In this article you’ll learn everything you need to know about niching down, what it means, why its important, and how to do it!
We’ll even cover how it will benefit your business, and give you real-life examples and action steps for you to do this with your business.
When you search for marketing advice, the most common thing that shows up is the concept of ‘niching down’ or ‘finding your niche’. It can even be referred to as just ‘niche’.
Don’t worry I’ve gotcha covered! Today we’re going to talk about all things niching down! You’ll learn 3 easy steps to help apply this to your blog.
Read on to find out…
One of the most important concepts to soak in is:
Copy(a.k.a. content) that tries to speak to everyone winds up connecting with no one.
-Bianca Pitts
Confused by the term ‘niche down’?
I wouldn’t be surprised if you are, it’s a common term thrown around by so many in the marketing industry, but there is confusion even among the ‘experts’.
The problem stems from online ‘gurus’ shelling out often vague advice, missing clear direction and actual action steps that you can apply to your business.
Let’s explore what is a niche? What it means, and how you can achieve it.
A niche is the profitable segment of any market with a focused audience who is looking for a solution to their problem.
This is where you come up with a solution and promote it to that niche.
It can be further segmented into more categories such as sub-niche, and under that sub-niche, there could be more sub-niches to cover.
For instance:
Industry -Pet
Niche —Dog Care
Sub niche —Dog Care > Dog Training
Sub-Sub-niche (Niched Down) —Dog Care > Dog Training > Yellow Lab Training
Every industry has a niche & a sub-niche in which you can easily get into if you are knowledgable in the subject!
This process i’ve just showed you is based on a time-honored process called STP, i’m going to walk you thru what STP is and how to use it.
I keep it simple, so don’t panic, I’m going to explain everything.
Basic Marketing Teaches A Niche As a Process Called STP (don’t run away yet!)
STP is the basic marketing process broken down into 3 steps.
Segmentation– (Choose Your Niche)Pin Down Who Your Customer Is & Their Struggles.
Targeting (Niche Down)- Narrowing down who your talking to. Focusing on a particular group (this is the niching down bit)
Positioning (Know Your Audience)- How you ensure you are offering exactly what your customer needs, knowing exactly what they are feeling, thinking, and why they need you. In other words how you will provide value, which dictates how you will appear in your target customers mind. How you make yourself unique, and different from your competitors, and if possible how do you make your competitors irrelevant.
Now, this process is explained and used differently depending on who you ask.
I created 2 processes that are based on the science behind the STP Process.
When you’re discovering your niche, you need a more broad overarching version of the STP, so I created The Niche Discovery Process.
The second process I created, Match Your Marketing Process, is specifically for content/product creation, this is a much more condensed and shorter process to help you optimize your content and products for your audience.
Here is the overview of The Niche Discovery Process.
There are 4 steps to finding your niche.
This article is focused on the 3rd step. If you need to learn the other 3 steps, no worries, i’ve linked them below to make it easy for ya!
If you haven’t checked out Discover Your Why I highly recommend doing so, readers have seen a 42% increase in success when following The Discovery Process steps in order!
Here’s an example of this process
Here is an example of The Niche Discovery Process, It’s Important for you to see the entire process to help you understand the niche down step, the 3rd step in this overall process is the niche down step:
Most bloggers and instructors only teach the 1st step when trying to nail down your blog niche, which is why so many struggle to get traction and traffic.
The step we will focus on in this article is niching down.
Not understanding that choosing your angle is crucial to creating content that resonates with your reader.
Because this is step is often missed, bloggers find themselves slaving away on content and can’t figure out why no one is buying their products or following their blog.
We’re going to cover exactly how to figure out who are you going to teach, and what do they need help with?
It’s often a confusing concept to apply to your specific topic, luckily you’re about to learn action steps that will help you niche down properly and start growing your traffic!
Niching Down means having a clear focus on who your ideal customer is and creating a marketing message that matches.
If we try to talk to everyone, we will end up reaching no one.
Our message will not be as impactful, and our ability to help others, sell products, or have any effect at all will diminish.
Think about it like this, if you were standing in front of a crowd of 100 people, it would be tricky to figure out exactly what to say that could help everyone right?
What if you found out there were 25 women that were struggling with getting their children to eat anything other than chicken nuggets, now that is quite specific.
All of a sudden, when you speak on that, 75 people tune out, walk away, or put in headphones, however, those 25 are hanging on your every word, and pushing thru the crowd to get closer to you, hear what you have to say and rustling around for their phone to record what you say so they don’t miss a thing.
These are your people, 25 may not seem as AH-mazing as 100 but these 25 are engaged, need your help, & will buy what you’re selling because they actually need it.
That’s the key here! If you spent all your time trying to woo the 100 you might end up with a sale or 2, but your 25 dedicated audience is much more likely to return, share with others and buy more of your products if you’re selling a 9-dollar ebook you only need to sell 10 to make your first 100 bucks! 10 people, you can totally find 10 people!
Once you made more products, perhaps now you have printables or courses, 100 course sold to 20 people and you’ve just made 2,000.
Not even counting affiliate marking, which would be you sharing helpful products from others that would help your customer with their particular struggle, when that customer buys you get a kick back, that can be a huge boost to your income, and its all stemmed from engaged readers, as well as ad revenue if they are coming back to read your helpful posts you will get money from that as well! There are so many ways to make money blogging!
No matter which monitization strategies you choose, having a engaged audience is essential for any of them to work.
You can see that gathering a focused narrow tribe is essential to any business.
The simple answer is who is running a business and wants to make money.
Learning how to niche down can apply to all topics, business models and can be applied to all platforms.
Some examples that this method I teach will apply to all of these frequently asked questions:
How to niche down a blog? How to niche down on etsy? How to niche down on social media? How to Niche Down on Youtube? How to Niche down in copywriting? As well as how to narrow down a niche? Which is just another way of saying niche down!
All of these steps i’m about to go over can be applied to any platform, as well as your copywriting, content, ads, videos, social media and even podcasts!
Before we get into the weeds of niching down, we need to go over the basics.
To me, a niche is more than just a topic, it’s also an angle, and a purpose.
How to choose a blog niche involves deciding what you want to talk about but the more important step is nailing down your focus or angle.
Nailing Down Your Angle and Purpose are the most often missed steps that leads to a lot of money and time wasted.
A niche is basically the subject you will help someone with, you have to figure out who you will teach, and what you will teach them, before you can decide how you will teach them.
So many bloggers miss this part of the process, let’s make sure you’ve got this!
Missing who your reader is and why your reader need you is what leads to content and ad’s that don’t convert, or make money.
There are so many bloggers that get these confused with knowing your audience, when to me know your audience is about how you will help your audience not who they are.
I think that is where alot of the confusion come from.
Lucky for you i’ve had to learn the hard way so that you don’t have to!
Let’s cover everything you need to know about how to niche down your blog.
Most think of finding your niche/topic as just figuring out your topic, such as gardening or cooking, but in reality, it is actually so much more than that, I’ve broken the process into 4 easy steps.
I recommend looking over all 4 steps whether you’re just now thinking about starting a blog or you’ve been blogging for years.
Niching Down is just a term that means narrowing your focus of a subject, for example instead of just selling hair care for women, sell hair care for women with curly hair, that struggle with frizz.
I teach the niche down process differently than most however, because when I first heard of this term nicheing down, my brain hurt.
I struggled to figure out exactly how to apply that to my chosen niche, was I niched down too much or not enough?
Which lead to many hours wasted researching, testing, and stress.
Low and behold I finally discovered a thought process that worked for me, and I decided to teach it to others that way, for those like me that struggle with the concept.
So for me this worked best broken down into a simple 3 step process.
Here’s the process that walks you thru how to know who you are talking to, so there is no confusion.
I’ve also got a FREE mini-course that shows you exactly how to go thru this process step-by-step.
This isn’t always applicable, I have examples below to help, but if it is applicable it is essitienal to nail down, this will help you focus in more and give more daily life experiences in your copywriting, which will help your content resonate.
Here is a few real-life examples of ads- one that targets a certain gender and one that doesn’t and you can get an idea of why it matters.
Car Insurance>Doesn’t matter the gender Focuses On Drivers In Segments (however they do different ads targeted at different groups of people, some focus on women, men, parents, and even grandparents, so they often will target different people within their market including their age and stage)
Make Up Pillow> Focuses On Women Worried About Aging/Wrinkles
You can see with those 2 examples the difference between choosing a gender or instead focusing on segmentation, both are ok, just ensure you do what’s right for your niche.
This can be applied many ways but the most common way is:
Experience Level in your subject, beginner, intermediate expert?
Age: Basic Demographics, under 20, Millennials, middle age, 50+, all of these stages require different help/advice, and have varying needs.
Interest Level: Have they just heard of this, dabble a bit, occasionally, daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc.
Life Events: Married, Single, Divorced, Widowed, Pregnant, Newborn, Teenager, College Bound Kids, Empty Nester, Retired, etc.
This list is not exhaustive there are other things you can target, but these are the most common, and you can mix and match or leave out any or all of them.
Here are some examples of using these life stages in your niche down process:
I’ve got a full list of over 400+ Niche Ideas in my FREE Mini-Course!
This life event component can be used with the experience level as well, lets say your industry is crafting, you want to talk to women who are in their 30’s no kids, and are new to crafting, that are newly weds, maybe all you create are things for newlyweds to put up in their houses, you can always pivot and later teach others to make these things to sell. Your Niched Down Niche is: Home Decor Crafting for newlywed women in their 30’s.
You might wonder, why does it matter if she has kids or if she is in her 30’s, here is why- oftentimes, your style, how much you’re willing to spend, the time you can commit, and many other variables are different based upon your age and stage in life, your income is different and the way you speak changes, which means the way you read & what you read changes.
Think back to when you were 18, how you behaved, spoke, thought, and your style/habits, now look at you today, how different are you? Have any of those things changed?
For most of us the answer is yes.
What we are interested in now, is vastly different from what we would have found interesting then.
This comes into play in every aspect of your business, from copywriting, marketing, product design, and even branding.
That is why it’s so important to look at this niche from the whole picture.
The discovery process walks you thru each part at the end you have a whole picture!
You’ve chosen your industry/Niche, now it’s time to get more focused.
Who are you talking to?
If your industry is Parenting, are you talking to the mom struggling to sleep with a newborn or the mom who has a sassy teenager?
Figuring out exactly who you are talking to is the key to success, if you just threw out some parenting advice randomly like:
make one meal they love a week to make them feel special…
That is not going to help either mom, they are going to keep scrolling searching for the answer.
You want to BE that answer!
If your niche is the newborn mom struggling to sleep your advice is more focused, you could say:
swaddling during naps helps the baby feel secure and sleep longer.
Now that is going to actually help the newborn mom, it will resonate with her and she will remember your advice, try it and will return for more, chances of becoming a paying customer go up!
If you’d chosen the mom of the sassy teenager your advice could be:
Resist responding with a snide remark, instead offer a diffusing comment, followed by fresh instruction-for example: “Thank you for your opinion”, “A more appropriate response is ‘sure mom I’ll shut the tv off right now and come help!”.
Now in real life I use something similar when either of my kids currently 4 and 9 yrs old, say something untoward, I simply tell them ‘try again’ and they are to repeat what they said but more polite or in a better tone, it really works wonders I tell ya!
But anywho! As you can see these 2 pieces of helpful copy are extremely focused and hand-picked to fit those niche needs versus the original blanket statement that really helped no one.
This process is covered more in-depth in Discover your why.
Here is the basic run down just to make it easier on ya!
Selecting Your Sub-Category can be tricky, especially the way most teach the niching down process.
Now that you have a general idea of who you’re talking to it’s time to actually pick your focused niche.
I’m going to use some examples to help you wrap your head around the process.
Some examples categories(niche): sub-category (niche down) are:
Parenting>Toddlers
Gardening>Houseplants
Hair Care> Dry Hair
Hobbies>Crafts
Sports>Outdoor
Toddler Bedtime Struggles
Growing Food Indoors On A Budget
Beginner Care For Dry Curly Hair
Cricut Crafts For Beginners
Hiking with kids under 5 for beginners
There are many ways to do this step, the main way I will teach you is to simply brainstorm potential paths you might talk about based on your why but if you’re struggling I’ve got an easy tool to use to get those gears turning…it’s Google!
Begin typing Your Why into Google and see what shows up for ideas of things people need help with (check out my free course that shows you how to do this no matter what your topic is)
Using the above example,
the niche is: breastfeeding and the why is: weaning from breastfeeding
So as you can see I began typing in my why and low and behold there is a lovey list of possible subjects I can focus on, I’ve looked at this list and decided to niche down to ‘moms weaning toddlers from breastfeeding’, and BAM! Now I’m ready to move on to the next step!
Not finding any ideas that tickle your fancy? No worries there’s a few other tricks you can try!
Having trouble getting ideas, try ‘how to’ ‘your niche‘ and see what comes up, I also like to use things like ‘help’ or ‘help with’,
Give Yourself 20 mins, set a timer, and get to work!
Brainstorm a possible sub-category that you can focus on now that you’ve found your why.
For those of you like me that prefer pen & paper, grab a piece of paper and start writing down different categories of people you’d like to help. You can also go digital if you prefer, typing it up in google docs or notes.
I suggest no more than 20 minutes because it’s easy to continue this process for hours and end up nowhere, it’s best to keep it short and sweet, remember you can always tweak and change it later!
Worried your chosen group isn’t profitable? I’ve gotcha covered we’ll go over exactly how to check in just a minute!
Try to choose one, then you can break it down further into sub-categories in the next step.
Bloggers who make real money are those who focus on a specific set of people, the blogs who try to please everyone by having 7 different topics can still be profitable sometimes, but it takes a whole lot longer and sales are way lower, plus you have to work like 10 times harder making like 30 freebies, product lines, etc all targeted to different ‘focuses’ or audiences.
I will show you what to do with these results in the next step!
The last step in the niche down process is checking the validity of your chosen sub-category.
You don’t want to pour hours, weeks & even years into a subject until before you know it’s profitable.
There are a few quick and easy ways to check if your niche is profitable, let’s go over them now.
This is a fantastic way to get insight about what is profitable in your niche, what products are already selling, which means there is purchase power in your market.
Head to amazon, type in things related to your niche, are there any popular products that show up?
When you google ‘help with’ [your niche or pain point] what products show up under google shop? These are some quick ways to see what people in your niche are selling, you can also check out their site which will be linked usually within the product page, then you could also gain insight into how they have their site set up and what topics they cover within your niche plus any other products they are selling.
The 3 FREE Google Chrome Extension Favorites that I use for different purposes are UberSuggest, The Moz bar, and Keywords Everywhere.
Moz Bar is Great for First Glance Domain Authority & Competition Research.
Keywords Everywhere is the best for Keywords, especially long-tail keywords.
Ubersuggest has a free option and allows you to ad costs per click for a keyword, domain authority, and tons of other stats on websites
Each of these can be used for free and show different information, they make searching hot topics easy!
Once installed with a few quick clicks, you can easily see how many people have searched for a topic, important keywords and long-tail keywords to include in your copywriting, how much competition there is, and so much more!
After you’ve googled your niche and seen what blogs show up, the next easy step is heading over to moz.com
There you will find this handy dandy Competitive Research Tool.
You will one of the blogs that had shown up on page 1 of google during your earlier search, then you can see that blogs entire collection of competitors and all kinds of handy info, like keywords they rank for and lack, domain authority, etc!
This is a fantastic way to check validity, chances are if there are a-lot of big blogs in your niche, then there is money in your niche!
Worried your niche is full?
Always analyze trends before jumping into a niche.
The more stable a niche trend the better!
I love using google trends! Most people use Google to find answers to all their questions, our blog is designed to answer those questions, what better place to check if our niche is profitable than the place that everyone uses!
Go to https://trends.google.com/trends/ and just type your niche. For example, I searched for the word “toddler weaning”.
This would be a great niche because the interest is stable! You want a stable trend, not something seasonal.
Now that you’ve checked out your competition, use that information and think about how you could offer something unique.
If your competition has advice and products that take a long time to apply or complete maybe your angle is that you cater to those who are short on time.
If your competition is focused on basic to the point info/graphics maybe your business is more colorful elaborate and fun.
Perhaps your niche is usually a super serious and everyone in that space is very formal, perhaps your blog is informal.
If everyone in your niche is portraying perfection, know-it-all-ness perhaps you come in humble, explaining that you don’t know it all, just sharing what you know, we’re all still growing here!
(This is something I do with this business because it’s true! Every “expert” has a mentor and continues to learn, we can’t know it all!)
There are all kinds of ways you can make your company stand out, whether its in your copywriting, marketing, branding or actual products, think about how you can be different from those around you and get started!
The niche down process benefits your business in multiple ways, some of the most important ways are a massive increase of money in your pocket, and outstanding value to your customers, which naturally generate more income with repeat customers and referrals.
For example,
I’ve niched down from women’s hair health to mom’s with dry frizzy curls.
I’ve created a product, a women’s hair product, because I’ve niched down I know exactly how to reach my target audience when creating posts, ads, videos, and any other content.
Here you can see what a targeted ad vs non targeted ad looks like to get a better idea of what I mean.
I wanted my ad to sell shampoo here are 2 versions of my ad copy, one broad and one targeted, can you tell which one is targeted? I bet you can!
If you need help choosing a niche have no fear! I’ve got an entire guide created just for you!
For example, perhaps you would like to start a food blog, here are some angles you might pick:
Just a few examples to get those juices flowin’
Wanna Know How To Be Seen By Google?
These are just some more examples to get your ideas rolling
Let’s say you are going to start a lifestyle blog, the same questions, who are you talking to, and what are you helping them with?
Learn my secret recipe for nailing down your niche!
Generally no, the more specific you get the better chances you are of gaining traffic quickly, with a specific topic content is easier to write, and easier to create content that answers a specific question your audience is asking.
It also allows you to avoid going up against larger more competitive blogs, at least until you gain more domain authority.
Which in turn allows you to be found and seen easier.
More importantly, it naturally aligns you, your content, marketing, and branding perfectly with a specific audience that will become raving fans who need your knowledge, help, and guidance on your chosen niche, which will convert into cash in your pocket!
Yes! Absolutely! If you want to make money blogging the easy answer is yes! A niche allows you to gain traffic quickly, build a loyal fan base, and possibly more importantly a loyal customer base! Having a niche (a specific one) also helps you easily come up with helpful content your readers want and need.
Which is what drives that loyal fan base! An example would be if your blog had no niche at all, you might blog one day about your breastfeeding struggle and then the next post is about choosing curtains, it will be very hard to find a strong following for years if ever, for many reasons, some of them being that google will struggle to figure out what your blog is about, damaging your domain authority making it much harder to show up on google’s prized first page!
If that same blog had chosen breastfeeding mom’s who struggle with breastfeeding supply issues, she could have tons of targeted posts talking about tips & tricks to help those issues, like the 5 best breastfeeding supplements, or 10 min trick to improve your supply, or even How to pump and feed at the same time/Increase your supply overnight by feeding & Pumping together.
Just off the top of my head, with that specific audience I could see a breastfeeding schedule printable, boost your supply guide, and even a course/challenge to follow, teaching tips and tricks. As you can see having a focused niche is essential to a successful blog!
You can see how this could attract a specific set of people, while at the same time making content creation a breeze, all while helping those specific set of people.
Want to learn how to never run out of content ideas that your audience crave?
Making money is easier, with higher traffic, ad revenue will be up, sponsers will match your brand easier, finding affilate products to share with your audience will be simplier so you will earn more affialate revanue, and you will also be able to create products easier as well.
Notice a trend? The more targeted your content is, the more it resonates with your audience, the more impact you have on thier lives, and a automatic result is more money in your pocket!
Once you’ve narrowed in on your target audience, the next step is creating marketing to match.
I call this step ‘Know Your Audience’, I teach this step differently than most, you hear such mixed messages coming from online guru’s that you end up frustrated that nothing is working.
This round and round in circles leads to confusion, overwhelm and frustration. You quickly become lost in a sea of dispair and often give up. Fear of failure plays a big part, too. So many things don’t work, it almost becomes pointless to even try. I strive to clear all this up and set you up with clear steps to get you going on the right path with confidence knowing exactly what you need to do and how to do it!
Here’s a quick run down of what I mean when I say know your audience, most teach this as segmentation, or niching down, but as you can see I believe these are 2 different steps.
Know your audience to me is not so much about who you are talking to but more about how you will help them and why they need you!
Which is key to creating valuable content that resonates with your people, also allowing you to create products that have people throwing their cards at you!
Want to see exactly how to do this?
No matter what topic you end up talking about, if you love it and create valuable content that resonates (speaks directly to them) position your blog to help your readers learn, build, or grow their knowledge, you will make money!
Want to know how long it will take to Quitting Your Full-Time Job | How long it will take to make money on your blog
So what do you think the toughest part of niching down is?
Leave a comment below I’d love to hear your thoughts! I’d be happy to create a post to help you!
Hey! We've got lots of new eyes here on the blog so I thought I'd…
Fear of being a fraud as an entreprenur is as normal as breathing, although many…
We've all seen it. This Labor Day Closeout 1000000000% off this weekend only blah blah…
Many experts say that you can basically snap your fingers and BAM you've got a…
Start Your Profitable Blog Today Whether you want to blog to work from home or…
Many entrepreneurs have remarked, "To thrive in today's digital landscape, you need a tool that…