How Do I Pick a Niche When I Have So Many Interests?

The question isn’t which interest to keep. It’s where they make sense together.

When you have a lot of interests and things you love, how do you choose only one?

It can feel like abandoning parts of yourself that are important to who you are.

Do you choose the thing you do best? The thing you’ve done the longest? The thing you think could make the most money?

And how do you choose something that could actually work without trapping yourself in a niche you’ll hate creating content six months from now?

This is one of the most common problems I see when people are trying to choose a niche.

It’s also one of my favorite things to work on.

The first thing I look for is a common thread.

Sometimes the common thread is what you do.

Sometimes it’s how you do it.

That second part can be much harder to see.

The way you approach things may feel completely normal to you because you’ve been doing it your whole life. Your strengths, the things people come to you for, the way you solve problems or explain things may be obvious to everyone around you and almost invisible to you.

It’s much easier to see those patterns from the outside than when you’re standing in the middle of your own life.

There are more rooms than you think

When I was working through my own discovery process, I started typing different combinations of interests into search just to see what was out there.

And sure enough, there were entire niches around combinations I wouldn’t necessarily have expected.

Millions of people following completely different things.

There are people happily consuming all of it.

That changed the question for me.

Instead of asking:

Which one of these interests should I keep?

I started thinking:

Where do these things make sense together?

Because there isn’t one room.

There are a lot of rooms.

And finding your niche is partly about finding the room where the things you care about make sense to the people already inside it.

If you find the right room, you’re going to find your people.

Look at the angle instead of the thing

Sometimes several interests fit together much better than they first appear.

I have a client who is an instructional designer, artist, teacher, computer programmer and linguist.

At first glance, that sounds like several completely separate directions.

But there is a thread.

He is now making a computer-animated movie while documenting the process so he can teach other people what worked, what failed, what frustrated him and what helped bring the project to life.

And he can teach it in three languages.

Suddenly, those separate abilities aren’t competing with one another.

They’re working together.

That is what I mean by looking for the thread.

The niche isn’t always one neat category waiting for you to pick it.

Sometimes it’s the project that gives several parts of you somewhere to go.

Sometimes it’s your perspective.

Maybe no matter what you’re doing, you naturally teach.

Maybe you’re the person who experiments with everything and reports back.

Maybe things constantly go wrong and somehow become funny stories everyone wants to hear.

The subject can change.

The angle may be what makes the content feel like it all belongs to the same person.

Pay attention to what keeps pulling you back

There are probably things you’ve never really gotten tired of.

Things you read about when nobody makes you.

Things you’re still willing to learn about years later.

I’ll bet there is at least one subject you can talk about much longer than the person who asked the question intended.

Pay attention to that.

Also pay attention to what happens when you start creating.

Some ideas produce more ideas.

You finish one post and immediately think of another.

You try something and want to know more.

Other subjects feel like work before you’ve even started. You keep telling yourself you should make content about them, but every time you sit down to do it, you dread it.

That’s valuable information.

You can absolutely find your direction by trying things and watching what gives you energy and what creates friction.

And sometimes the hardest part is seeing the pattern for yourself.

That is one of the reasons I created the Signal Profile.

You answer a short set of questions, and your answers are analyzed for patterns and connections. From there, I create a starting direction for your brand based on you, not a generic formula.

The Profile includes niche possibilities, content direction and other places to begin.

The Signal Profile is $59.

Picking a niche is less about narrowing yourself down and more about finding where you already fit.

Which leaves the harder question. What is the thread running through everything you have ever been drawn to? Most people cannot answer that about themselves, and the ones who can usually heard it from someone else first.

If this changed how you think about branding, subscribe to get the next Foundation as it’s published.