Basics of an Online Business Part 2 - Focusing on a Specific Niche
It can be very tempting to try to make your online content appeal to everyone. But doing so really means you end up speaking to no one and you end up wasting a lot of time, energy, and potentially money.
When you try to speak to everyone you never become focused on a single style or niche of content. By choosing a specific niche, style, and brand you can attract your target audience—the people who most resonate with you and your business.
These people will become your true fans and will be the driving force behind making your business successful and building your community.
Daron here from @wildhomesteading with my weekly post on @homesteaderscoop all about running an online business and homesteading.
Wild Homesteading as an Example
I run the online business Wild Homesteading which helps people to be successful homesteaders by working with nature. There are a lot of homesteading sites out there but there are actually very few that are very focused on working with nature as the core message.
Often it is about personal freedom, independence, resiliency, returning to a simpler way of life, etc. The benefits to nature are talked about (growing food without toxic chemicals as an example) but often they are a side benefit and not the core reason for homesteading.
Because of my own personal passions and the way, I run my homestead I decided to focus on a specific niche within the niche of homesteading. My target audience are people who care deeply about the environment and want to become homesteaders to lower their environmental impact, create habitat for wildlife, and grow healthy food for themselves.
For these people climate change, biodiversity loss, the loss of wilderness, etc. are all huge motivators and my site and the way I talk about homesteading can speak directly to their concerns.
This is why I call what I do “Wild Homesteading” instead of just homesteading. Wild homesteading is about bringing the wilderness back to our homesteads instead of going out into the wilderness and conquering it as homesteading has often historically been described.
This approach to homesteading does not need to appeal to everyone. There are plenty of people who fit this niche despite it being a relatively small percent of the population.
Overtime I will grow a following of true fans that love my content and are drawn to my niche. These are the people who will help ensure my business is successful in the long run.
Finding Your Own Niche
Look at your online business (or blog here on steem) and ask yourself—what is my niche? Is there a central theme to your content and products? Or is it a bit of everything?
If you have a defined niche then great! Just keep producing content and products in that niche. But if you are more scattered here are some tips to help you find your niche.
- What are you most passionate about in relation to your online business? What topics just excite you?
- Out of your content what tends to do the best? Which content gets the most engagement? Which content gets the most views?
- Now combine the answers to 1 and 2 and see where there is some overlap. Write these down.
- Is there a general theme to these? Try to combine them into a couple groups.
- Now write a single sentence that describes each group. These sentences are each defining a niche.
- Pick the 1 that resonates the most with you and use it to help guide your future content and products.
When I went through this process I got a sentence like this: working with nature to build your homestead and grow your own food.
From this I was able to define my central theme of working with nature and come up with 3 categories for my blog posts. This also helped me to define my niche as I described in the previous section.
So what is your niche? Please leave a comment saying what your niche is. If you don’t have an online business then please leave a comment saying what aspects of homesteading appeals to you.
Thank you!
Follow @wildhomesteading for more posts all about homesteading, working with nature, and growing your own food.
And check out my blog - www.wildhomesteading.com for weekly in-depth posts on working with nature to grow your own food and start/build your homestead.
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Good tips, finding your niche is certainly important. I think it's sort of like here on Steem. There's lots of people producing lots of different things but if you are trying to just emulate others then you won't be entirely successful because it isn't genuine.
This is great.
Also, I love what you wrote about wild-homesteading. It's certainly something that I'm more attracted to should I ever find myself as the custodian of land. Pastures and paddocks are just waaaay too much energy to maintain, to be honest.