Welcome to the Niche Content Creator Podcast. In this first episode I will introduce you to the show and and I will give you permission to fully embrace the niche that has chosen you. I know, I know, we are choosing our niche by careful market analysis, competitive research, and audience size calculation. Well, maybe there is a niche that has already chosen you and it is time you allow yourself to be the one to solidify or even create the community around your passion.

The first episode of the Niche Content Creator is being written at a park. You see, it is Christmas Day 2022 and there are no coffee shops around here open this morning. I enjoy early morning coffee shops for writing. You know, the ones that open at 4 or 5AM? This is because the early morning crowd rarely sits for a while. They grab their order and get to whatever work forced them out of their warm beds so early. And I am able to do what I love. I am able to write with the coffee shop ambiance in the background. Yes, the people with the loud phone calls still pop in an out, but the video conference calls and kids playing video games won’t be until early afternoon.

But today I brewed my own java and took it to the corner park and had my own coffee shop on a park bench over-looking the city. I got to watch the sun rise above the mountains and I met Sydney, a shy German Shepherd, who didn’t warm up to me enough to let me pet her. But that’s is okay. The ravens made a mess of the other side of the park by picking through the trash cans. They watched me and I watched them in between typing out the episode for my entrepreneurial podcast, the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast where we are diving into websites. What are they, how can they be used, and how to put them together. I then arranged for three podcast interviews which would give me the content necessary for my February 2023 episode release schedule. Batching is wonderful. And now I am relaxing here with you sharing the content creator lifestyle.

And that is what this show is all about. I am going to share what it is like being a professional content creator. This show is for the YouTuber, Podcaster, blogger, TikToker, and Instagrammer. It is for people trying to maintain excitement and appeal in a weekly email newsletter or how to add yet another dimension of content to support a Patreon group. If you are creating video, image, or text content on an ongoing, seemingly death march basis, then you are among friends here!

Though, if you want to make seven figures within your first year I am afraid you will have to go listen to those superstars with a whole staff working for them. No, I am making a humble living doing this, but it is an exceptionally happy living I am making. Of course, I am constantly building it up and I am seeing financial growth every month. I am on track to turn that humble living into a comfortable living in the next year or so. But you will find that the unique approach this show takes, in the saturated entrepreneurial space, is that my focus is on freedom and happiness. The money is necessary, to be sure. The banks do not accept happiness as payment for the mortgage. But, looking at the odds, you are more likely to create a basic living and be doing what you love than you are to become a six figure a month income generator. Nothing caps your earning potential, but you will notice this show leans towards freedom and happiness. And I will share this journey with you as I build the revenue streams that have allowed me to be happier than I ever have in the employment world and have given me the freedom to join the 9 to 5 world if it served my family and then quit when it no longer served my family. Freedom doesn’t mean you don’t work a 9to5 job. It means you only do so when it is a net benefit for you and your loved ones. Imagine making your life choices from a position of strength. I have experienced both sides and I never want to go back to those years where I worked a toxic job because I had no other options. So, I created other options and broke myself free. I actually chose to go back to the employment work force because of an exciting opportunity. But when that opportunity went sour after a couple years my side hustle allowed me to leave. This show isn’t about glorifying the entrepreneurial lifestyle. It is about appreciating what your life could be like if you were free to make the decisions that benefitted you the most. And if you have a burning passion for some niche topic then you have the foundation for developing that freedom yourself.

I imagine you are listening to this show because there is something about the content creator’s lifestyle that appeals to you. It really works best if you have a passion for something and like to write, speak, take pictures, or work video. Preferably all of them! It also works best if you value your time and creative outlets more than you value money. To be sure, there are some big names that are making millions of dollars doing this. And there are some smaller names that are doing quite well. But it will take some time to build yourself up to those levels. And, all it takes is to really listen to what they are saying and you’ll soon find out that raging success usually comes as a surprise, is rarely because the person was a genius that expected it to happen, and is often exceedingly difficult to reproduce unless you are among the wave of the first people to jump on. It does happen and it could happen to you with the right combination of subject, experience, and execution. Success, though, is defined differently for everyone. For the last ten years it has been defined as the ability to take my kids to school, pick them up, help with homework, and spend time with them. It was the ability to work in the same room as my wife and throw the ball with my dogs every couple hours. Sure, I work from before sun-up to after sun-down.  But, my definition of success was being in control of how I spend my time and being able to spend it with my family when they needed it, not stuffed in the slivers of time before and after the day’s commutes . And that is what I accomplished.

That said, this podcast will be more of a sharing of the journey. I’ll share what is working for me and what isn’t. I will bring on others who have had success that you can replicate. But I am not intending for this to be a tutorial podcast. It is a discussion. I am going to share with you my content creator lifestyle and hope to provide an enjoyable slice of time for you as I enjoy all this lifestyle has to offer. I know that isn’t a strong statement of purpose. I spent my professional career in Product Marketing so I know the discipline. How about if I say the purpose of this podcast is to discuss finding happiness in life as a content creator. I like that. And one thing that brings me joy is writing these episodes at coffee shops and finding the best ambiances around the world. ooooo, that is interesting, world travel? Well, that is for my other outreaches. But you can tag along with me as hike through Madagascar rainforests for my chameleon show or interview business start ups for my entrepreneurial show. It has been and will be an amazing life.

And I need to take a couple minutes to talk to the listeners who are here from the podcast world and are checking this out because they searched for content creator. This will be different from most content creation type podcasts. When I called this the Niche Content Creator podcast I am talking about niche topics that you love. Chameleons, Bavarian cuckoo clocks, Passion flower vines, an obscure martial art, Magic the Gathering Cards, or the different printings of Tolkein’s book, The Hobbit. These are the things I am talking about when I say “niche”.  I am coming at this from the perspective of how to be a significant influencer within the niche of your choice. I will share with you how to use all the tools at your disposal to create a indelible and significant effect in the building of your niche community and your own personal growth. And, tough love here, not all niche’s will be large enough to create a liveable income. I am presently making a humble living within my niche passion, chameleons and reptile keeping. I am making more money than if my passion was gnats of Tanzania, but I make significantly less than if I talked about Shiba Inu dogs. If you have chosen your niche because it is your passion rather than it is your path to riches then I think you will enjoy this podcast! Of course, I am all about being able to make a living within your niche. Because that is how you can truly excel. But I am going to focus on how to develop within your niche, not the hacks to a million dollar month within a year. (And, by the way, those hacks really don’t exist.)

I think an appropriate exploration for the first episode of a content creation show is to explore how to choose what you want to talk about. This may be obvious to you, but many of us struggle even if we know what we love. So I would like to ask the questions What can you talk about endlessly and who do you want to care about?

What can you talk endlessly about?

Your success as a content writer, or, at least the success that will lead you to a happy life being a content creator, will center around what you can enjoy talking about endlessly. For me, it is chameleons. I know I have to stop working all the time, but that is hard because when I am relaxing from putting together educational material on chameleons I am thinking about new chameleon projects. My relaxation is chameleon projects that do not have the pressure of a deadline. So, my topic is pretty clear. But, even with this clarity, I put off embracing it for decades because I didn’t rethink the topic was big enough to be a career and I didn’t know how to make it a career. So, you can be sure that my purpose here on Earth now is to help people bypass those roadblocks in their own life. And this is why a chameleon guy feels so passionately about podcasts about entrepreneurship and content creation. As clear as my passion is now, and has been, my brain was couldn’t fully embrace it because I didn’t know how to make it work. I know now.

Are you surprised that the biggest YouTube millionaire got that way by playing the video game Minecraft and sharing videos talking about it? I am not. When my son was young he was obsessed with this game that allowed you to travel an endless video land finding elements to make items and interact with other players. When we would take the dogs out for a walk he would be talking about Minecraft when we were putting the leashes on and we would do the entire walk, come back, and be taking the leashes off and he had not stopped once during the walk telling me about what he did and the strategies he learned. He was a prime candidate for starting a Minecraft video channel, podcast, or blog.

Instead of doing market analysis to determine the marketability of your topic I’d like to give you permission to create round the topic you love. What is that topic you hope you can justify writing about? What is that topic that speaks to your soul, but you are embarrassed to tell people about? It is that you are 40 years old and love Legos? Or you know Disneyland inside and out and can’t wait to go back? I mean, those examples are softball examples. We already know that people are making a living blogging and YouTubing about those topics. If that is your passion we need to talk about differentiating yourself from the fleet of others already doing it! You wondering if those topics are enough to launch into your dream life of making it your job to go to Disneyland or get the latest Lego set when it hits the store shelves is a much different discussion than someone who loves pill bugs and has 50 species in their closet. Well, actually, that already has been proven to be a viable subject already so I’ll have to come up with another example. The point is that the internet has allowed you to connect with billions of people and your obsession with plastic figurines is probably already shared by a surprising number of those people.

But what I want to highlight here is that if you have such a high passion for grasses of Patagonia that you can enthusiastically put together episode after episode or post after post about that subject you can easily create a community where there wasn’t one before. Just take a look at how geologists, paleontologists, and other sciences that people can’t pronounce are gaining hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. Doing market research is useful, but just to see what the lay of the land is. No matter what your passion, you will be able to grow the community with your enthusiasm. You just have to get out of the mindset of looking for a topic that has already shown you the path to success and be willing to be the one who blazes the trail. I know someone who is a full time educator about tarantulas on YouTube. And he is dwarfed by the guy who educates YouTubers about ants. Who knew? So, no, whatever your niche is, if you have a passion, I wouldn’t bet against you finding and building an audience of people that love the same thing or grow to love the same thing because of how you present it.

But I am not good at (fill in the blank)

Now, you may be saying, yeah, I love this obscure niche, but I am not good at writing or photography or whatever. Well, I am not going to spend too much time on this. The bottom line is that few of us are naturally talented at all the aspects of content creation. You have to want it enough to decide what skills you need and go get those skills. YouTube will teach you everything you need to know. Writing, photography, videography, cooking bacon on a tractor engine…So, if you continue to put off starting your outreach because you don’t have a certain skill then I can only give a kick in the butt. All the tools you need are in front of you. Dive in. The only encouragement I will give is to not wait until you have the skills you think you need to start. Just start and take advantage of the fact that no one will know you exist and everyone expects your first work to be cringeworthy. Just start and read the manual while flying the plane. You will be amazed at 1) how much you learn by actually doing it that you could never prepare for ahead of time and 2) how much you do not need 90% of the stuff you are using as an excuse not to start. But I am not going to continually work on shooting down your excuses. Those are your roadblocks to grapple with. If someone is making excuses it is mind blowing how many excuses can be produced. What you are really saying is that you are scared of taking the first step. And I will respond with – yeah, it can be scary. You will feel uncomfortable and will, at the same time, be glad no one is reading your stuff and wondering why more people aren’t reading your stuff. Welcome to the roller coaster. You just have to step aboard and start your wild ride.

Should I niche down or up?

There is a valid struggle that every niche content creator faces when starting their outreach. How far down should I niche? My niche is chameleons. I could niche down as far as Panther Chameleons or even breeding panther chameleons. I could expand it to all chameleons, arboreal lizards, reptiles, or as far as pets or animals. The struggle is real. The more niche you go to easier it is to find an audience and the lower the competition. The wider you go the larger the audience potential, but, also, the greater the competition. There is no right answer. Adam Wickens of the YouTube channel Wickens Wicked Reptiles originally was going to do a channel on Hognose Snakes. But then expanded it to a general reptile channel. He now has a quarter of a million subscribers and, in the span of four years, has become a full time YouTuber able to travel the globe making videos for his channel. Sounds like a success story to most people that probably would not have been realized if he limited his audience to just one species of reptile.

I limited my brand to chameleons. And I can tell you that it has been challenging breaking anywhere near the size audience I would need to support the outreach simply on content. But, with a deep history in the chameleon community pushing husbandry methods forward, the reputation has allowed me to sell physical products to the community that provides the financial support I need. My deep experience in the community allows me to know exactly what we need in a cage, for example, so I am able to make products laser focused on my community’s needs. If you have that kind of experience under your belt then 3D Printers will allow you to create a business with physical products and accessories and your content creation acts as marketing. I have used this model for about ten years and others have used it successfully as well. There are a whole lot of opportunities available to you and anyone wanting to make a living from content creation will probably have five or six income streams!

So, how do you choose the niche level? I am going to say that you should choose with respect to what you could be writing about a year from now. If you could feel like there is a community you want to call your own, how wide would it be? I love chameleons. I think ball pythons and turtles are cool, but have no real desire to explore them. So, reptiles may be too wide of a topic for me. I am endlessly fascinated by arboreal reptiles so expanding to reptiles that live in trees would be a definite possibility for me, but I am so firmly a chameleon guy that, even though I might be more successful having a general reptile channel, I would be happiest just doing chameleons. So, where would your happiness lay?  I know the struggle of balancing where you know you would be happy and the thought that you should expand so you don’t trap yourself into a small market. And I know there isn’t an easy answer. I have plenty of examples of people who went broad and discovered that there was so much to talk about in their original focus that they have no idea if they will ever get to the board news of their topic. Dillon Perron of the Animals at Home Podcast didn’t want to restrict himself to reptiles because he wasn’t sure there would be enough to talk about. He is now a leader in exploring the ethics of keeping reptiles and I don’t think he will ever run out of topics. Mainly because it is no longer topics he is considering. He has a mission to push forward. And that touches on another aspect that we will soon get to. My chameleon caging company is called Dragon Strand because I thought that the chameleon caging market might be too small and I wanted a name that allowed me to expand into other reptiles. Well, here I am ten years later and the chameleon caging market has expanded beyond what I can supply. And the expansion could arguably be, in a very real part, a result of my efforts. So I fully support embracing your niche from the start. I now would love to have a company name that was obviously about chameleon cages, but that boat has sailed! And for every example of someone going too broad when they really wanted to be more focused I can bring you an example like Adam Wickens who is the name he is because he went broader than he originally planned. Perhaps the secret is that you should set your niche level at what you are actually going to present. If you are going to focus on cuckoo clocks then go all the way and call your show the cuckoo clock show. Don’t water it down by calling it the clock show. But if you are going to talk about cuckoo clocks, wristwatches, and sundials front he beginning, then go ahead and call it the “telling time” show. Bottom line is decide what you want to do, align the show title with what you will be providing, and do not worry about the market size. You will be the reason why the audience grows.

As a final note I want to say, don’t think your topic has to be something you are already an expert in. Sure it helps. I started my Chameleon Academy Podcast after being in chameleons for decades, having already run a digital eZine about them, and having bred chameleons on a private, retail, and wholesale level. So, yes, I had the credentials to create a show from the position of experience. But believe me when I say I could have been just as successful if I was starting from ground zero. Honestly, people love journey shows. So you documenting your learning journey will be just as, if not more, enthralling than being the expert doling out wisdom from on high. The key is to not think you have to present yourself as something you are not. If you are not an experienced person then don’t pretend you are. Present yourself as a learner and do your show from that perspective. Your audience will love hearing your expertise. Your audience will love coming along with you as you grow. Which percentage of each you are doesn’t matter. Your audience will love watching the process of you increasing the expertise percentage and finding new ways to grow.

I would be in the top tier of chameleon husbandry expertise. But the reason my show can remain fresh into its eighth season is because the show is all about my growth. And my listeners are taken along with me as I challenge everything I think I know and work on being better at chameleon husbandry. If I ever stopped growing in my chosen art and sat back on my chameleon expertise laurels my show would quickly grow stale. It doesn’t matter how much expertise I have behind me. My audience tunes in to see a human being being authentic about where he is in life and constantly loving the challenge of growth within his passion. And I would be doing this no matter what size audience I had. I would be doing this if I had no shows and no one knew my name. And that is how you be authentic. Your audience will tune in to see growth. They really don’t care where you are starting from!  Accepting and embracing that is the first huge step to combatting imposter syndrome which is our term for feeling like you aren’t worthy to speak on your topic or be in the public eye for it.

You have to love the process

Now, what about the danger of burning out? Being immersed in something you love may be the quickest way for it to become a chore and drain all joy from it. You have to love both the topic and the process of content creation, preparation, and release into the wilds of the internet. Sure, there has to be passion in our soul for the topic, but it is easy for us content creators to get stuck in our head. We are structuring our content so it can be repurposed for audio, video, short form video, blog post, infographics, etc…We are selecting words that are friendly to SEO and titles that might entice people to read this hour’s posting or rank on Google. Oh, and then, of course, we need to come across as authentic because appealing to all the AI in our life doesn’t help one bit if the actual human consuming the content is turned off by its technical feel. And then there is the schedule. Produce multiple times a day, every day, every week. And this isn’t just the platforms pushing you. Your competition doesn’t seem to slow down. So, how much are you willing to grind for this content creator lifestyle you dreamed of? Any of you in the business know that these are not rhetorical questions. They are questions and pressures we face every day. Do you love those travel bloggers frolicking carefree in the sun with those impossibly beautiful landscapes? Before you decide snapping a photo of yourself lounging at the pool is the life for you, check into how much of their vacation time is waiting for their turn at the beach swing, the pressure of taking a useable photo, and then all the review and editing time that needs to be done while you still have the chance to reshoot the location. Make sure you love the process, not the life suggested by the images and videos.

So, how can you love the process? Well, if you have chosen your niche because you felt there was a market for it then you had better love content production and repurposing. But most of you listening to this podcast episode will be those whose subject matter chosen them. You are absolutely in love with 1960s surfboards and could talk about them endlessly. You love composting and what good that can do for the world. Maybe soap making is your obsession. Whatever it is, the constant creation and repurposing and outreach takes meaning when you care about the community.

Who do you want to care about?

The most special thing about content creation – no matter what you are talking about – it that we are sharing our experiences with other human beings. And what we are giving to them is not just the superficial transfer of information, but we are helping them find wonder and fulfillment in this crazy world. Me talking about chameleons probably won’t earn me a trip to the White House to receive the presidential medal for podcast excellence. But there is some teen ager out there who is finding a reason to care about the natural world through their experience with a pet chameleon. And I am helping them better do what brings them joy. Your soap making podcast may feel obscure, but you are helping someone with a hobby which relaxes them and allows their mind to be creative and dream up different recipes. We niche content creators are creating happiness. So don’t ever wonder if your YouTube channel with 200 subscribers matters. What in the world ever really matters? We are specs on a pale blue dot in the cosmos ocean for a glimmer of time. On a universal scale you blink and you have missed it all. So how about valuing those five thousand, five hundred, or even just five people whose lives have been made better because you decided to create a show around some obscure thing that they find happiness in.

The reason why that is important is because if those five thousand, five hundred, or just five people’s happiness is enough to keep you going then you will have found that spark that will be your light when you are overwhelmed by repurposing content, figuring out the latest reach method, or remembering which “its” the apostrophe goes with. Yeah, we all need to monetize and play the subscriber growth game. Those are important parts of the puzzle. But if we have the money or digital ego fluffing as our primary goals then the whole process will become empty. You may not know the names of those five people, but take good care of them. And, don’t worry if you don’t know who those five people are. Have faith that they are there. One day you will be in line at your local coffee shop and when you place your order the person behind you will recognize your voice, ask if you are who they think you are, and then tell you how much what you have done has meant to them. And, in that moment, you will realize how powerful all that time spent in front of the camera or speaking into the microphone is.

So, welcome to the Niche Content Creator Podcast where we are going to talk about keeping that fire going, how to create effectively, and how to take care of those five people out there whose world you will make better.

My name is Bill Strand. You can find show notes and transcripts at nichecontentcreator.com.

If you enjoyed this episode please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or where ever you listen to your podcasts and give this show a review. It makes a difference and I would be grateful.

Take care of yourself and I will see you next time!