How do I present myself and my work if I'm unable to clearly target a niche? I love writing spiritual and motivational topics, yet I cannot carve out a niche or topic.
The only thing I know is people like what I write and share it a lot organically on my Facebook. I would love to get more information, especially if you're a successful author or blogger.
This is a great question! I think I've seen some of your other questions here as well. Let me try to help you out. My name is Humberto Valle, I'm the co-founder of a global marketing agency (www.Unthink.me) we help startups and small businesses with an expertise in non-tangible products and services; like yours for example.
This is great timing because we just wrapped up a slack conversation with the founder of The Hustle, Sam Parr. Their team offers content as a service, so they are a media company providing useful information with a niche focused on humor but their content ranges and is often very very helpful for its readers. It seems to me that you too are in the media business itself but haven't discovered that yet.
They had a strategy from the get go, Sam Parr told us that even though they knew they wanted that humor help niche they had to adjust their deliver as they went. *** This adjustment comes at different times for different people, yours might be now***
You already have a niche - SPIRITUAL MOTIVATION
now your immediate next effort needs to be find your blue ocean within that niche - an area or industry that houses the most people who need this type of content - you can make a list of jobs/life stages such as pregnancy, divorce, coping with death, disability, VA, etc and pick the ones you can relate to or have a lot of interest and or knowledge in...
you could also pick one that is something you want to learn eagerly and your BLUE OCEAN media is motivational content for your own growth and use yourself as a case study - such as blogging about yourself and publishing self help books on that one area.
If you are a funny person try making your blue ocean a funny spiritual motivational author - now that's a blue ocean strategy to follow.
WHAT'S A BLUE OCEAN?
I've dropped this a few times now, so just in case - a Blue Ocean is a strategy methodology discovered by Chan Kim and Renee Maugborne (Corporate Strategists) that showcases how niches aren't good enough and how metrics based off competition aren't good enough for sustainability. A Blue Ocean is not a niche, but a completely newly created market space not previously served. Red Oceans are bloody with competition and noise while Blue Oceans although smaller are much better for ROI and incumbents such as yourself. The key to growth is finding a niche and then the blue ocean of that niche.
OUR BLUE OCEAN
At Unthink our niche was startups and small businesses and our Blue Ocean is leap in value for low budgets - we let our clients negotiate their subscription fee. It affects business processes such as I had to build a team of engineers, graphic artists and marketers that would work with me and work their bones for pennies on the dollar to deliver value to small and struggling companies. We do what we can for that client even if we lose financial ROI that month - on average we increase profit margins month over month.
Finding your niche is not enough, this can often confuse you because you tend to then find competitors and try to mimic their own efforts and even get discouraged by not getting the same results - try finding a niche and then a blue ocean (a twist, oxymoron, reduce industry standard cost, increase standard value, eliminate fluff in typical offerings, and create new offerings - could your content be better in GIFs? or Mobile App or as a Table Game?
ON IMPLEMENTATION
Your content online can be a marketing channel to drive traffic to promote the end product - but you won't find that product unless you have the blue ocean approach first. Otherwise you may find yourself writing content for the sake of writing and that's not cool for business.
Sometimes in order for your content to scale and go viral you just need the right channel - when it comes to inbound marketing (which is what we do) we call this "Content Recycling" - we may write a good article or how to and published it as text and after a few weeks if it gets a decent traction we may create a slide or video out of the original text article - sometimes that will generate even more traction that the original, sometimes the content should be acted or on interview form, specially if your written content is long.
The structure of the content itself is important, headlines for SEO and readability, good relatable non-stocky images are also a factor for increased shares and subscribers.
Facebook is a good channel but it shouldn't be your hub, invest in a good platform to build your community in a controlled space, Facebook is its own ecosystem and is hard to export validation and growth elsewhere from FB to the rest of the global (internet) community.
Once you have your niche, one thing that we do as inbound marketers is create content for our personas. Let's say you write for professionals who work 24/7, have no time for vacations, have lost their families, been divorced, haven grown in years, etc - you may write for each of these phases of their journey - share snippets of your content or article and get them to subscribe to receive the article you wrote, this helps you build a list you can send a next phase article to them... as you grow your list you can get sponsored updates, promos, and sell your own work as well.
I hope this helps a bit, if you can do me a favor please follow me on twitter @HumbertoVee or Facebook at www.facebook.com/iwillunthink - if you have any questions please feel free to message me :)
One way you can approach this is to allow your niche to announce itself.
1) Start blogging.
2) Ensure your pages are SEO'ed correctly - mobile friendly + no HTML syntax errors + LD-JSON is correct + site's verified + sitemap is correct, your site runs latest LAMP + HTTP2/ALPN SSL, to name a few. Ensure all your onsite SEO is 100% correct.
3) Run small amounts of paid traffic to many of your pages. I suggest Outbrain for this.
4) Run Adsense on your pages.
The combo of #3 + #4 will likely create a profit stream or at least, neutralize... so your income pays for your traffic.
5) As your natural traffic increases, look at your Google Analytics to determine how people are searching to arrive at your pages.
Consider the most prevalent search criteria + formulate your niche from this data.
So in essence, let your readership tell you your niche.
