Before you can begin branding yourself online, you will need to be very deliberate about zeroing in on that sweet spot and clearly defining your niche. And you can’t determine that niche until your area of expertise is fully established.
But it’s not enough to say, for instance, that you’re a makeup artist and your expertise is makeup application. You’ll need to narrow things down to a specific niche. What’s your specialty? What part of makeup application do you focus on? Is it special effects makeup? Do you concentrate on darker skin tones? This focus will make you stand out from the millions of other makeup artists who are online right now.
Continuing with our makeup example, artist Keita Moore got things right. By combining his love of art with his love of makeup, Moore can create looks fit for a museum. His client list includes people like NeNe Leakes and Fantasia Barrino.
Moore specializes in airbrush makeup, which puts him in a class all his own. Add the fact that he’s a male in a female-dominated industry, and you’ve got a guy who was able to successfully carve a niche that was unique and ripe for domination.
Ultimately, Moore loves what he does, and that’s a huge piece of finding a niche; but it’s not everything. Once you’ve determined that you’ll be passionate about sharing and creating content around your niche, you’ll need to determine if there’s even a need or market for it.
Keyword Research Can Help You In Finding Your Niche
You may be passionate about cake decorating, but a quick search on Google’s Keyword Planner will tell you that as many as 100,000 searches for cake decorating happen every month, which would mean that you’d have a lot of competition.
On the flip side, you may feel, as a cake decorator, that you can narrow your niche down to sugar crafting. Maybe you’re really good at turning hardened sugar into penguin sculptures. But if you head back to do some keyword research, you’ll find that as little as 100 searches for sugar crafting are happening every month, which would imply that, unfortunately, no one really gives a damn about your cute little sugar penguins.
As you can see, taking the time to do a little keyword research is an essential part of finding a niche that you will dominate in – a niche with little competition but tons of searches. It’s within this area you’ll find your sweet spot.
