MAKE IT BIG, somewhere small!

Welcome back to Digital Gravity 💪

Every Friday, we share strategies to help you grow your business with content marketing and reach ‘critical mass’ in the great online game.

This week, Katie shares her take on using specificity to create loyalty and how to carve out your own corner of the internet.

Enjoy 👇

🎭 Find a niche, not a nation… 🎭

By Katie Conover

You’ve probably heard it a million times when it comes to marketing your newsletter, or your brand, but let me tell you one more time:

Be as niche as you can!

I know there’s a common impulse to cast a large net and try to appeal to a broad audience, but NUH-UH!

People like people with mutual quirky interests.

And a tight, small community can be much more profitable than a loose, large one. 

Take my close friend, Cat, for example.  

Cat pays for a Dropout.tv subscription, just to listen to Dimension 20: Dungeons and Drag Queens. 

She loves drag queens, she loves Dungeons and Dragons. 

This low-budget series was basically made just for her. 

So, she pays an extra 70 bucks a year (on top of her Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ subscription) just to watch four drag queens play her favorite game. 

Since there aren’t many series like this, she’s willing to dish out the cash.

But if this series were about four regular people who appealed to mainstream America playing the most popular board games of the month… well, then it’d be a pass from her.

Anyone can find common-interest podcasts/series/movies anywhere and for free.

But this niche makes a huge splash in a little pond. 

People will pay for the unique. For rare.

Even my boyfriend, who spends most of his free time painting, will tell you the best podcast around is the Art of Darkness Podcast.

He pays $10 a month to listen to two people, Kevin Kautzman and Abbie Lucas, talk about dead artists and the dark side of creativity. It’s a bummer podcast. But he loves it.

The podcast on Patreon has 470 members, and a regular member spends $10, and the tier above pays $15.

That’s around $4,700 to $7,050 a month to talk for an hour a week.

So, is this podcast successful just because they talk about lesser-known topics?

No.

It’s successful because they’re passionate about lesser-known topics.

These podcasts and the people involved don’t bend to the will of the masses. They’re simply themselves, talking about their simple, authentic interests.

And people love that. 

They love it so much they’ll pay for it.

So, next time you’re writing content or forming a post, and trying to reach all the corners of the internet, think inward.

What excites you? What would you want to read? Write about that. 

You don’t need to be as loud as possible for everyone.

You just need to be heard by the right people. 

—Katie

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