How to Pick Your Niche for Content

TL;DR:

When we first start anything whether we're writing something, creating a product, whatever it is, generally the first draft has a ton of extra, unnecessary things in it.

When I was a freshman in college, I was hired to do an event video. I had a ton of ideas and this was going to be a killer video. I gathered a team of four different videographers and explained my grand plan to them.

The event lasted a weekend long and I made sure that I had at least one videographer at every single event to make sure we got everything. We ended up with over 40 hours of footage, and I had to go through all that footage and cut it down to a 4-minute highlight reel.

This ended up being painstakingly annoying and unnecessarily long. I had to pull two all nighters just to get it done on time and the quality was not good, because I was pulling all nighters to get it done. The people that hired me were satisfied, but I knew this wasn't anywhere near my best work.

Next year I was hired again for the same event. This time I didn't bring on any helpers. I decided I would do it all myself. I had a better idea of what I wanted and what the final product should look like, so I ended up getting much less than 40 hours of footage and the final product came out pretty good, I was satisfied with the work - and this time I didn’t have to pull any all nighters.

Now the following year, my third year doing this, I was pretty busy during the event so I had to be very conservative with how much time I spent recording. It forced me to plan out my shots and only get what I needed.

I was able to hop in and out of the event getting the shots I needed and then I was able to edit the whole video within a weekend. Based on my experience from the last 2 years I knew exactly the type of shots that they were looking for in the video and I spent all four of the minutes with those shots. They loved the video, and it was by far the easiest video I made to date.

My fourth year was the last year I did this event and this time was even easier. I got exactly the shots that they wanted, and I didn't spend time going through unnecessary footage or pulling all-nighters to edit.

The more experience I got under my belt, the more I knew what the audience was looking for. The clearer Vision I had of what the audience was looking for, the easier it was for me to get the footage I needed without wasting my time.

This is no different than any other content creation, you start off doing a bunch of things and as your audience responds you learn what they like and you keep doubling down until you have good content that resonates with your audience.

When we first started the Branding Deep Dive Podcast, the only thing we knew was that we wanted to do something in the branding space.

We didn't know who, if anyone, would listen to us. We just knew that we liked this type of content and this type of discussion so we decided to move forward with it. After we release the first few episodes and we shared it with our circles, we noticed who the content was resonating most with: brick and mortar small business owners and people looking to build their personal brand. Having this knowledge we were then able to create more content that served that audience.

If you listen to the intro in episode 60 vs episode 2 or episode 20, they're all different. As we took more swings at bat, we kept getting a better and better understanding of how to actually hit the ball. As we kept creating more content we got clearer and clearer on who our audience was and what type of content was resonating the most with them.

The key ingredient here is that we started before we had all the answers. In the content world you need to have a heavy bias for action along with A continuous improvement mindset to achieve the ever elusive content-market fit.

We will never reach perfection, but the only way we get closer and closer to perfection is by putting in the work. If you want to find clarity for your Brand's messaging, start putting out content and see what people respond to.

Find out what people are actually liking from what you're putting out and what people aren't liking. Double down on the things that people are liking.