CHOOSING A NICHE IN BUSINESS
The business and marketing experts sitting in their $400 swivel chairs in their home office with four monitors and a bonsai plant all say the same thing: Niche down, pick a lane, and consistently advertise and create content specifically for that lane. I don’t do that. In fact, there is a small group of us on the internet who are determined to combat the algorithms and the Wall Street Journal, and we refuse to choose a niche. We are the holdouts in the war between generalists and specialists, and we will die penniless before we write a social media campaign specifically for a 32-year-old mom of two who likes yoga, drives a Hyundai, and eats too much sunflower butter.
A quick glance at my blog entries makes all this niche stuff pretty obvious. My writing, at least on here, is wildly inconsistent. You can loosely lump it all together under health – if you include emotional, physical, spiritual, mental, and grammatical health. But even then there are those random posts that are basically impossible to rationalize under the health banner.
IF YOU LIKE ME
Now, I’m not completely outside the carefully curated business world lines. Although I certainly didn’t know this when I started, I do what’s sometimes called “character-driven marketing.” My business plan operates under the assumption that if you like my writing, you like me, and you’ll be interested in whatever nonsense I choose to write about next. No need to choose a niche.
But one exception hits your inbox (or Facebook feed or WordPress reader) every year.
Gratitude.
Every year around Thanksgiving, I come back to gratitude. I write about it (typically about how horrible I am at practicing it). I think about it. And I talk about it with my friends. I’m shockingly consistent about gratitude.
Obviously, this year is no different – my question for myself in 2023 is, “How many things did you forget to be grateful for this year?” It’s a bit of an unhelpful question because, clearly, I don’t remember what I forgot. But I’m trying to go back over the last twelve months and remember what I forgot to be grateful for in that moment.
So, as we continue this holiday season, I encourage you to join me in taking some time to remember. What can you be grateful for from the past year? I’d love to hear what comes up for you if you’re willing to share!
WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT NICHES?
“Okay,” you might say. “Why on earth are we talking about niches? Couldn’t you just have written those three paragraphs about gratitude and been done with it?”
And you make a good point. Yes, I could have, and if my editor hates the rest of it, I’ll cut it and just post that. She does a great job of saving you from the worst of my mental wanderings. You should send her flowers later.
But I was thinking about choosing a niche, and here’s why: gratitude and health are my niches. But they’re not really niches, because they apply to everyone and their mom’s old cat. There is not a soul on this earth for whom health or gratitude is irrelevant.
And as I think about each of us as humans, isn’t that how we want to be? Don’t we all want to choose a niche that matters to people? To become experts in the language of living, and living well? To learn to love all the people, not just the mom in the Hyundai?
GRATITUDE AND OTHER RELATABLE NICHES
And maybe your business doesn’t do that. Maybe you sell water saws to tile experts who restore 18th-century buildings (how water can be a saw is one of the mysteries of the universe) and that’s about as niche as it gets. But how you sell, how you treat people, how you live, that’s relevant to everyone. No matter how you choose your niche, you can practice character-driven traits through the big, important things.
Things like gratitude.
So. What did you forget to be grateful for this past year?
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