The “Niche Myth” Is the Biggest Lie Told to Beginner Bloggers
Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels
Your blog’s microniche is harming your profitability and views.
New bloggers will start looking for blog niche ideas in 2022, just like they have been since blogging started. But nobody talks about the dangers of niching.
Most content on the subject tells you that you need a blogging niche, or discusses which is the best profitable niche for blogging. This is semi-true - a niche establishes authority and builds a consistent audience - but leaves out a huge amount of potentially risky downsides of niching. For people asking themselves, “Do I need a blogging niche?” it’s worth understanding the benefits and the downsides.
One of my favorite YouTubers, Annie Dubé, grew a huge YouTube following and income by creating hyper-targeted videos on how to perform well on YouTube. I watched 5 of her videos, loved them, and stopped because I found that while her content was excellent, it was repetitive. She covered SEO, thumbnails, titles, and the algorithm. And then she covered them again in slightly different ways. And again, and again. (You can see her full playlist here. I recommend it!)
I was therefore not surprised when she announced that she was stepping away from the YouTube YouTubing niche she’d previously dominated - even though she was getting hundreds of thousands of views and earning tons of money. She personifies the dangers of niching to a perfect degree.
Why the niche myth is pervasive
The internet is a crowded place. That’s why so many writers turn to niches as a way to stand out. You stand a better chance of being an expert in one thing than in several subjects, after all.
But this misses the real reason people follow creators. I love Annie Dubé and do find her to be exceptionally experienced and knowledgeable about growing a YouTube channel, but she’s by no means the only (or even most) expert in the field.
I like her the best because of her personality, not her niche.
You won’t find followers and readers by becoming the only person on the internet who can help readers learn how to braid their cat’s hair. But you will by being fun, quirky, interesting, opinionated, and personality-driven.
Do you need a blogging niche? Not if it’s harmful.
When you’re just starting out as a blogger, the predominant advice is to niche. Find what you excel at and hone in on that one subject. The more narrow, the better. There are entire niches, ironically, about helping you find the best niche, the most profitable niche in 2022, the most useful niche to earn money, and so on.
You can listen to that advice, but you should hear this too.
Niching is harmful for five reasons.
1. You artificially limit yourself.
Annie Dubé said in her video that she stopped wanting to create content because of her niche. Even though it was still highly profitable for her, she got tired of creating content about YouTube. She felt like she was artificially limiting herself and her interests to pander to the YouTube algorithm, which had pigeonholed her in the “YouTubing About YouTube” category.
Luckily she made the decision to pivot, but I wonder how many creators simply give up every year because they feel trapped in their single content creation interest. For hobby bloggers and vloggers, it’s not so much an issue. But if you’re like me (or Dubé), content creation is my whole life. If I only wrote about one thing, I’d really struggle mentally.
People have more than one interest. Niching stops you from expressing more than one, which can limit your blogging career down the road.
2. You might run out of material.
As I mentioned above, Dubé felt like she’d covered the main areas of YouTube growth and got tired of repeating them in different ways. That’s when she began to ask herself if she needed a blogging niche (or vlogging niche, in her case). I felt similarly when I began to write about side hustles. My audience loved them, so I wrote exclusively about them. But then I felt like I’d said everything I had to say on the subject. I forced myself to continue, believing that was now my “niche” and what my audience wanted from me, but ultimately I stopped writing about side hustles because I simply ran out of material.
Furthermore, the niche itself might become saturated. As I found when I wrote about side hustles to great success, many people did the same. Now, on Medium at least, side hustle content just doesn’t get a lot of clicks because it’s been written about so extensively.
Niches are great to find your value, but especially if you choose a microniche, you run the risk of having nothing left to say or trying to speak in a very crowded (and very small) room.
3. You might change your mind.
I’ve stumbled into half a dozen niches during my time blogging. At first, I believed I would be the supreme cat blogger. Then I wrote about writing on Medium. I started writing pop psychology articles. And finally, I recently began writing in the freelancing/entrepreneurship field.
As I’ve grown as a person and a blogger, I’ve found my writing interest reflects what I’m interested in IRL. If you pick a niche on Day 1of your blogging journey, you stop yourself from being able to write about your growth and journey in other directions.
4. You get misleading signals.
I published four articles about side hustles, and then I got tired and wrote about something else. I published it to crickets. After writing about side hustles so frequently and exclusively, my audience had come to expect that - and only that - from me. I worried that I’d written myself into a corner.
But I persevered and wrote about other things I enjoyed. My views and reads came back. I had mistakenly believed my audience only wanted one thing from me, but in fact, they wanted me and were just confused after I spent so long writing about a single topic.
If you narrow down too early and then switch, it’s like building your audience from scratch. But that doesn’t mean your audience doesn’t want to hear from you on a wide variety of topics. It just means you’ve confused them (and potentially the algorithm). Annie Dubé said in her video that she expects to get far fewer views while the algorithm works out what her new “niche” is.
5. You might mislead your audience into thinking you’re an expert.
The dangers of “fake news" and the internet mean not only that lies travel swiftly, but also that people might get the wrong idea about you. If you post exclusively about cats, your audience might come to believe you’re a cat expert. They might ask you for veterinary advice, or get angry when one of your hacks doesn’t work as promised.
This isn’t because you’ve intentionally lied to readers, but because you’ve been accidentally positioned as a false expert in their heads. By widening the niche, you make it subtly clear that you’re not an expert - just a person with interests and opinions, like them.
You don’t need a blogging niche. You need a blogging lane.
You might find the best blogging niche with low competition, but at what cost?
Many content creators position niching as a silver bullet. Grow your blog, grow your income, by picking a single, narrow topic and going all-in.
The truth is that niching is an inorganic way that stifles your blogging growth and potential. However, there’s still value in building consistency and expectations with your readers. Instead of choosing a single topic and turning that into your focus, make your personality the focus. I call this building a blogging lane.
I write about cats, programming, pop psychology, freelancing, and yes, side hustles. That’s my blogging lane. Underpinning it all is me - my personality, my writing voice, my interests. My audience reads my stories not because they think I’m the end-all, be-all voice in a topic, but because they like what I have to say, and they’re willing to listen to me talk about it, just like you would a friend. Medium especially is a great platform for this because, unlike Google or YouTube, it doesn’t pigeonhole you into a single topic of expertise.
Do you need a blogging niche? It can help at the start, but it can also hurt your chances of growing your blogging empire in the long term. Instead, build a blogging lane and enjoy the organic, natural audience that grows from that.