In my line of business I'm privileged in gaining access to great minds.
Only the other day I was in conversation with Spence Wilson, son of Kemmons – the guy who created Holiday Inn. We talked at length about the importance of providing your clients with service beyond expectations, and the providence of planning. He'd correctly predicted the changing face of the consumer and fine-tuned his product while others in the hospitality industry sat still. Like father, like son.
Today I enjoyed an hour with Rosanne Zusman, officially one of the greatest minds in sales and marketing. She's a brand girl, and we chatted through how any company – small or big – can propel themselves to the top of their field by staying loyal to their values, creating a personality that resonates from bottom to C-suite, and finding that special something that sets them apart from the rest of the pack.
JetBlue, Nordstrom, Microtel and Zappos are famous names that each stay firm on their principles and have defined an almost humanistic deviation from standard corporate practice. Have your customers empathise with you and you're on the way to cracking the greatest mystery of marketing: the path to converting clients to brand evangelists. As Rosanne explained: "Customer revies are the new advertising".
What the hell does this mean to you? Well think back to the paragraph before last. That 'special something setting you apart from the pack'.
Ever heard of 'niche'?
Nice is nice because it's the only way to amplify your message and personal brand above the forests of blogs and businesses too idle to find an element of uniqueness.
In the first of a three-part series in a regular series called Weekend Workshop, we try to answer this question: Why go niche?
1. Let's look at that personality thing in depth. The only blogs worth reading are those that gel with your emotions. You have to get it. The pixels popping with syllables have to resonate and provoke you – good or bad. Simply, if you don't know what you're talking about, your personality is as dead as a crumpet. So revive yourself and your readers by jabbering about what you do best.
2. Niche is all about the detail. And detail matters more than you know, if traffic is your game. If you're confident about your subject, you can go to town with the content. The content that people will flock to. If you can inspire people to take action, then you're in super-niche territory, and that's for another day. But put simply, create descriptive content with authority and you'll take your blog into overdrive.
3. It's like nothing you've ever seen before. The crux of the niche blog is its exclusivity. When you drop in on a blog authored by an expert in the scene, you instantly fall in line with their core beliefs, values – and desires. You can lead a tribe with a niche blog. You can change the world with a niche blog.
4. It's not a blog without niche. So there it is, on the line – I truly opine that unless you're writing about a specialist topic, yours is just a personal journal. A manifesto for life is always interesting: to a point. But face it – unless your name is Netenyahu are you really going to gather a crowd round your makeshift podium? Forget it. Forget any reason you got into this gig unless it involves doing it for ego or an archive that your kids can look at and laugh. Oh, and even if that's your motive, you're probably out of luck because you're bound to forget about renewing that domain name and before too long the screen burn from those words you've been staring at will have faded away.
5. Selling is buying in niche. Folks hate to be sold to, but they love to buy, right? I just bought my first ever eBook from IttyBiz because I felt like This Was It when it came to a fulcrum of all the essential elements that I myself hold dear about blogging and marketing. If you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that your ingredients are sugar and spice rather than filthy smoke and rancid cheese, that you blog with integrity, openness and honesty, then you got me suckered. And the only way you can achieve all these things is with the passion that comes with operating out of your skin, in a sphere of knowledge that resembles a niche.
6. Time, gentlemen, please. A niche is a staggering way to waste your time. Until you reach Breakthrough. When you combine a niche with Breakthrough – let's call that the moment your RSS subscriber tally reaches 100 – you're unstoppable. All the anguish, recalcitrance and cerebral pausing that defined the first phase of your growth, fades away and you become something approximating a brand. Strong, robust, firm. Like a big cock. And with folks hanging off your wisdom.
7. Think of yourself. If you're going to be something special, it takes . And since you know yourself better than most people – except those voices caterwauling in your head in the middle of the night about Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia.
8. Learn, baby, learn. Self-development. Greater level of awareness. Developing a network of fellow thinkers and movers who in return for your bright ideas will share with you theirs. Now do you see why everyone benefits when you focus on what you love?
9. Being inspirational works. I'm not about to play the betting game and say Bill Gates wouldn't be able to speak lucidly about knitting for a half-hour but, y'know, I think it's kinda unlikely. Or maybe he pearled one too many while he was waiting for the computer room to vacate so he could get to grips with his coding. Either way, I'm sure he'd prefer to ramble on about his charitable Foundation or the glory days for Microsoft. And you can definitely bet he'd draw a sizeable audience if he ever started blogging about them. Inspirational sells: take a look at the clothes and cars Anthony Robbins moves around in if you haven't yet discovered the value of motivating people. If you're talking your language, you're serving up an intriguing concoction of relevance to others who follow your field of interest. Go make it worthwhile.
10. Find new opportunities. If you can be genuinely original, insightful and generous with everything you do online, you're but destined to yield what you sow. Fantastic repercussions, offers of partnerships, formidable testimonials and powerful gratitude that will take you places you never even dreamed of.
Now are you interested in niche? Stay tuned, because tomorrow we'll talk about how to find yours…
