topic.

A niche is a problem in need of a solution… and people who want that solution… and are willing to pay for  it… and this is a huge run-on sentence but you get the point. 😉

Here’s another myth, BTW…

You don’t necessarily have to spin your wheels trying to “narrow down your niche”.

I mean, a couple issues ago I talked about 8-figure company sending out a free newsletter called the Morning Brew. Their niche? News.

Or… go to a big blog like Life Hacker. Their niche? Uhhh… life? I dunno because they have content about damn near anything over there.

In both cases, the niche is about as broad as it gets. One talks about business news. The other is… life. But, what you notice is that both of them solve a problem for the audience they serve.

Morning Brew curates news, makes it non-boring, and convenient as hell. And Lifehacker… if you notice, every blog post revolves around solving a specific problem. I get Lifehacker posts showing up in my Google searches all the time because the posts provide what I was looking for. Yet, the site as a whole is actually pretty all over the place in terms of niche.

Now, a site like Lifehacker does come with a caveat. Their market (in terms of a group of people) is so all over the place that it would be a very difficult site to monetize through direct product offers. That’s why it is an advertising-driven site. It has to be.

Anyway, some more thoughts on niche…

Your passion about it going in only matters to a certain extent. And keep in mind… once you find yourself making money in something, I’m sure you can learn to be passionate about it pretty quickly. 🙂

Not a single “how to make money blogging” blogger went into it thinking how passionate they are about teaching others how to make money. Most sorta fell into it by doing other things. Hell, I ran a tech blog for 10 years before I ever wrote the first blog post about monetization.

The motto…

Your passion doesn’t really matter that much. And you don’t “find” a niche by some magical introspection of what you’re interested in and wading around in a bunch of keyword tools.

Just ask…

What do people WANT? What’s the problem they want to solve?

Real, concrete problems.

Something tangible that they really want.

Finding a niche isn’t done by looking inward. Your eyes need to be firmly OUT THERE. Finding the demand. Looking at what people want. And then doing that.

And remember, there’s value in curation, too. You don’t have to be the “guru”. A lot of people avoid niches because they don’t feel like they’re an expert. You don’t have to be. There are other ways to provide value to a market than being a “guru”.