I was scared. For a long time:

“I don’t want to write about one thing. I like all the things.”

The idea of just writing about one topic scared the 💩 out of me: I did not want to be confined to a niche prison. What if I wanted to write about something different?

Well last week, after some gentle coercion by a peer, I finally announced I was “niching down” with this newsletter. (If you missed it, read about it here).

My finger was trembling. Nervous as hell. (Cue climactic music)…

Then I hit ‘send’.

The email went out — and it was a complete unlock.

It’s true what they say: “constraints unlock creativity.”

Here’s how accepting the constraint of niching down opened the floodgates of ideas and opportunities.

Quick story: I run a lot.

It’s my highly-leveraged meditation/fitness/ideation session. Last week after I hit send on the email announcing my newfound “focus”, I went for a run — and ideas began flowing.

I’ll often get ideas while running, but this was different: they wouldn’t stop. I was recording each idea as quickly and often as they came. My minutes-per-kilometer took a backseat to my ideas-per-minute.

I had ideas about…
​→ newsletter lead magnets
→ newsletter courses
→ newsletter podcasts
→ newsletter guides & templates
→ newsletter growth strategies
→ newsletter… — you get the picture.

My Otter.ai app was getting a better workout than my legs.

[sidenote: use a voice-to-text app for ideas when exercising. Best hack ever.]

The point is this → honing in on the focus of your content is NEVER a bad thing. At worst, you discover you don’t like a topic as much as you thought and pivot to something else.

At best, you become the go-to expert in that niche.

How To Figure Out Your Niche

Last year I wrote an Atomic Essay titled Stop niching down already. I argued that a niche can feel suffocating if you’re not ready to commit (clearly, I was not ready).

Steph Smith provides some advice for those feeling similarly, particularly on this point:

Focus on the how, not the what. How can you deliver differently than others? Can you add in some branded infographics to an otherwise dry subject? Can you inject some humor into an unnecessarily serious topic? You don’t have to niche down, just deliver differently and stand out a bit.

Justin Welsh offers a more zeroed-in approach his Operating System course (aff):

The #1 problem I see when people are trying to build a business on LinkedIn is that

they are not focused on a specific customer. “When you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody.”

Justin provides a great example:

You may think your niche is marketing. But that’s too broad. So you drill down to focus on email marketing. Great! But you could get even more targeted: email marketing for 7-figure business owners.

Now you know exactly the type of content and messaging you’ll need to resonate with that audience.

I haven’t drilled down to a sub-niche.

And it’s okay if you haven’t either. But you can see how figuring out your sub-niche would really refine your focus and your messaging in a hyper-specific way.

Where are you at? Is your newsletter targeted? Are you focusing on differentiating your ‘how’ instead of your ‘what’, or are you laser-focused on a sub-niche like Justin recommends?

Let me know, and reach out with any questions. I’d love to help guide you.

Resources & Affiliate Links:

→ This article was pulled from my Growth Currency⚡ newsletter
→ Connect with me on Twitter
→ I Learned a TON from Justin Welsh’s LinkedIn OS and Content OS products. I’m an affiliate and couldn’t recommend them more.

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