Choosing a niche is one of, if not the most important decision you'll need to make as a content creator. Choose the wrong one, and you'll completely burn yourself out years later with minimal views to show for it. Choose the right one, however, And you'll be able to grow a successful YouTube channel and earn good money along the way, starting a business and connecting with the audience that most wants to hear from you.
So in this episode of Full Time YouTuber, I'm going to help you find your perfect niche. Whether it's with your YouTube channel or you post content elsewhere and you have the exact same dilemma. Of not knowing which niche to pursue. Then at the end of the episode, I'm going to share the biggest mistakes you should avoid when choosing a niche, because there are some big ones and they're going to completely sabotage your success from day one.
So you won't want to miss those. If you're new here, Hey, my name is. Ben, I'm a YouTuber and entrepreneur and I help new video creators start and grow their YouTube channels into a profitable business. And the first step in that journey of building a business out of your YouTube channel is finding your perfect niche.
Why is it important to pick a niche? Well, choosing a niche, especially if you choose the right one, is going to grow your channel a thousand times faster than not having one. Just let that sink in for a second. Choosing a niche is going to grow your channel a thousand times faster than just posting general content.
Choosing jetpack that will fuel you to your end destination. Because with that niche, you have so much more clarity and direction, and you'll be able to build so much more momentum. Compared to just being a generalist with no and destination in mind. So if you really do want to speed up that time equation and waste as little of it as possible on your content creation journey, it's a really good idea to choose a niche from day one.
This is because your audience is itchy. They've got itches in their hands, their arms, their legs, their abdomen and their head. Those itches are very specific. Itches that are tied to specific topics. For example, I remember when I first started getting into the Pokemon Go game. I became totally obsessed with this game.
I was playing it 24 7 and I just thought I was the world's best Pokemon Go player. But I couldn't figure out how to capture these really rare Pokemon. So I went onto YouTube. And I found a bunch of YouTube channels that covered Pokemon Go. I remember there was one channel in particular that helped me catch this rare Pokemon at lightning speed and gave me so much more value in other ways I could get the most out of the game.
And I became completely addicted to this channel. I remember waking up every morning, refreshing my YouTube to see if this guy had brought out a new Pokemon Go video with more tips and tricks. For me to be an even better Pokemon Go master. So at that point in time, Pokemon Go was my itch and this YouTuber scratched it perfectly.
And every niche out there is a kind of itch, just like this. At different times throughout your life, you often have different curiosities and interests, and they tend to be hyper specific. So when you see a podcast episode, a YouTube video, an Instagram reel. And it's on that hyper niche topic that you are so fascinated with at the time, it's so satisfying to have someone cover this topic and educate and inform you and give you value on that one itch you needed scratched.
And they did such a good job at it. Now, when you put yourself back into the perspective of a content creator and not just a consumer. When you can scratch your audience's itches by addressing their most common specific pain points, your follower base is going to grow faster than it ever has before and you'll keep them deeply satisfied in the process from scratching that itch really well and appealing to that one thing that they're seeking out information about.
Whereas, let's say I had an itch for Pokemon Go, and on YouTube I see a video about how to groom a cat. Is that scratching my itch? No, absolutely not. I'm sure that cat video would scratch many people's itches, but it was not my itch. And no matter how good that content creator was with the cat video, it wasn't my itch.
So I'm not going to get any value if I were to watch that video. So your job as a content creator is to be that itch scratcher, because when you can satisfy your audience deeply with really good scratching, They're going to be much more likely to take you up when you have a paid offer for them, a call to action, or when it comes to monetizing your channel.
These are the people that will have received so much specific value from you over the weeks, months, and years. That they will happily oblige since you've already given them so much value and they know, like, and trust you. Another reason having a clear niche will help you greatly is with content creation.
If I were to say to you, come up with a video idea, but I didn't give a specific topic. Would you feel like you can easily come up with a great video idea? My guess is probably not, or it would take a while to think of something. Whereas if I said, come up with a great video idea around your career, something that relates to your career.
That is on the topic of whatever your career is. Something tells me that video idea is going to come so much more easily to you than when there are unlimited options. So having a niche creates a boundary around the type of content you make and therefore it makes it much easier and you're able to think of video ideas then plan, shoot and edit them so much faster.
So what should you make your niche? That will scratch your audience's itch. And who are your audience? Well, this is where you'll need to be really self aware. And ask yourself, what are you an expert at? What do you know the absolute most about? What could you talk about for weeks? Months and years if you had to pick one topic that fulfilled all of those criteria What would it be most of the time this will be whatever the career is that you've pursued?
Since you're spending literally years of your life You would have gone through school college or university to become extremely knowledgeable about that topic And therefore it's your number one topic that you know the most about above all Now, keep in mind that with a career, it's not just the career that is the topic, but there are aspects of the career.
Like, for example, I have a background as a filmmaker and videographer. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I should start a YouTube channel about filmmaking and videography. Because those are topics that at one point in my life I was really passionate about, but right now I just kind of lost it. And I moved on to bigger and better things, but that's okay because what I really am passionate about is the core skill set behind those two things.
And that is creating videos. I've been making videos literally since I was 13 years old and I've done it nearly. Every day for the last 20 plus years. And when I think about a skill I'd be passionate about for a YouTube channel, it would be the art of creating videos as well as making money with them through starting a business.
So you may want to ask yourself, what are the elements of your career? If you don't like your career and you want to separate yourself from it, what are the sub skill sets that you learned that you. Think you could teach and make a YouTube channel about because chances are those are itches that many other people need to be scratched.
I know I've taken this metaphor way too far, but I really think it's relevant in terms of giving value to solve people's problems. It's like an itch and more often than not, when starting a YouTube channel, you're a problem solver and you're solving specific problems that people in your niche have. Now, if you really, really don't want to talk about your career or anything related to it, let's say you're doing a complete 180 and you want to start fresh, I totally get it.
That's fine. What you'll have to do instead is ask yourself, what is your number one passion? This really shouldn't take you long to answer because it's obvious. I know for me, my passions are making videos, entrepreneurship, health and fitness, and I'm sure you've got your own. So think about what your top three passions might be.
Could you start a YouTube channel around any of those three? Think about what you've gravitated back towards over the years. I can say with certainty that everything I'm doing now with my YouTube channel and starting the podcast really are interests and deep down fascinations I've had over the years that have shown up in one way or another.
For example, making content. I've always been obsessed with making videos. And I even remember making a podcast when I was like 15 years old, it wasn't actually a podcast, but I used to use the old version of iMovie, the very first one, and I put these soundscapes together where they had built in sound effects.
And I'd make these silly stories where I'd record a voiceover and play like. The sound of a horse neighing and then galloping off into the distance, and it was super silly. But it's kind of fate that I've come back there after 20 years, because that is an interest that has stayed with me. As has making videos, and entrepreneurship as well.
I've always gravitated towards business and entrepreneurship. Ever since I was a teenager, I remember coming up with so many business ideas, especially earlier in my life. I thought I could buy and sell wrestling merchandise, and that failed epically. I tried buying and selling phones online, and that also failed epically.
I started my own business as a videographer, and that did really well. And I've always been obsessed with that concept of how I can monetize something that I'm really passionate about. So what have you gravitated back towards over the years? Chances are it's something that would be in your top three passions.
And passion is really so important when it comes to content creation, because passion trend really does translate into the best content. When you can share your passion in a video or a podcast, I even feel myself getting really passionate while speaking these words, when you can get passionate. able to connect with your audience so much more effectively and deliver them so much more value because you're speaking with authority and enthusiasm and people really resonate with that.
Also, it feels good for me as the creator to be able to make content that I'm passionate about. So everyone wins when you're making content that you are truly passionate about. Of course, you want to make sure that you actually have expertise and credibility when you choose your niche. For example, I'm really passionate about gardening, but I've done a lot of experimenting and killed a lot of plants.
And I know that I wouldn't be qualified to start a gardening YouTube channel because my advice. Probably wouldn't be on point. I'd kill a lot of people's houseplants and that would be a bad idea. But with the other topics like making videos and entrepreneurship, I'm extremely qualified because I've been doing this my whole life.
Although I would say, don't feel like you have to be the world's number one expert at a topic because you absolutely don't. And the flip side of that is that it can put you into a perfectionism mindset. Where you feel like you're never qualified enough, therefore you should just never make any content.
Whereas in reality, if you're experienced enough that you can give good advice with certainty, video after video, then that's all you need. As long as the information you're giving you know is correct, then you should totally go ahead with the niche you chose. So have any ideas come up yet? Well, if they have, that's great.
The next step on this niche Choosing journey is to do market research. This is really important because you don't want to attach yourself to a niche that is dying or dead because that's going to waste a lot of time and you may find yourself having to change niches yet again because the niche didn't have enough growth potential.
So once you have some ideas, take a look on YouTube and see what others are making. Is there a lot of content out there? Are there a lot of creators posting daily or at least weekly content? And what types of numbers are those videos doing? While I don't necessarily advocate for choosing the niche with the most amount of views per video, I do think it is important to choose one where at least Some creators are doing well in terms of views.
Since on the backend of running a YouTube business, you need enough people at the top of your funnel to go through and take your calls to action and buy your products for you to be able to scale it into a profitable business. So it's important that you start with a big enough audience from day one, I'd say at the absolute minimum, you'd want a niche where after you've done this search, the videos that pop up are getting at least.
10 to 100, 000 views. Not every single video, but the top performing videos are getting somewhere in that range. That's a sign that if you play your cards right, you'll be able to get similar numbers to that one day. And that will be enough to grow your channel quickly and make money with it. It is also important to identify when there is a big demand.
But there's a gap in content creators making content about that topic. If you feel confident that there's a really big audience of people on another platform like Instagram or Reddit that is obsessed with one specific kind of content, and you know, your topic has a big following, but no one has yet made a.
Good YouTube channel around that topic. That may just be a gap in the market that you could fulfill. Of course, this is riskier since no one has been there before, but it could also be a sign that there's a gap in the market that you could fulfill. The next really important thing you'll need to evaluate during your market research is if this niche that you've chosen has monetization potential.
What do I mean by that? Are videos getting lots of views and therefore getting YouTube ad revenue? Are there a lot of products in that niche and therefore you could do brand deals and make affiliate income? Are the problems associated with your niche big ones that people are willing to pay money for?
Therefore, you could sell them online courses, coaching, consulting, physical goods, or other various products that they would actually have money to solve. Because in general, the bigger the problem you can solve for people, the more they're willing to spend for a solution. If you want to know all the ways that I recommend monetizing a YouTube channel, I wrote a free guide called my top 10 ways to make money with YouTube, which you can download completely for free in the show notes.
And in there, there's a whole bunch of ideas since as a YouTuber, monetizing your channel isn't just about choosing one single income stream. It's all about diversifying across several income streams. So 10 great ideas that you'll be able to measure up. if you are unhappy with your niche go against the niche you choose to see whether it has potential to be monetized.
One example of a niche that I don't think is a great one especially from a monetization perspective is Gaming. While gaming is a hugely popular topic no question everyone loves playing it. The problems of gamers are very small. People will not pay you more than about 20 if you were ever to offer an online product to them or solve their gaming problems in a one on one coaching session.
It's just really not the type of audience that monetizes well because the problems in that niche are very small compared to, say, relationship advice, where it can feel like the end of the world if things aren't going well in a relationship and therefore people are willing to pay top quality money.
Dollar for solutions to their problems. So it's important to think about it from that perspective. How big are the problems and will you be able to monetize this topic down the road? Now it's not to say that everyone that starts a YouTube channel has to do it for profit because there's lots of people out there that do it just for fun.
But I will say that if you want to be a content creator in the long term, this is unavoidable. We've all got bills to pay. We've all got a mortgage or rent and we've got to make money somehow. And making content is time consuming. And dedicating all that time to make content for your audience can turn into the equivalent of a part time or even a full time job that you're not getting paid for if you're not monetizing.
And unfortunately, that's not going to allow you to pay your mortgage and bills and so on. And this is really why I made this podcast to help creators monetize their channel. So I really do think it's important to keep this in the back of your mind, that this is a long term journey, and in order to do anything for a long time, it needs to be sustainable, and for it to be sustainable, you need to be able to pay the bills.
And then one day, hopefully when your channel does really well, you can live a great life and you can use your channel as a tool for building multiple revenue streams and making money while you sleep. Okay, so hopefully I've convinced you that it's a good idea to choose a monetizable niche. Again, you can download my free guide in the show notes if you want some ideas about how to get started with that.
Now I'm going to assume that at this point you've got an idea for your channel. Even if you're not 100 percent set on it yet, that's okay, because the next stage is testing it. Before you commit years of your life to building a channel around this one topic, make sure you post a few test videos to see if any of them resonate.
This is kind of in line with the market research stage where you're putting your ideas into action and really seeing what happens because an idea will only ever be a theory until you take action to prove whether it either does or doesn't work. And if you post a few videos and you feel like you're not hitting the mark, you're getting zero views.
You've always got the ability to pivot either slightly to the left or right, or do a complete 180, since you're still a brand new content creator, and your audience of two people will forgive you for completely changing topics. I do think it's important when you're building your channel to build a unique value proposition.
So think about what is going to make you stand out. Whether it's the niche topic that you've chosen or in the way you deliver the information. For example, I feel like my unique selling point, so I've built a channel around 360 cameras. So my unique selling point in the first six or so years of my YouTube channel was I made videos about 360 cameras.
But I did it in the fastest and most information dense way possible, where other creators were taking half an hour to even an hour or more to explain complex topics. I was able to do the same thing in five to ten minutes. And I truly feel like that's a skill I have with my YouTube videos, where I can really just cut to the chase and not waste anyone's time, tell them exactly what they need to know.
And nothing that they don't need to know. And I can edit my videos tightly in a fun and engaging way that helps even beginners understand complex topics around 360 cameras. So that was my unique selling point was in my storytelling ability. But a unique selling point can also be other things like making videos in a slightly different way to everyone else.
Maybe you make them in your car. Maybe you do 60 second only tutorials. Or maybe you find hyper specific videos. topics within the broader niche that you cover that all the other creators didn't think to cover. There are lots of different ways you can make your channel stand out from the crowd, because it's really important not to just go out and copy other people's channels verbatim, because that's going to make you blend in with them and every other creator in that niche.
So now that I've given you some ideas about how to find your niche and things you should do, Now I want to cover some common niche mistakes you must avoid, especially as a brand new channel. The first mistake is don't do a vlog. I know this might seem like weird advice, but when people don't know you, they're not going to care enough to watch your vlog.
They might accidentally click on your video and they'll think Who is this person to think that I care about their trip to the grocery store? I really think vlogs only work when the person is already very well known, where they've entertained a big audience, given a lot of value, and that makes their audience invested enough, from having enough of their itches scratched by this creator or person, that they want to know the more menial everyday Details of this person's life, but it's not a good way to build a channel from scratch because chances are your vlog is nowhere near as valuable as information you could share with people in a more informational style video.
The next mistake to avoid is covering multiple unrelated topics. So let's say you've identified a few of your passions. I went through this exact process with one of my coaching clients this week, where he told me that his interests were 360 cameras, dentistry. He loved history and trains, but he was thinking of making a YouTube channel where he shared the local.
Eateries and spots around his local area. And I just thought, what is this channel about? It's like five random topics and the chances of finding an audience that also share an interest in those five random topics are slim to none. If I tie it back to the opening where I say, you've got to scratch the audience's specific itch here, there were five separate itches on five completely unrelated topics that absolutely no one had.
So that's when we went back to my advice from earlier in finding what he was a world expert at, and it turns out he was a world expert dentist. Like, the best of the best. And I could see his eyes light up when we were on this call. He was like, when I inject people in the chair, they don't feel a thing, and they're amazed at how quick and painless it is.
Whereas when I see other practitioners having to go back and re inject a patient, it's a really bad look. Whereas with my method, I get happy customers every time. And just from hearing that alone, I said, Look, forget about all those other topics. We've clearly got a winner here. You're extremely experienced and extremely passionate.
This is the perfect topic for your YouTube channel. So again, you want to focus on scratching just one itch that people have. And the itchier it is, the better. Whereas those other unrelated topics like history and finding good local eateries are not really a big problem that people have. So knowing that provided a really clear direction for the path forward for him.
Now, mistake three follows on from covering multiple unrelated topics. And that is being too broad. If you're too broad, you're not going to be able to go into as much depth about specific problems people have. Because you're too busy trying to cover everything. And going into a lot of depth is what people really want.
They don't just want the surface level information, but they want to understand the topic inside and out. Let's say relationships for example. If you made your topic about relationships in general and nothing more. There's so much ground to cover there that you're Hey, how you doin my little fans? What's the fifth day, how you doin Still not there, you suck.
I feel, but yeah, I really should grow your vomits. So there's so many content that's missing today on just the sorts of things that type of make Depth of information over width of topics. And again, that will grow a channel a thousand times faster than being a generalist. When you can speak specifically to a specific type of person with specific problems.
On the flip side of that, the final mistake when choosing a niche is going to niche. This usually happens when people don't really do their market research before starting a channel. And they start a channel on a topic where there's very little to no demand. And then they choose a niche within that niche.
Let's say you started a channel on postage stamps. That's already a really niche topic that there's probably no videos on YouTube with 10, 000 to a hundred thousand views. And then the niche of a niche of that would be Australian postage stamps. The amount of people in Australia, I think we've got 26 million at the moment.
Who care about postage stamps is probably, like, 20, 000, I'm gonna guess. And of that, the people that care specifically about Australian stamps and not global stamps is probably, like, 5, 000 people. And those 5, 000 people might not even be on YouTube. They're probably too busy collecting stamps. So if you were to start a channel on something too niche like You're just going to be wasting your time unless you're doing it purely as a hobby, then you really need to avoid going too niche with your channel because it's going to allow no room for growth to a much wider audience.
Because don't forget you need to be able to think of content ideas every week. You need to post on Instagram and whichever other platforms outside YouTube that you want to post on. You need to be extremely passionate about the topic and there just needs to be a lot of depth there. A lot of itches that you can scratch for your audience.
And in really niche topics, there might be one or two, but that's it. You'll run out of ideas in two weeks and your channel will be done. All right, well, I hope I've shared some ideas that will help you find your niche as well as avoiding the most common mistakes. And with that said, I'm going to give you some homework, if you want to follow along.
And that is, if you haven't chosen a niche yet for your channel, Go ahead and choose one based on the criteria in this episode. If you need a refresher, just re listen to the episode. Then I want you to test out at least one piece of content and see if it gets any traction. Again, the early stages are all about market research.
So it's important that you test the theory and ideally you'll want to do this with a. Few videos and not just one, but even one is a great place to start. So make a piece of test content. Post it online, see if it gets anything. See if you enjoy the process of making it, and whether you feel passionate about the topic you're talking about.
If it doesn't hit the mark, that's fine. You can always try again next week with the different idea. And if you want some help in finding your niche, I do offer one on one coaching where I can guide you through this process in even more detail to help you find your perfect niche so you can build a profitable YouTube channel around it.
If that sounds good, feel free to book a free discovery call with me by following the link in the show notes. And I'd be happy to help you get the ball rolling with me. I hope you enjoyed this as well as chat about whether one on one coaching with me would be a good fit for you. So feel free to follow the link below to get started.
That's it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. I wish you all the success in the world and happy creating.
