Escaping Niches
Photo by ^riza^.
I had one of those days today where a few things coalesce to make you think about a particular topic. First was listening to John Gruber (DaringFireball.net) and Merlin Mann’s (43folders) SxSW talk on blogging. There are a lot of good tips buried in the talk if you don’t mind the two personalities, particularly on focusing on an obsession, adding value and differentiating your content. Most interestingly for me, they discussed the concept of an ‘ideal reader’ (which I’ve previously talked about as a ‘target audience’, but I like their term better!) This ideal reader is the person you would most want to enjoy your work. It could be another blogger you highly respect and admire, a friend, or another version of yourself. The key is that you’re crafting your work based around who you would most like to read it.
This idea was recalled again when I read a great post at Leo Babauta’s Write to Done blog about shattering the myth of blog niches. In it Leo argues that if you want a really big audience it can be a viable strategy to tackle a very broad niche because you’re maximizing the audience available to you. He cites his own blog ZenHabits.net as an example of this strategy working very effectively.
This got me thinking about some advice that bloggers and other web publishers will often hear: to focus on an extremely specific topic and become the ‘guru’ on that topic. The logic is that since there is so much competition in broader niches you must specialize to stand-out. This is a good strategy and has worked for many people, but setting your sights on a larger niche is not necessarily foolhardy.
The audio talk and blog post at Write to Done got me thinking about some of the bigger blogs that I read and trying to identify what they were actually about. Tim Ferris’s blog jumps all over the place, from road-testing supercars to extreme weight loss to travel tips to nutritional science. The range of topics is so broad that no one person could be interested in all of them.
One blog I’ve been enjoying a lot lately (and am quite late to the party on) is Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. This is another example of a blog that jumps all over the place, from setting up an e-mail list to deep and meaningful lessons on being at peace with the now.
These are just a couple of examples from my own reading list, but you might be able to think of your own: extremely popular blogs/websites that you enjoy even though they do not have a ‘niche’ at all.
There’s a good argument to be made that these writers are high-profile and because of that, some people will read whatever they write simply because they wrote it. I don’t doubt this is part of it, but other cases make me doubt that this is the sole reason for their success. Jason Kottke was one of the earliest ‘A-list bloggers’ despite having always posted about a huge array of topics from the very beginning. As far as I’m aware he was not a high-profile figure before creating the project. Coming back full circle, John Gruber of DaringFireball (who featured in the SxSW talk I mentioned) has consistently written about a very broad variety of topics and was not a big name before starting the blog.
The logical question to follow all this with is: why does it work? It seems common sensical that writing about all your very specific passions would lead few people to find a fit with your blog or website (or magazine column, for that matter), yet the evidence suggests otherwise. This is where the notion of the ‘ideal reader’ comes into play. There are going to be other people out there who have kind of the same perspective on things that you do. You’re not carbon copies of each-other, and some things you write about are going to bore the pants off them, but overall you’re sort of into the same things and get excited about the same kinds of ideas. Your ‘ideal reader’ is sort of like a friend or a business partner: someone who is different to you but shares your general vision for how things are, should or could be.
If you have trouble with envisioning an abstract ‘ideal reader’, Merlin Mann says that he thinks about a specific person when he writes. This person is someone he would love to enjoy his writing, like Jeffrey Zeldman, for example. The thought process being that if you write/create stuff that someone really awesome would like then you’re doing something good (and chances are other people that are like Zeldman will like it too).
The idea that when you start publishing online you have to “find a little niche and dominate it” and “don’t try writing about certain things because there’s too much competition” is seeming more and more like a creativity killer to me. This doesn’t mean you can’t focus on a tiny niche if it’s your passion, but I think there are a lot of people right now saying to themselves “I really want to write about technology because I love it, but I will never get noticed and I can’t monetize so I’m going to write about netbooks instead” (insert your broad niche and little niche of choice) who end up writing about netbooks and then realizing after a few months that they’re bored with netbooks, running out of ideas on new things to say and it’s showing in the content. As a result, they have no readers and despite that perfect-fit affiliate program are not monetizing anything.
I very firmly believe that you could start a technology blog, a self-improvement blog, a make money online blog today and grow it skywards if you live and breathe the things you’re writing about. Furthermore, if you live and breathe the things you’re writing about and produce content with value to your ideal reader, you can succeed with a blog about technology, self-improvement, making money online and four other topics. If you’re clever about the way you communicate your obsession you will produce great content. The internet is also big enough now that there will be thousands (millions?) of ‘ideal readers’ who care about technology, self-improvement and making money online and will not shy away from a good blog or website on all those topics. If the content is consistently good your project will grow exponentially. Allowing yourself to talk about all the little (and big) things you are obsessed by will help guarantee you have an abundance of ideas and inspiration. Those two things mean you will write great stuff. If you do so while keeping an ‘ideal reader’ in mind you’ll continue to attract new people who enjoy what you do.
