Why your “niche” doesn’t have to be so niche

When you start creating content — whether it’s written content, tiktoks, YouTube videos, a newsletter — one of the first pieces of advice you’ll find online is that “you need to find your niche.”

But honestly, I think it’s bad advice.

I think a better word for it would be “consistency.”

A niche, to me, is confining. It’s forcing you to put yourself in a very specific box before you even start your content journey.

And of course, you can evolve your niche as you continue to create content, but I’d argue that widening that niche from the get-go is better than making constant small shifts in the specific topics you cover.

Here’s what I mean

I’ll give you an example from my actual life. I started my blog homey homies as an interior design blog. When I decided to really take my blog seriously, I took all of the advice of “deciding on my niche.” And what first started as generally “interior design” eventually evolved to “design with personality.”

That somewhat expanded over the years to lightly touch on other aspects of design, like architecture, graphic design, and clothing design. But by that point, I had a reputation built up in interior design, so it was really hard to really make that switch naturally.

I found myself not able to write about the range of things I really wanted to write about. And the few times I did, they seemed so random and out of place on my blog.

I think that other people fall into this trap all the time, too, of narrowing their focus to smaller than the interests they really want to talk about.

What I uncovered is that I really wanted to talk about creativity — and interior design was just one portion of that.

For other people, this may look like:

• Talking about iPad productivity hacks exclusively when they really want to talk about their favorite tech products.

• Creating makeup content when they really want to talk about all of their artistic passions.

• Streaming themselves playing video games when they want to talk about all of the latest entertainment media.

Addressing the “niche down” elephant in the room

I think that there definitely is a benefit to niching down, algorithm-wise, to be fair.

If you are talking about a very specific thing that few to no other people are, then you have a better chance of getting more engagement from your audience.

The problem here, though, is that you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to explore the full potential of your passion.

At best, you don't have that outlet available to share that passion with the world. At worst, you lose steam trying to pull out all of these ideas for content in this too-narrow niche. This is what leads many people to fizzle out and slowly stop creating content.

To me, longevity and authenticity are better than maybe getting a slight bump in the algorithm in the short term.

The “lifestyle” blueprint

Need proof that you don’t need to niche down to thrive? Consider all of the lifestyle tiktokers with millions of followers.

Sure, most of them are extremely conventionally attractive, but putting that aside, most of their followers come back to them video after video for their personality. They may have a “what I eat in a day” video one day, a shopping haul the next, and a storytime the next.

The only “niche” here is just their life. They’re talking about these loosely related things that are representative of them, their personality, and what they’re passionate about. And it works.

This translates outside of the lifestyle category, too.

Your personality and your life don’t have to be what you’re selling. Your passion does.

I’m not saying to create content about how to become an illustrator one day and tips for fixing your car the next. But find some kind of common thread between the things that you’re interested in, and use that as your loose guideline for the content you create.

If you have one shared interest with your audience, that’s probably not your only shared interest. It seems silly to pretend that people who follow you for interior design, for example, have interior design as their singular interest in life. They probably like art and music and travel, too, just like you.

So that’s why my bio says that I’m a “content marketer who’s obsessed with the intersection of productivity and creativity.”

This niche is wide enough to fit in all of the things that are dear to my heart — writing, productivity, technology, creativity, marketing — but narrow enough that if someone likes one topic I talk about, they’ll probably click into a decent amount of posts on other topics.

So in conclusion, screw the niche. If you want longevity, make your niche the umbrella that covers your passions. You’ll create better content, feel better about that content, and you will maybe help your audience discover a new passion they didn’t even know they had.