Renegade Newsletters: How To Choose A Niche
The process I would use to pick a niche
This article is being provided free to all members as I want to share how I think about niches and decide if they can be profitable.
In the last article we talked about niching down and why that is important for defining the scope of your newsletter. In this article I want to talk more broadly about how and why to choose your niche.
This article assumes you are not trying to create a newsletter such as The Morning Brew, which although simple in practise to create (gather stories and write a few paragraphs about them, linking to another article or the site), these kind of newsletters take a lot of time and effort to pull together, and need to be written daily.
No breaks, no holidays, no life.
In a later article I will outline the exact strategy I would use to make this journey low effort and max profit, but for now, lets talk about the realities of choosing a niche.
Whilst I personally believe that you can write a newsletter on just about any topic (if there is a magazine about it, it is a viable niche), there are a couple of things you must consider.
Are you passionate about it.
Do you have knowledge about it.
It is a monetizable niche.
Lets take the last one first. Is it a monetizable niche?
Some topics, no matter how much work you put in just don’t make that much money. I am not a believer in the ‘only choose wealth, health, or relationships’ mindset. That is a copout for marketing guru’s who have only ever sold in those niches.
And while the low-cost newsletter route is beyond a doubt the easiest way to get people who don’t like to spend a lot of money to part with their hard earned dosh, there are some markets where they just don’t.
I have been fortunate over the years to see a lot of peoples niches and their results, I have also seen people work on niches for over a decade and not make more than a couple of grand a year from them at best.
A lot of the time it is due to really bad marketing, but when its not the marketing (on the whole), I like to understand why.
I used to like to look… are there digital products being sold in this niche already, and are they being sold in printed magazines?
Let me explain.
One person I know is into a particular craft, they write a blog, have a decent sized email list they should be making money from, and have a whole range of digital products that they have created. These are all top-notched products, they have good sales pages, the emails are great, but they make very few sales.
So one day, I went out and grabbed a bunch of magazines in the niche and went through them.
There were tons of ads… But for craft supplies. I went through some back-issues and did find a couple of digital products, but they were only in the magazine for a month or two, never to be seen again.
The craft supplies ads were there month-after-month-after-month.
People in this niche were spending money, just not on digital products.
More recently, a member here who is in the mental health space and is very passionate about it had a similar problem. He had great content, but couldn’t get it to convert to sales.
Some niches just don’t work... why?
In our fast changing world the ‘does a magazine sell digital products’ question is not what it used to be.
I prefer looking at from a ‘can I provide a quick solution to a problem’ standpoint.
… and would I pay money for that.
And you have to be honest with that question.
Let’s go back to using AI for documentary film making niche for a moment… and also talk about the psychology of how we are going to sell to our audience.
The end goal (and I will go into painful detail on this soon), is to find problems in that niche, create small, easily consumed products (not 11 hour courses), and get subscribers to join your paid newsletter in exchange for one of those products.
Your products need to solve a real pain point, create a desire, or provide a shortcut and their perceived value should be way higher than the measly cost of your newsletter… and once they join for the bribe, they end up staying for the content.
This is the heart of The Renegade Subscriber system.
So in the AI video niche I might create guides such as…
The Complete Visual Guide To Camera And Shooting Styles in RunwayML Gen-3
50 documentary style film LUTs.
The Complete Film Lens Guide in RunwayML Gen-3 and King.
Midjourney Image To RunwayML Video Crash Course.
The Advanced Guide To Character Consistency.
The Directors Guide To Capturing AI B-Roll.
A Visual Prompt Database For Dramatic Documentary Shots.
Simulating Drone Shots, Advanced Prompt Examples.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head, you don’t need to create all of these at first, just one bribe after you have gotten started.
Now the important question you have to ask yourself is...
Would I honestly pay money for these.
If you wouldn’t pay at least $27 for one of these products, then neither will your niche… and this is the problem with most niches I see failing.
They create products no-one wants. If you as the creator wouldn’t stump up the money for it, then neither will your audience.
If you would rather spend hours watching YouTube videos and Googling away to find answers then so will they.
This should be the starting point of picking a niche. Is it monetizable?.
Before we move on, let me just say that MOST niches are monetizable if you frame the product in the right way, if it solves a problem, creates a desire, or provides a shortcut.
There are millions of dollars being made by individuals in the homesteading, off-grid living niche, there are millions of dollars being made in the frugal living niche. There even millions of dollars being made in the couponing niche. It is all about the framing.
So, that was a long winded answer to point 3. We still have the other two to get to… I get carried away when I start typing.
Are you passionate about it?
I am going to be brutally honest here, if you are not passionate about your subject then you probably wont succeed here.
This is true regardless of whether you are creating a newsletter or not.
… and I know a bunch of members here don’t have hobbies or interests because they have spend their entire life working or looking after kids.
If that is you… then you need to find an interest, and quickly.
Yes it is true that you can do this without being passionate, but you really won’t, you might start, but one bump down the road and you will pack it in.
I know that is probably not what you wanted to hear, but I am just being straight with you. But let me shine a positive light here for a minute and get to the second point from way above.
Do you have knowledge about it?
Six weeks ago I absolutely knew nothing about AI film making… nothing. I had a spark of an idea for a project, I was looking at ways of doing it, I had played with a few of the recent AI video generators, I put the two together and my new interest was born.
Six weeks in I have consumed every scrap of content I could find on the subject, and I feel confident that if I was going to start a newsletter in this niche then the 5% rule would apply.
You only need to know 5% more than your average customer to be considered an expert.
And ever then, that is not always true. You just just have to focus on a topic and gain knowledge enough to write an issue of your newsletter, or create a product.
For example, let’s go back to my products list from above and pick one.
The Complete Visual Guide To Camera And Shooting Styles in RunwayML Gen-3
A few weeks ago I spent quite some time researching all of the camera angles and shooting styles I could use in shots such as:
Low angle
High angle
Overhead
FPV
Hand held
Wide angle
Close up
Macro cinematography
Over the shoulder
Tracking
You can then combine these with additional shooting styles to get some very unique looks. Out there on the Internet there are a bunch of guides about these, they are spread all over the place, and use examples from lots of different video clips.
Using the knowledge I have gained I would create a visual reference guide using the same visual prompt and seed therefore creating the same / similar scene inside RunwayML but shot in all of the different Styles. I would also do this for the lenses product I mentioned above.
To me as a creator I would pay to have this reference, it would make it easier and quicker to understand.
As the newsletter creator it would take me a couple of hours to pull together the product and sell it using the Renegade Subscriber system we are going to cover.
I did not need to master the whole world of AI Video Documentary Making to become an expert on the subject. I just needed to focus on on thing for a short time, I can write a newsletter article about it and then offer the complete guide as a bonus to upgrade to paid.
That is how simple it is.
You don’t need to know everything about your topic, you just ned to be passionate and get started.
And I think I am going to wrap this article up here.
If you are reading this for free then I hope it gives you some insight into how I think about niches regardless of whether you are creating a newsletter or not. For paid up members, I will see you in the next one where we will go into more detail and talk about the business model in detail.
I would really appreciate a like if you found this interesting, its what motivates me to write. If you have any comments or questions then please post away.
Very inspiring and insightful post Dan. You're pumping up my enthusiasm!
Awesome; Always. And definitely priceless.