What You Should Know Before Choosing to Write for a Niche Market

home

What You Should Know Before Choosing to
Write for a Niche Market

Should you write articles that will appeal to a broad audience or to a niche market?

Should you be a Generalist or become the Specialist or Expert in your field?

Let’s compare the advantages of becoming the Specialist versus the Generalist.

Advantages of Specialisation:

1. Specialised knowledge

You can quickly write expert articles that demonstrate your deep understanding of your subject.
You can communicate in the jargon of your target market.
You can recycle concepts and data so you don’t need to start from scratch every time you write an article.

2. Less competition

You can dominate your niche at a lower cost. It can very expensive to bid for keywords in some competitive markets.
You can position and brand yourself much easier with less competition.
You can easily keep tabs on your few competitors.

3. Market research

You can increase your efficiency and productivity because you only need to do one market research to produce a lot of articles.
You can easily keep up-to-date with trends when you deal with only a small target market.
You’ll save time by being familiar with the resources available in your field including relevant contacts.

4. Expert status

Your reputation will command respect and draw people to you. People will want to be associated with you.
You’ll be in-demand as you become the authority. People will approach you instead of you cold calling them.
You can charge more when you are the Specialist in your field.

Advantages of being a Generalist compared to a Specialist:

You’ll never get bored. There will always be something new to discover.
You’ll never run out of ideas and become stale with the unlimited range of writing topics available.
You have flexibility. You won’t be pigeon-holed so you can change writing direction and still command the same respect.
You’ll have more security. Trends and competitors are of little threat to you as you’re not locked into a dead-end area of expertise.
You can benefit from cross-pollination applying knowledge gained from one area to another.
You will be perceived as open-minded and multi-skilled.

Should you choose to be a Generalist or a Specialist? It’s a matter of personal preference. Yes, Specialists can command higher fees but their livelihood can be short lived at the mercy of trends and a smaller group of followers.

Some writers have solved this dilemma by taking different pen names. They’ve built a solid reputation in different areas without looking like a jack-of-all-trades.

Henriette Martel is a website strategist, consultant and Director of the Australian Training Guide. She is also the author of 200 Marketing Ideas for Your Website and Speed Article Marketing.

--------------

You can reproduced this article in your magazine or newsletter so long as it is reprinted in full (no editing) to the above line. It should contain authorship and copyright information as well as the URLs.