There are a lot of people making content on the internet today. Along with the billions of websites that exist today, there are also multiple billions of social media accounts on different platforms.
How on earth can you stand out when there are so many voices speaking simultaneously?
“Niche down to blow up”. This is a piece of advice for content creators that gets truer every year. What does it mean and how can you apply it for yourself? Let’s take a look at how you can grow your audience by niching down.
What Is Niching Down?
If you try to appeal to everyone about everything, you’ll end up appealing to no one.
Niching down is the process of narrowing your focus to a very specific topic. It’s not an accident. Your niche topic should be well-defined so you know exactly what you’re going to talk about and where your focus will be.
When you have this kind of focus, you’re more likely to make content that your audience will want to see.
Think about it. If you want to learn how to grow tomatoes at home, would you rather watch a video about starting a vegetable garden or a video giving all the steps to planting and cultivating tomatoes in pots? Even better, you could watch a video about growing tomatoes in the specific climate and conditions you have at home!
General overviews are a hard market to break into. When you focus on a specific niche, you can actually get more attention than you would in a large niche because you’re putting your content in front of a different audience.
Does Niching Down Limit You?
Although niching down means putting up some restrictions on the topics you address, you may find it easier to come up with content. Instead of racking your brain to find fresh topics in a large industry, you can focus on what’s relevant to your audience. You can also take ongoing trends and relate them back to your audience.

Niching down may actually relieve some of the pressure you feel to create huge content pieces that deal with every situation under the sun. You’ll be free to create content with a more precise focus.
Going into a niche also means you don’t have to start from the beginning of every topic. You have a little more freedom to create topics with the knowledge that your audience has a basic level of understanding. They’re not coming to you unless they have some idea about the topic already.
If you ever get to the point where you feel like your niche is limiting you, you have the option to expand. Once you get further into a niche, there will be some natural opportunities to touch on other topics or expand the niche in some small way.
How Niching Down Helps You Grow
It feels counterintuitive, but narrowing your focus can actually help you grow exponentially. Why is that?
Here are 3 ways niching down helps you grow your audience:
Finding a Unique Customer Need
Large, general topics contain so many different perspectives. It’s easy for individuals to get lost in all the content, especially if they’re not in the majority. If a lot of the content on a certain topic is addressing the questions, interests, or concerns of the majority, there will naturally be a lot of gaps in content for those outside the majority.
You can see this in every niche. There will be many people who create content answering the most frequently asked questions, but far fewer people making content around less common questions.
It’s a natural human instinct. We want to address the concerns of the majority first. By fighting against this instinct and focusing on a more specific topic or group of people, you can find and meet unique needs in your audience and fill some of the topic gaps.
A good example of this is in the course market. If you look up courses on graphic design, most of the courses will be teaching graphic design in Photoshop since this is one of the best programs out there for design. Because most courses focus on Adobe programs, you can fill a gap by teaching graphic design in other, lesser-known design programs, like Affinity, GIMP, or Canva.

Niching down gives you the chance to speak to a very specific problem. This way, people can find the answers they need instead of having to adapt a majority solution to their circumstances. You’re speaking to them where they are, giving you an edge over larger, more popular creators.
Building Brand Loyalty
Because niching down naturally leads you to speak to a smaller audience, it’s easier to build brand loyalty. Your content becomes more relatable and personal to your audience, lending you a helpful air of authenticity.
Instead of being an unreachable person behind the screen, you feel like a real person. You’re addressing the actual needs of the people interacting with your content.
When someone speaks to your situation directly or gives you highly relevant advice you can implement on your own, you’re going to feel more connected to that person. This is what you can do for your audience by niching down and getting in touch with their specific needs.
Growing Niche Expertise
When you decide to narrow your focus, it gives you a smaller area you need to learn about and stay updated on. Instead of feeling like you need to know everything about a broad topic, you can become an expert on your highly specific niche.
This is nothing new. It’s difficult to become an expert in a broad topic because there’s just too much to know. PhD programs and specialty certifications have been designed around this idea for ages.
While you may go to a general practitioner (GP) for a normal medical issue, you go to a specialist when you have a problem the GP can’t solve. It would be unreasonable to expect your GP to be an expert in every area of medicine. It would be equally unreasonable to expect your specialist to be an expert in many different areas of medicine. You go to the person who can provide the best information about your specific situation.
People consume content in much the same way they go to the doctor. If they have a cursory interest in something or a simple question, they’ll go to a general source first. But, if they have a more specific question or a particular area of interest, they’ll seek out content from more specialized experts.
Position yourself as an expert in your small niche. Become the go-to source for your niche by building up your expertise around your chosen topic.
How to Niche Down
Niching down can feel easier to talk about than to do. Here are a few steps you can take to niche down right now:
- Create a specific audience profile: You may already have an idea of the type of people you want to view your content, but for this exercise, you’re going to create a highly detailed profile of one single person. Try to come up with a person who epitomizes what you expect your ideal audience to be like. Go into as much detail as you can. Give the profile a name. Talk about their background and circumstances. Write the profile like you’re describing someone to your friend.
- List out your audience wants: With your profile in hand, take some time to list out the things this person would want that relate to your topic. Think about what their struggles are and how they would like things to be. People are not always objective about their own lives, so make sure you try your best to look at the topic from the perspective of the person in your profile. List as many wants as you can think of.
- Label the number one need: Now that you’ve gotten all this down on paper, your last step is to identify the needs that person has that would take the top priority. Start by sorting needs by small or large problems, then go further and narrow it down to the top 3. Then, decide which need would be the highest priority to the person you’ve profiled. The number one need for your profiled audience member is a great place to start for a niche. Let’s see how this could work in action.
Niching Down Example
Let’s set the scene.
You create content around coffee.
The ideal audience member you’ve profiled is named Frank. He’s a 27 year old working at an entry level accountancy job for a small business. Frank stops by a local coffee shop a few times per week before work. His favorite drink is a flat white.

Although Frank would love to save some money on coffee shop trips, he’s only ever made plain coffee in a coffee maker at home. With his job he has a little extra money, but not a lot of free time. He would love to learn how to make different coffee drinks for himself, but he doesn’t have a lot of free time to invest in learning.
Frank needs accessible, beginner-level training on how to make coffee drinks with minimal supplies and equipment.
As a content creator in the coffee industry, you could position yourself to address this specific niche. Make tutorials about how to make delicious coffee drinks at home with everyday kitchen supplies and simple, easily accessible ingredients. Talk about affordable must-have coffeemaking equipment to use at home.
Help Frank get his coffee fix at home over the weekends and you’ll be rewarded with a loyal audience member!
Niche down to blow up may be a cliché in the world of online content, but that’s because it’s true. Get started writing up your ideal customer profile today so you can work toward a niche where your expertise will shine.