We talk about niches a lot at brand credential. That is because a personal brand niche is a critical aspect of anyone’s personal brand.
But what is a niche in personal branding? Maybe you know what one is, but are struggling to find your own. Or perhaps you have questions like wondering whether or not you can have more than one personal brand niche. Finding a niche is a common personal branding challenge that many people struggle with at some point.
In this blog post we’ll explain what a personal branding niche is, and offer tips and examples to help you find your own personal brand niche and answer common questions.
Our overview of the concept of a personal brand niche will include:
A niche in personal branding is the primary topic your personal brand is known for, and the target audience you speak to when creating content about that topic. For example, if you are a marketing professional who creates content about marketing tips that are designed to help fellow marketers, your niche is marketing advice, and your niche target audience is made up of marketing professionals.
Personal brand niches are similar in concept to business brand niches. Just like a business focuses on a product that solves a specific problem for its target customers, personal brands focus on solving specific problems and providing specific value for a target audience. That audience and corresponding subject matter is a person’s personal brand niche.
Related: Personal Brand Framework: 5 Steps to Defining Your Personal Brand [plus a free template]
In this section we’ll look at creators and professionals who have created strong niche followings for their personal brand and its corresponding niche topic.
Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi is a prolific writer on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium where she gives tips for writing and content creation to her audience of fellow writers and creators. She then expanded her personal brand niche to include personal development, entrepreneurship, personal brand monetization, and wellness.
Grab her LinkedIn Ultimate Content Mastery Guide to learn from one of the best LinkedIn creators.
Easlo built a foundation for his brand by gaining recognition for his Notion products and teaching others how to create with Notion. He has since expanded to teaching skills he has learned on his creator journey, like getting started as a creator, building Notion products, and Twitter growth
Get Easlo’s Twitter Operating System to learn the strategies he used to gain 200K+ followers.
Gary Vaynerchuk started talking about marketing and business growth to his audience of fellow entrepreneurs. Vaynerchuk has established large followings on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and has expanded to other topics that resonate with different segments of his audience, like trading cards, NFTs, and personal development.
Read Gary Varynerchuk’s book Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too for more personal branding tips.
Dulma became known for her direct to consumer (DTC) brand analysis TikTok videos. While that is still the core of her focus, she also talks about the creator's journey and personal development and has expanded to channels like Twitter.
Related: Examples of Personal Brands: 5 Personal Brand Examples From Creators Who Built Huge Audiences and Successful Businesses
Erika Kullberg is a lawyer, personal finance influencer, and entrepreneur. The former corporate M&A attorney’s niche focuses on sharing advice, tips and templates for common legal questions and needs. This has enabled her to build significant followings on platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook.
Related: The Benefits of Personal Branding
Use these personal branding niche tips below to discover your first niche topic.
One thing each of the creators above will tell you is that starting to create content is a key aspect of discovering your niche. It is also a common personal branding mistake to get caught up in planning and strategy so much that you prevent yourself from ever getting out there and experimenting, which is where you will learn the most.
While it is certainly helpful to have a target audience and topic in mind when you start out, you don’t quite know what your true niche will end up being. That is evident in looking at each of the creators above, as their personal brands evolved over time to expand to new topics, audience segments, and sub niche topics.
Creator Eve Arnold captures this idea in this Tweet. She wrote hundreds of articles on Medium, published books, and wrote newsletters before she landed on her niche of writing about the journey of being a part time creator.
Think of things you want to talk about, write about what feels natural and enjoyable, see what resonates with people, and continue adjusting until you’ve created your niche.
Related: Personal Branding Action Plan - Checklist + Complete Guide for Starting Your Personal Brand
If you do have a topic in mind already, or discover one during your first few months of content creation, then you should double down and focus on that niche topic.
Once you’ve established an engaged following for your first niche topic, you can expand from there to other topics. It will be easier to make your following compound by creating a ton of content about one topic than it will be by creating a little bit of content about a bunch of topics.
Related: Personal Branding Tips: 5 Things Every Professional Should Have to Build Their Brand
The reasons the personal brands mentioned above were able to grow so much is because of the way they were able to solve problems for their niche target audiences. Vaynerchuk helps his followers with business and marketing, Easlo helps his followers with content creation and productivity, etc.
What problems do you solve for yourself that you could help other people with? That can be your niche. For example, if you are a marketer who has built systems, templates, processes, and strategies to help you do your job, the odds are other marketers would find those items to be valuable.
Think of problems you solve for yourself, expertise you’ve gained during your career, and advice you can offer to people. Start writing about those online, and if you find out that people find your content useful, you’ve found the beginning of your personal branding niche.
Related: 7 Personal Branding Tips to Help Grow Your Audience and Influence
Keeping your personal brand goals in mind is another factor that will guide your niche finding journey.
For example, if your goal is to be a lawyer, your niche may be similar to Kullberg’s in the example above as you create content offering legal advice in order to establish a following of potential clients. In that scenario you likely wouldn’t find yourself creating a bunch of content about random topics like cooking or marketing as they stray too far from your niche topic and target audience.
Your long term goals are a helpful data point to keep in mind as you experiment with your personal brand niche because they can help guide you.
Yes, you can have more than one niche. For example, creators like Gary Vaynerchuk have multiple niche segments of their overall audience. Vaynerchuk creates content for entrepreneurs and business professionals, but he also has segments of his audience made up of NFT enthusiasts, sports fans, and trading card collectors that he also engages with and creates content for.
Another way to look at it is you create a unique niche over time as you combine topics and interests to create a unique voice and corresponding audience.
The best strategies for finding your niche include starting to create content on different topics to see what resonates with people, focusing on the problems you can solve for others, and sharing your unique expertise. Creating content about these topics over time will reveal the topics you like to discuss most, and which topics you are able to create a following for.
Related: Personal Brand Audit: Assess Your Personal Brand [free guide]
Yes, you can change your personal brand niche at any time. Your niche may also evolve over time as you discover what you like to create content about most. You may try several niches at first before settling on the one that best suits your personal brand.
Related: How Does a Personal Brand Lift Your Reputation? - Explanation + Examples
A personal brand niche is an important part of someone’s brand. It helps to define what they talk about, and who their primary target audience is. We hope the explanations, examples and tips in this blog post help you to find your own personal brand niche.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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