Choosing the niche for your website is usually one of the most important things you can do to secure your own success or failure. This happens right at the start of the process, right when your website is still just a twinkle in your eye, and yet it will dictate the course of your entire online empire.
The reason for this is of course that the niche is going to dictate who enjoys reading your site, and as such it will dictate the size of your market as well as the demographic that that market will be made up of and the amount of competition you will face.
Ideally then you’d create a blog in a niche that was highly in-demand and appealed to everyone, where there would be currently very few sites on the net to compete with. The people who enjoyed this topic most of all of course would be wealthy types who enjoyed splashing cash, and as such you’d have an endless supply of happy customers willing to buy your products and click your links.
The problem is that this doesn’t tend to happen so often. The popular niches tend to be highly crowded, while the less popular ones are quiet for a reason. You’re forced then to make a compromise of some sort and to hedge your bets with a busy-yet-popular niche or a specialist-and-quiet topic.
Unless that is, you are such a good writer, that you manage to appeal to everyone – regardless of whether they’re interested in the topic at all. The challenge is simple: can you write a website on curling that people will read who have no interest in curling? This way you can choose your quiet niche, still have a wide audience, and possibly even elevate the status of the subject matter.
How to Appeal to Everyone
License: Creative Commons image source
If you think that something like that can’t be done, then you should turn your attention to the TV series and magazine ‘Top Gear’. This is an English show/publication all about cars, but actually pretty much everyone in England watches it regardless of their knowledge of automobiles. Why? Because they interview celebrities, they tell lots of jokes and they do amazing things like drive to the North Pole and transform cars into giant bobsleighs.
This brand manages to appeal to more than just the target demographic then by including some universally-appreciated elements: humour and celebrity. Right away that’s something that you could do with a website in any niche. Whether you were to get celebrities to try curling for themselves, or you were to simply use such wit and such a great writing style that people would read your blog despite not really being involved in that world. Everyone likes to laugh, and celebrities have a huge appeal.
Finding Ways to Appeal
License: Creative Commons image source
As such then you should always be looking for ways to appeal to wider audiences and to bring in additional readers – especially if your subject is very niche. Be wary of putting your regular readers off – you do need to include some posts that are bang on the subject matter occasionally – but every now and then try to write something that your friends would want to read or that allows you to work alongside another website or blog.
At the same time, if you keep your site well designed, and your writing is simply very high in quality, then people will enjoy going there and so will seek out things that interest them once they’ve originally found your site. Use a writing style that employs mini ‘cliff hangers’ at the ends of your paragraphs, and that is personal, entertaining and well-structured (focussing on providing a narrative), and people won’t be able to help but read on.
Hone your writing style, look for universal angles and you might be surprised who ends up sticking around. Think about how popular personal blogs used to be, do you really care what happens to complete strangers all that much?
The author of this article, Christine Wild, works at “Todd SEO Guy“, a website providing quality SEO services. Christine likes to travel and is a passionate social worker.
