Want to know why picking a niche is so hard? It’s fear (it’s always fear). Before we have any chance of picking a niche – or anything else for that matter, we need to get over our natural fear of risk vs results. Let me explain:
In Michael Lewis’ book “The Fifth Risk”, he explains perhaps the most boring topic ever – how the USA federal government works. To remove the boring aspect of it, he used the big idea of tying it in with something else – in this case Donald Trump.
When you put two massive entities like that together: Trump, who takes risks with everything, and the federal government (which is meant to do the opposite), you set off a conflict time bomb.
Lewis had no idea he would write that book (or any of his other best selling books). They happened by chance. Whenever he gets an idea, he scribbles it down and stores it in a pile of ideas.
Then one day, when he’s ready for a new project, he rifles through his ideas and writes a test piece (around 10,000 words).
If he’s still interested, he may go on and create a book, if not, he discards it.
Every book he writes (which is often on unrelated topics) is the equivalent to you and me of picking a new niche.
He has the luxury of using trial and error because he doesn’t need the money – something he knows a lot about having written The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and several other books about Wall Street.
And that’s the most common problem when it comes to choosing a niche – the fear of picking the wrong one and wasting what little time and money we have left before we might have to consider rejoining the rat race.
This tells us one thing: if we’re not going to be picky about choosing a niche because we’d rather write about anything than face having to go back to a JOB, then we need to pick a niche that is proven to be lucrative, is massive enough to take on new competition, and one that does not require a PhD to understand it.
We’ll explore that in part 3. Meanwhile, let me know in the comments what niche you’d happily write about if someone were to give you a signed blank cheque.
How To Find The Perfect Niche. Part 2 [Copywriting Niches]
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