How to Pick a Niche for Content Curation

Today we’ll talk about how to select a niche to curate.

Maybe you’re someone who has a product or service or idea and you want to know how to down to a specific niche and actually monetize the strategy.

Another type of person who might ask this question a lot is the someone that wants to start a separate site curating stuff around a specific niche and needs some tips on how to do that.

Hone in Your Target Market

So let’s start by talking about marketing at a high-level view point and why a lot of times the biggest mistake people make when they go out to find their target market is selecting too wide or too big of a target market.

Really the first thing you should do is try to hone that target market to the smallest addressable size you can. Because what that allows you to do is spend your time, your resources, and your focus on being the single best resource for that group of people or for that niche.

For instance, let’s say you want to design a shoe. You really want to figure out what kind of shoe you going to design right but now you want to hone that shoe down to a subset of people first.

Example:

I’m going to design a shoe; it is going to be a sandal with flowers on it.

Then your task is to go find the people that like sandals with flowers on them.

That will help you focus your mind on ideas like, “Maybe I should go to a sea based resort somewhere because that is where people would appreciate that”

And a lot of times what and the basis that I see when I when we do in our consultations in and with our clients is often times their target is much too wide and their messages that they are putting out are too broad focused where what they need to do is hone in their messaging around niches

Now that’s the same way with curation. I saw a site recently that all it reviewed was knobs. Yes knobs. If you have ever seen high-end stereo and audio equipment you will see that there are a lot of knobs to adjust audio settings.

This site reviewed how the actual knob performed and if you have ever touched some of these high-end stereo equipment set-ups you know there is a high class feels, they move in a smooth motion, the whole functionality behind it, the sound they make, if they make any sound.

So all this site did is review knobs. It did not review the overall component itself, it did not review anything else, and it just reviewed how the knob felt, how they turned, some of the challenges with it.

This knob review site is a great example of kind of setting yourself apart but also picking a niche to curate because it’s unique and it’s very focused. You know that angle that someone’s coming from when trying to find information about audio equipment knobs.

But the great thing is that review site actually created buzz because it was so unique. I haven’t checked the site lately but I bet if they wanted to they could expand their offering or at least their curation of reviews because they became known for this one particular thing.

It works the same way for when you’re looking for niche. Trying to start with the smallest addressable size you can. Meaning and we kinda gave an example with the sandals, but if you’re going to curate stuff try to bring it down to each level.

Thinking in Hierarchies

Think about these things as levels are hierarchies. Each market has its own set of categories and subcategories so a lot of times it’s trying to figure out how to get a niche market that you can basically own that you can be the single best resource for.

So that’s really the only secret. If you’re wondering, “How do I select a niche”. It really is just the process of deciding on what your higher-level hierarchy is and then keep going down, going down, going down, until you find an addressable niche that you can focus on and that you can own.

So Many Choices?

That is if you’re looking for a niche. I will say that if you’re looking to market yourself, your product or idea, sometimes going that far into a niche isn’t the smartest thing to do.

It may be a smart thing to do on the marketing side, right, but it’s not the smartest thing to do on the curation side because a lot of times in your niche, the people you’re going after, are interested in a wider swath of topics and if you just subset those topics in Curation you’re missing the larger topics available for your niche.

What I’m basically saying is that if you go to fine within your niche and you curate stuff that is in too fine of detail and that is all that you curate, you run the risk of alienating other people in your niche.

Generally that’s the other common mistake we see and that is for someone who is not looking to monetize their site.

A good example is a let’s say I am looking to curate stuff on trading and there’s different trading styles like scalping, day trading , forex, but it is smartest to focus on just one of those trading styles and each subsets with in that style instead of the entire trading market.

Don’t Forget About Monetization

Also, before picking a niche, think about you sales funnel, think about your monetization strategy. This is something we always come back to on this show. We talk about monetization and one of the biggest mistakes I see people make with content marketing, curation is content marketing, is they don’t think about monetization first.

They don’t think “What is the path to purchase, how am I going to monetize my efforts”

Where is the monetization from? Is it going to be advertising, is it an email opt-in that I lead into other affiliate offers?

So think about monetization first before you dive into a niche and really spend all the building out a site and effort curating content.