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MenuAs an author, if people like what I write, but I'm unable to find a niche, how would I launch my writing?
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.
Answers
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.
Why dont you approach a publisher?
The answer to this question is two-fold. Firstly, what's your best answer so far as to what your niche is based on your experience and expertise? Secondly, what is your audience most interested in and responding to? The answer to this will be a sweet spot in the middle. I find that often it simply takes an outside perspective to be able to narrow down a niche. Also remember, you can have more than one niche, as long as you write about them separately. Hope this helps! Happy to answer any further questions.
Related Questions
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What are the best practices for heading in the right direction if you're struggling to find a niche in the spiritual/motivational field for a blog?
General Motivation for a general audience sounds like a hard focus point. Try breaking down- all motivation have singular aspects outside of faith and religion. What are your topics? Relationship, Career, depression/Mental illness, etc? Sometimes there's a need to talk things through to fully understand what it is you have rather than switching focus. I've been to art school, I've proofread and guided lots of writers through this- the creative process takes some analysis, but sometimes you're just too close to see what's right in front of you. Take a step back, do some general blogging. Tumblr is great for becoming engrossed in various cultures- the motivation culture is one of them! Take time to know the general community and that will help.PQ
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Can I expect book sales if I upload my ebook on Kindle Direct Publishing and do nothing to promote it?
While you might be able to expect initial sales from family and friends who know about it, actual sales from people stumbling upon your book depends on a few factors when you upload it. 1.) Have you chosen the correct keyword phrases and categories? 2.) Are these categories extremely competitive? 3.) Did you incorporate these specific keywords and categories in your title, subtitle, and book blurb?(Note: not everyone can finagle a way into putting the word thriller in their title, but some can do it in their subcategories although at times that may seem too sales pitchy, not that anyone but authors who know what you're doing would notice or even care). 4.) Do you have between one-hundred to three-hundred people ready to buy your book when it is released? (family, friends, subscribers) When you can sell around that many copies the first three days of your release, Amazon's free marketing kicks in. Hot New Releases List, Those Who Bought This Book...etc. That's pretty much awesome sauce if you can manage it. 5.) Does my amazon page look inviting? 6.) Is there too much front matter before the actual sample chapter begins, thus impeding your readers from getting into the book right away? If the answers to these questions are a big fat no,(or a big fat yes to questions 2 and 6) then uploading your book and walking away from it is going to get you nowhere. You essentially need to take your writer's cap off and get serious about marketing. An indie author doesn't get to be complacent in that respect. Becoming a book marketing guru can be daunting and overwhelming when looking at it as a whole, and figuring out where to start has made many authors give up before giving it a chance. Which is why I am super happy to be answering this question for you. Not that you asked how to market your book. I suppose I've basically answered your question, but I'd like to take it a step further and give you a place to start so you aren't flailing around in the deep quagmire of marketing do's and don'ts. Amazon's search engines are designed to find books listed under popular categories and niches so keywords are going to be your best friend. One book that is absolutely stellar at explaining the process behind researching keywords is a book called Making a Killing on Kindle(Without Blogging Facebook Or Twitter) and another book called How to Sell Fiction on Kindle. The Reader's Digest version is this: go to Amazon.com and start typing in your genre in the search tab. The goal is to take your main genre and find subcategories that are popularly searched on Amazon. So when I type in the word Thriller I get "thrillers in books, mysteries and thrillers new releases 2016", etc. Now type in "thrillers a" and you get "thrillers and suspense books" etc. these top key phrases are the ones that are searched the most by people interested in that genre. Now try typing in "thrillers b" and you get "psychological thrillers books" and other key phrases, but this is an important thing to discover. Many people are searching for psychological thrillers. Does your book fall under that category? Is it a psychological thriller, a serial killer thriller, or possibly some other type of thriller that can be narrowed down to a specific niche? This can be a long and arduous way to research keywords and phrases, which is why I think grabbing those books that I mentioned above and memorizing the very dickens out of them is a great beginning for your marketing guru journey. Why? Because most of the research has been done for you, and you get a list of the most highly ranked keyword phrases for your specific genre...all current. You are also given instructions on simple html coding to help make your amazon page sparkle. I hope this information is helpful for you, and good luck with your book. I hope you are able to get it uploaded and visible on kindle as soon as possible. If you’re interested in learning more about the best practices on marketing your books feel free to visit me on my website at The Blond Guerrilla: Guerrilla Marketing, Writing, and Self-Publishing Your Book. http://theblondguerrilla.com Or set up a call and we can work on a plan to help you sell your books. I’m always excited to help fellow authors in their quest to get their books discovered. Happy marketing my author friend!CA
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Personal branded domain (mattpeplinski.com) or a branded domain (empiricspirit.com) to promote books?
Both domains are very important. I suggest that you use both of them in different ways. If you believe that your empiric spirit domain is a "company" that you would like to support in social media and in articles, etc., for years to come, support it on its own domain separately from your personal domain. However, I surmise that your personal domain is where you will (and, in my opinion, should) be driving up your social media presence and content. So, I recommend that you direct all book traffic there. So, create a subdomain for your site, or a subfolder, and "point" your book domain to that subfolder. Write about the book in your social media and blog, and all traffic will come where you want it to ultimately come - your website. It's important to maintain a website for the success of your book - for informational purposes, and to show people where to purchase the book. But it is important that you use social media like a pro, and become a guest blogging expert and frequent guest on radio programs... Those things matter much more. Direct all traffic where you want using bitly links, and track what is most effective. Good luck! Enjoy the journey :)KG
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What are some ways you balance your energy?
Setup great goal to utilize that energy, Meditation and Self believe is best approach to get it done. Don't compare yourself with anyone.NS
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As an author (non fiction), is it better to brand your domain name around your name or around a concept?
In my opinion, I would consider your long-term goals. If your plan is to build a brand around yourself and become established as a major influencer, it certainly makes more sense to go that route. On the flip side, your low hanging fruit is to build a brand around the concept by which you intend to cover. For example, Start With Why became a household name and Simon Sinek has built an entire company around that premise. It comes down to what aligns and resonates with you and what you intend to accomplish. Hope this is helpful, all the best!CH
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