“You grow rich in your niche.”

Classic advice, but is it true? Perhaps if you are creating a product. I’m not looking to create products. I’m more interested in content marketing through a blog or podcast. I have heard advice that says if you are going to start a blog or podcast, you need to narrow down your niche and only target the people who you know will be interested in your specific topic.

According to Jon Morrow in his latest podcast episode, this is BAD advice.

There is a distinction between product marketing and channel marketing. Product marketing should be targeted to a particular audience, but channel marketing should cast a much wider net. For channel marketing, you want to go as wide as you possibly can to capture as much of your audience as possible. You want to expand outward, even if it means reaching out to people who are not quite ready for your product or service yet.

The size of any audience is capped by demand. 

Traffic has to come from somewhere, either from shares or links or searches when it comes to organic marketing. If you pick a narrow topic that has a tiny audience, you are not going to get the traffic you want.

Take the three biggest mainstream topics:

• Health
• Wealth
• Personal growth

These three spaces have many websites, influencers, and searches on Google. People are already talking about the topics, sharing websites, and driving traffic.

Rather than trying to persuade people to be interested or going strict and trying to talk about obscure topics, go into a space where lots of people are already talking. 

But how do you stand out from the competition?

You have two choices: you can be in a competitive space where there is a lot of demand and you can learn how to stand out or you can be in a space where virtually no one is interested and you can stand out but it has no benefit to you.

Final advice: Find people who make more money than you do but they’re dumb and lazy. Go do what they do, and don’t be dumb and don’t be lazy. This is the essence of beating the competition.

Jon Morrow is on fire again with an episode that is twelve minutes long. He talks about product vs. channel marketing, sophisticated vs. unsophisticated marketing, and square tomatoes. It’s worth a listen. @hiro did you listen to this one?