How to Find Your Niche in Anything

The flying spaghetti approach to finding what works for you.

If you’ve been in the writing game for some time, you’ll likely have heard over and over again:

• Find your niche.
• Find your unique point of view and be consistent in its delivery.
• Identify what your audience lacks and fill that hole with your content or product.

That’s all well and sound advice.

If you’re like me, you bristled a bit upon first hearing this. I don’t want to write in a niche. The world is my canvas or stage or oyster — something like that. I’ll write what I want to write about and you can’t stop me.

Here’s the thing: I’m the kind to buck authority for the sake of the bucking. I fight for a bit before remembering that advice is not the same as an attack. Most advice comes from a place of experience, wisdom, and those that have already found all the ways to fail.

A niche is not as limiting as one would think.

The most common reason given for finding and staying in your niche is that it gives your readers something to expect. Your views translate to readers that stay.

You might be an excellent writer across many different topics — your general expertise wide and varied. But if someone loves your hot take on the latest bitcoin drama but does not have one hoot to give about your scene by scene analysis of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, it’s going to make for a fickle follower.

Readers, you and I included, are greedy little things. We demand our content feeds us something. What that is will be different for every reader and every day. While I might want to feel some connection with the author one day, the next I’m not in the mood for touchy-feely, thinky-thoughts, and want my questions on how to find a niche answered.

Thus I’ll follow different writers for my varying needs. And how do I know I can look to specific writers to meet my needs? Niches. I know what to expect because those authors and writers reliably produce within their niches.

Ok, fine, you say. You’ll agree you need a niche. Luckily, you can probably even afford to maintain a couple of niches, and your readers will be understanding.

But how does that not become limiting?

And, more importantly, how the hell do you find your niche?

Niches are misunderstood creatures. Less about strict notions of content and more about creating an expectation, niches can be vast. You can write about nearly any topic so long as you are directing it toward a specific audience and meeting their particular needs or delivering on wants.

Take the writing niche as a case study. On the surface, it may feel like there is nothing more you can add. I mean, how many more articles about adverbs could the world really need?

But niche writing is less about content and more about what? Audience. Exactly.

Writers need marketing, investment, promotion, motivation, time management, productivity, business strategy, SEO, pop culture, and a whole range of other ideas in our reading list. We wear a lot of hats; thus, we’ll have questions all over the place.

Your particular brand of writing niche content may refine this massive, broad genre. You might resound well with writers with kids, writers launching a podcast, or writers with mental health issues because of the content you can offer. You can narrow down your audience in a broad niche like writing. Over time your voice will grow, and your name will become synonymous with your subject.

Ultimate niche success!

What I did right up there in that last paragraph drew this entire article into my niche. Up until that point, it could have gone in a few different directions — start-ups, marketing, writing, product development. By referencing the act of writing and making this otherwise nebulous topic about writers specifically, I made it about my known readership — I’ve provided a connection point for you (probably a writer), a chance to nod and go “Yeah! I understand this! Thanks, Gwenna!”

So, all that brings us to that harder question. How do you find your niche? I have good news and bad news.

It’s actually pretty easy to find your niche.

It’s just not very quick for most of us.

For a select few of us, we come to this world of blogging and content writing pre-equipped with a niche. It might have been born of a previous career or a lifetime’s experience. It might be that you’ve spent your entire life devoted to the old family business and you have so much to offer the world about jellybeans. But when you decide to launch the writing portion of your career, the niche is pretty easy to narrow down.

Ultimately, we write what we love. But, as humans, we tend to love a whole bunch of things. I’m a parent, a wife, and a professional writer. I have hobbies and histories that I could write about that run the gamut of wildly overdone out to downright bizarre. I’ve run a hockey team and a science museum, escaped an abusive relationship and found true love, and lived on welfare and now own my own business. I could go in a few different directions with my niching.

I’d be willing to bet money your life, love, and experience could take you down just as many roads. Probably more.

So, again, we ask, how the hell do you pick a niche?

I recommend the flying spaghetti technique. When you are first starting up, accept that success will likely not come skittering in at you just because you are now a writer. Know that your first weeks or, in my case, months aren’t going to find a lot of traction.

The early days of blogging or content writing are your prime time for experimentation. Write about what you need to write and what you love, blog about everything, experiment with styles, audiences, topics, and niches. Pick up a handful of word-based spaghetti, fling it at the wall, and see what sticks.

Most websites offer some version of statistics in readership and engagement. If you are writing on Medium, their stats page is pretty to the point.WordPress also offers a brilliant little snapshot of which of your writings seem to be striking a chord with readers. If your platform doesn’t provide these types of tools, look into Google Analytics or SumoMe.*

Once you get your little anti-niche rebellion out of the way, you can use those stats to seems to attract readers. You’ll likely start to see a pattern emerge: what appears to attract readers and what keeps them around. Write more about that. Watch your readership grow.

Congrats! You found your sticky noodles. You found your niche. It might be apparent within a few weeks of writing and flinging. It might take longer. In my case, I found the noodles on the wall pretty early but was still violently bucking the advice.

To wrap it up: niches are not about dictating topics but relating to your reader. Your niche will, without a doubt, be within something you love. Experiment with wild abandon, and it will make itself pretty visible.

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Gwenna Laithland is an independent journalist, humorist, and freelance writer in Oklahoma. She writes contemporary sci-fi and is working on her debut novel, Beyond the Sky.