Are you struggling to find your writing niche? Do you want to know how to stand out in the crowded world of online content creation?
In his book The Art and Business of Online Writing, Nicolas Cole offers valuable insights on choosing and refining your writing niche. He shares advice on gathering data, focusing your efforts, and narrowing down your topic to create a unique space for yourself in the online writing landscape.
Read on to discover how you can transform your writing career by finding and developing your perfect niche.
How to Determine Your Writing Niche
Once you’ve been writing consistently online for about six months, Cole says you should gather metrics and use those to focus your efforts on a specific writing niche. To be successful in the world of online writing, you must stand out by doing something unique and being the best at what you do. This requires you to determine where you’re the most successful and dedicate yourself to that area—if you spread yourself too thin by writing about too many different topics or for too many different audiences, you’ll never become the best at anything, just decent at a lot of things.
(Shortform note: While Cole argues that niching down is crucial to become a successful writer, this might not be the case for everyone. Cole’s emphasis on niche writing is to gain popularity—this is great if you want to be a famous or viral writer (like Cole), but having a successful career doesn’t require fame. For example, if your end goal is to be a successful freelance copywriter, being a generalist may benefit you more than being a specialist. Generalists have a broad portfolio that shows potential clients they’re flexible and talented—they can make any topic jump off the page. This could provide you with a wider range of job opportunities.)
Step #1: Gather Data and Get Focused
Cole says the first step in determining your niche is looking at the likes, dislikes, views, and comments on your posts and seeing which topic is most popular with your audience. This is because your audience determines your fate—if they continue to read your content, you’ll gain popularity and credibility and can start making money. To grow and maintain that audience, you must continue giving them what they want.
For example, imagine that your posts about relationships are getting the most views, likes, and comments. While you don’t have to stop writing other things, you should dedicate the vast majority of your time to relationship pieces because this is the content that builds your audience.
(Shortform note: While Cole argues that you should select your main focus based on what others are most interested in, Gary Vaynerchuk argues otherwise in Crush It!. According to Vaynerchuk, you should select your niche based on what you’re most passionate about for two main reasons: First, your authenticity will allow your audience to relate more to your content. Second, pursuing what you’re most passionate about will sustain your motivation and interest, which is necessary for you to maintain your success.)
Step #2: Narrow Down Your Topic
Once you’ve determined the topic you’ll focus on, Cole says you must narrow down your topic into a niche by getting as specific as possible with your subtopic, audience, and style. This is an ongoing process throughout your career—the longer you’ve been writing and the more data you gather using the above process, the more you can narrow down your niche until you eventually create an entirely new niche that no one else offers.
Subtopic
First, Cole says you must narrow the scope of your topic into a subtopic. For example, if the general topic is “relationships,” subtopics you might try are “relationship management” or “breakup management.” Under a subtopic like “relationship management” you could then create numerous articles with content like how to spot communication issues, how to spice up the relationship, and so on. Cole says you should continue trying out subtopics and use your data to determine which one to focus on for your niche.
(Shortform note: If you’re having trouble coming up with subtopics for your niche, one way to generate ideas is to visit Reddit and see what people are (or aren’t) talking about within your topic. For example, if you search “relationship” on Reddit and click on “communities,” some subreddits that come up are “toxic relationships,” “ADHD relationships,” and “BPD loved ones.” All of these are great starting points for a subtopic.)
Audience
Specifying your audience—who you’re writing for—will help you narrow down your subtopic further until it becomes a niche. For example, if you determine that the subtopic that works best for you is relationship management, especially the articles written for people with mental illness, you should try creating more content for this audience. Your subtopic will narrow into the niche “relationship management for people with mental illness.”
You could then narrow this down even further, for example, by targeting your advice toward people with a specific mental illness like depression. Use data in this way to continually focus your writing throughout your career.
(Shortform note: There are a number of factors to take into account when narrowing down your audience. For example: What are your audience’s expectations of you? How much does your audience know about the topic already? What’s their attitude toward the topic—do they already agree or disagree with you? What are their demographics? Consider categories like age, religion, gender, ethnic background, sexual orientation, relationship status, occupation, and so on.)
Style
Finally, narrow your niche further by choosing your style. Cole says that your style will exist somewhere on a range between educating and entertaining. For example, if you’re a hard educator, your content might be very formal and include scientific research. If you’re a hard entertainer, your content might be largely opinion-based, with humor and drama to highlight your points. Your style can exist anywhere in between.
To narrow down your niche into something completely unique, Cole says you should adopt a style that’s unusual for your niche. For example, if your niche is “relationship management for people with depression” and most writers in this niche use a highly educational style, you can stand out by incorporating elements of entertainment like stories and humor.
(Shortform note: If you want to make your style unique, there are a few more defining factors of style you should take into account. For example, diction—the types of words you use—plays a large role in defining your style. Your style is also impacted by your sentence structure—the way you arrange your words—and your narration, which is the perspective you speak from. Further, the tone (your attitude) and the creative devices you use (like metaphor or symbolism) shape your style. These additional elements are especially important to consider in fiction writing, as they shape how the reader will interpret your story.)
