How to Find Your Niche & Stand Out On YouTube

The best way to stand out on YouTube is to niche down and find a specific audience. But before I share with you the process of finding what your niche should be, I want to talk about a very important factor that most creators and YouTubers overlook. That factor is you. It's the you factor. And, you know, it's hard to be yourself on YouTube when you're first getting started. I know for me personally, it took me about 30 to 40 videos to upload here on YouTube before I finally felt like my personality started coming out on film. Because, let's face it, if you've never talked to a camera before, it can be very, very awkward in the beginning. But once my true personality started to come out on the camera, I noticed that, you know, my audience was starting to connect with me a lot more. And I think we truly underestimate, you know, the us factor in this. All our personal experiences, our stories, our transformations, you know, the struggles we've had as we've gone through my, you know, our journeys. And on my guitar channel, I share my guitar journey. Here on YouTube, I share my YouTube journey. You know, it's not easy growing a YouTube channel, and I understand what it's like to have a small channel that has hardly any subscribers and to be working really, really hard and then, like, got 10 subscribers, and now my guitar channel has over, you know, almost 550,000 subscribers. And it didn't start that way. So the journey and the things that we've learned in the process are the things that we should share with our audience that really differentiate us from any other person on YouTube. No one else has your exact story, your exact experiences, so don't be afraid to share those with your audience. And now let's get into the process of actually niche pushing down so that we can have a focused energy with our content and focusing in on specifically who our audience is. The first thing I teach all of my clients is if you're going to use YouTube, use it as a business, okay? So it's great to create content for fun. We want this to be a fun process because if it's not enjoyable for you, you're going to want to give up and you're going to want to quit. But if you're just uploading content for the sake of uploading content, you don't have a business, you have a hobby. And when I work with clients, I teach them how to use YouTube as a business so that we can get more attention for ourselves and our products and services, which allows us to sell more of those Products and services. I specialize in selling courses online, so I use my YouTube channel so to connect with clients that might want to buy my courses. And this process of niching down is going to help us do that so much easier. So the first thing we have to ask is, what are you passionate about? Okay. And if you want to pause the video, grab a piece of paper and a pen, just write down maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 things that you are truly, truly passionate about. These are things that you love to do that you maybe skip eating meals over that you would do for free even if you didn't get paid. These are just things you are truly passionate about. For me, you know, those things were business, those things were, were music. I love video games. I really do love to play video games. I don't have a video game channel on YouTube because, you know, while I like to do it for fun, I wouldn't particularly know how to make. How to make money off of doing that. So my first channel was being a guitar teacher. So that was my passion and what I chose to do my YouTube channel about. And you have to decide, first, what is your passion? Second, you need to ask yourself, what are the questions that people come to you and ask you constantly, all the time, because this is an implied expertise. Okay? It is implying that you have a certain knowledge about something, or people assume that. That you have a knowledge about something. So for me, as a guitar teacher, people often ask me, lauren, you know, what's the best guitar that I should get, if I start playing lessons, or who do I start taking lessons from? Do you have recommendations on what, like, the first song should be? That I learned. Now, my wife is a nurse, so she gets asked a lot of medical questions, even questions that she might not have the answers to because, you know, she's not a brain surgeon, so she can't comment on brain surgery. But people might ask her questions that she doesn't have knowledge on because they think she's a nurse and they think that she knows everything about the medical field. So you're going to have a specific set of questions or topics that people keep coming to you and asking you questions about or asking you advice on. So I want you to take the time, write those questions down because those are going to be implied levels of expertise or people see you, the people around you and your inner circle see you as knowledgeable in this subject or having some sort of expertise in this subject. So, for example, you might not be a mechanic, but if your friends always see you in your garage working on Your car, they might ask you a lot of questions about, you know, oil and gas and other things related to cars that I'm not familiar with. But they might ask you, hey, do you know I got a flat tire? Do you know how to change a tire? I don't know how to do that. Do you know how to use a jack to lift the car up? I've never done that before. So those are things that even though you might not be a mechanic, you might still have an expertise in that skill. So we're going to try and find like the intersection of that, the intersection of your passion and the thing that you are an expert about. And I'm putting expert in, you know, little quotes here. And I want to remind people, I teach guitar on YouTube. I don't have a degree in music, okay. And I don't have a degree in education. So by the university standard, I may not be a qualified expert in the fact that I don't have a degree, but I have a lot of experience in music. I've played live, I've, I've recorded albums, I've taught thousands of students. But before I even started on YouTube, so I did have an experience with teaching. And even though I don't have a degree, I'm able to do it. So we want to find the intersection between the passion, the expertise, and then the third thing we want to ask yourself is, which of these things can we make money off of? Okay, Going back to my mechanic example, you might be able to create videos on YouTube showing people how to fix cars. And maybe through affiliate programming, you're going to sell car parts to people. Or maybe you're going to create a course around basic car fixes that people should know. How to change a flat tire, how to, you know, check your oil change, you know, change your transmission fluid, basic stuff like that for people who are interested in doing their own work on their car. Right? So for me, I sell a course that teaches people how to go from basically not being able to play guitar to being able to play their favorite songs and stuff on the guitar. So I teach them the skills needed by all beginners to become a decent guitar player. And this is where you truly make money on YouTube. It's not the YouTube advertising. Granted, I do make a full time income on my guitar channel through YouTube advertising. But I will tell you that what I make through my courses is 10 times that. Okay? 10 times that. So we want to use YouTube to sell products and services, okay? And the way we are going to do that, okay? Once we niche down and we figure out what our expertise is, what, what things we're going to talk on our channel. Then we have to figure out who the person is that we're talking to. So this is part of the niching down process. So we need to know what are we going to talk about. And then two, we need to know who are we going to deliver this information to. So is it a male or a female? Or maybe it's someone that's non binary? I don't know, but you have to choose. Okay, so for me on my guitar channel, it's male. Do I get female guitar students? Absolutely. I have lots of female guitar students. But my primary, we call this an avatar. My primary ideal customer, the person I'm going to make content for is a male. Okay, how old are they? Okay, are they young? Are they retired? Are they, you know, in their 40s? Do they have a family? We need to know about this person. So my people are over the age of 50. I focus primarily on retirees. Okay. So my content is made for older adults, not, you know, people in their 20s or 30s. Again, do I get some clients that are in their 20s and 30s? I do, but the majority of my students are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. That is my ideal client. And when I'm putting out content, so, for example, I'm a musician, the music I'm doing is not modern music. The music I'm doing is a collection of songs from like the 60s, 70s and 80s, because that matches up with the age range of my ideal client. Every once in a while I might do a modern song because it's fun for me because I'm an 90s child, but I make all my content for this person. And I tell my clients, this is us going fishing. It's like when you go fishing, you have to use the right bait to catch the right fish. Right? So for us, we're going to use our content to fish and find the right clients. So we need to know what are their specific pain points, what are their problems? Okay, what are the things that, that frustrate them or what if things that they've tried and, and failed and they feel like this is like a lost cause for them. All right, so for a lot of my students, they've taken in person lessons or they've tried learning online before they bought a book or, you know, a VHS a long time ago, and it didn't work out. So they're frustrated and they think something's wrong with them. And it's not that something's wrong with them. They just haven't found the right system yet. All right? And it's our job to educate them that, hey, we can help you. And I have a system that's very different. Actually, my system is made specifically for you, okay? And I always tell people I have a system for adults learning to play guitar over the age of 50. That's why the majority of my customers in my program are over the age of 50. And then once you start thinking about these pain points, these problems, you want to think, what are the top questions these clients are going to ask us about this? So say you're working, you know, with women in their 40s who are, you know, busy entrepreneurs, and they're trying to lose weight. Like, you know, what are some of the top questions? Or what are things that they might search for in YouTube? So. So that's me, okay? I'm in my 40s. I'm a busy entrepreneur. I want to know about, you know, how do I work out effectively in a short period of time? You know, should I be doing more cardio? Should I be doing more weightlifting? Okay. I know as you age, things change. You know, should I be doing hiit training? What kind of diet should I be on? You know, how heavy of weights should. Should I be lifting? Can I just do body weight exercise? Or do I have to get a pair of dumbbells at home? What dumbbells should I buy? So, because these are all the questions, if you really go down the path of figuring out the questions that your clients have, there's so many. And when we are an expert in a space or we've been doing something for so long, we often forget that some of these very, very simple questions that we take for granted, people don't know. Like, so for me, playing a note on the guitar is so easy. I've been doing it for years. But for a student, they don't know exactly where to put their finger, how hard do they press? You know, what's the right way to do it? With the wrong way, which way? You know, is it okay if my wrist looks like this? Or is it supposed to look like this? Like, very simple things that we take for granted, but that our clients have questions on. Now, the goal here, this is the goal of this whole niching down and figuring out who your audience is. The goal here is that when someone goes over to Google or someone goes over to YouTube and they type that question in the search profile, we want our video to come up. We want the answer to be ours. We want the opportunity to help this person and solve their problems. Because chances are, if we do a good job at this one, they're probably going to go watch another video, which means we get to serve them more, we get to help them more, which makes them like us in our brand more. And people buy from people they like. You have to remember that people buy from people they like. So now you. Someone has a problem, they're searching for the answer. You've hopefully made a video around that question. They find you. They like you. And now your goal is to get them off of YouTube, to go over to your website, okay. To go buy your products and services, to go deeper with you so that you can help them solve this problem even faster, or help them save time and money by working with you and helping them get the transformation that they're seeking. And this is the game that I teach my clients to play. With YouTube, it's like we are trying to niche down so that we can find our people. And it's how I grew my channel. It's almost 550,000 subscribers now. My guitar channel. And I've sold over $3 million in courses. In guitar courses. All right? To clients that were just simply searching for the answers to their questions. And guess what? I showed up in the search and was like, hey, look at me. I can help you answer that question. They liked what I did, and then they went and bought from me. And that ultimately should be your goal from YouTube. Okay. Is creating content for your ideal client niche down. Find your niche. Find your ideal client and start answering their questions. And then once you discover your niche, you just have to start posting the content. And if you want to know how frequently you need to post content to your YouTube for your channel to grow, go watch that video right over there.