How should I find my niche?

Many creators ask: How should I start? How do I pick my niche? What should I write about? I call this niche-anxiety. I have suffered from it myself for many years.

Niche-anxiety makes sense in the pre-connected world. This is how the world was before the internet. In the pre-connected world you were only able to provide value to a few people who lived near you. If you became an artist, or a writer, or sports commentator, or a movie reviewer, your economic prospects were limited.

Our current reality is dramatically different because of the internet. You can now set up one-to-one connections with any of the 4.66 billion people on the internet. Your neighborhood just blew up. In this much larger neighborhood you can easily find thousands of people who love whatever it is that you love.

This is why niche-anxiety no longer makes sense. It leads to analysis-paralysis and delays starting.

“Ok, so my niche can be whatever I want. That still does not help me decide. What should I write about?”

Here is Joe Pulizzi’s answer to this question from Content Inc.: Create what you consume. You already know what you are interested in and what lights up your mind. It is what you read about and think about all day. To find your natural niche look at what you spend your day doing. What content do you consume? That is the content you can produce.

To build a content business you need to mash-up what you consume with your own perspective and your own life. If you pick an area you have no interest in and have never consumed in, you will need to build both the consuming relationship to the niche and the creating relationship.

Instead of doing all the forced work, why not leverage the consuming relationship you already have, and just work on building the creating relationship?

Next steps: 1/ Look at what you read, watch, listen to, all day. Do you love sports? Do you like cars? Do you like Mars exploration? Do you love traveling the world? Look at what lights you up and realize that there are thousands of people who would love to read your perspective on these topics.

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