To niche or not to niche?

Something I hate about the saying, ‘the riches are in the niches,’ is that it only rhymes if you are pronouncing something wrong.

Go ahead, read it again.

The riches are in the niches.

If you know how to pronounce both words correctly, you have to sacrifice the pronunciation of one of them, or your innate bardic desire to make words rhyme.

It’s like if ‘Aristotle’ and ‘Chipotle’ were both at the ends of two lines in a rhyming couplet.

This is how I feel when someone says that riches are to be found in a specialized segment of the market.

The sentiment is basically correct. If you try to serve absolutely everybody, then you are so generic, you functionally serve nobody. I agree with that, in principle.

A certain amount of niching down is advisable for most businesses. But for polymaths like me, I just can’t do it.

Case in point: I once chose a niche. I built a niche website. I decided to be a website designer for one specific kind of person.

Instantly, I was bored.

After just three weeks of marketing myself to find the reeches in those niches, I gave up to go do something else.

Maybe for some people, this is great advice. If you want to find your one thing and do just do that one thing, maybe selecting just one niche works for you.

But I’m not wired that way. Spinning multiple plates, and managing multiple projects, may be all that is keeping me from accelerating success. I’m willing to endure that friction, if it means I get to continue to be self-directed in the type of work that I want to do.

Wrangling all this nitches is a hassle. They’re a hassle to wrassle. (Don’t ever let me write poetry again.) Recently I decided I could no longer ignore the massive educational opportunity in cryptocurrency. I hesitated to devote some of my fragmented brand into helping people buy their first bit of Bitcoin. Spinning up another nitch was daunting, but above all else, I didn’t want to pivot into being a cryptobro.

Thankfully, I belong to a group of people who are much smarter than I am. There’s a membership forum in Thought Leaders Business School, and when I described this challenge on niching vs notoriety to my community there, I received some excellent feedback, as well as one stellar idea.

‘Your Big Word is Digital,’ said Julia Steel. ‘You’re an expert in Digital Marketing, Digital Meetings, and Digital Money.

I liked this framing so much, I put it on my homepage.

Each one of these is a nice niche, I guess. But there’s plenty of room to explore, and when I get bored with one, I’ll start working on another.

I’ll be producing content on these three topics over on YouTube for the next couple of months. So if you want to browse through my latest videos on Digital Marketing, Digital Meetings, or Digital Money, then click on the topic(s) you like.