The niche-OCD: stop making your life a billion times more complicated.

2 months. 6 months. 10 months. One year of working on a “business” that you don’t even like in the first place. You feel like you’re broken in the mind. How can you STOP liking your niche? It feels like a breakup with your spouse. You got married to a niche and now you hate it. What do you do?

Well… listen up. From a fellow “content creator” (arghhh how can you not cringe when you say this word??) I know what’s causing your sleepless nights researching business stuff on Google and being disappointed that nothing works right now for you.

Listen, very carefully.

YOU HAVE OCD.

You have OCD about having to be OCD about your niche. Think about it like this: how many language teachers think about languages ALL THE TIME? No, seriously, if you’re in the language learning niche, do you actually dream of language apps and teaching methods in your sleep? Do you think about this stuff all day? Like a psychopath? Most likely not. And if you make cat toilets and sell them on your etsy shop, do you actually think about cat toilets all the time? Sure, the thought of cat toilets and how you can improve cat toilets and build a space-ship-level Elon Musk-tier cat toilet does occupy your mind. But not all day… and that’s absolutely normal. Nobody is that OCD about something. But the point is that you SHOULD be OCD in business. But not when you’re a “content creator”. And here’s why. I’ll explain it real simple for you.

The reason you lost “passion” in creating content is that content is POINTLESS. You don’t want to hear this but posting on social media isn’t productive. Unless you want to be an influencer – in that case, your product IS your content –

But if you’re like me, and you don’t want to be famous, you just want to “create content” to drive traffic to your offer, then you’re doing it in a way that’s killing your willpower and your will to keep working. Why? Because it takes:

 

• • being OCD about your niche

• • time (that you could be spending on improving your product)

• • energy (that you could be spending on improving your product)

So what ends up happening, if you’re alone on this journey, is that you can’t have it all! You can’t have 1. the perfect social media content 2. a perfect product/service. Because you’re splitting your attention into two things. A little bit you work on the product, a little bit on the social media content. But that’s just not working. You end up hating the content creation process. In fact, it gets repetitive, you don’t know what videos to make… and you start making bad quality content. AND a bad quality product as well. And if you’re not seeing results – conversions, sign ups -, it feels like it’s the end.

…and this is when the problem arises. You doubt your niche. You doubt that you even like your niche. And this is a slow spiral towards giving up. But I’m here to say that you should instead see content creation and your offer as two very separate things. “Content creation” to me is just another word for “marketing”. Because you can call it however you want, but what content creation does – or should do – is drive traffic to your offer, hence it’s a form of marketing. But before you feel all good now that you’ve got your content out there… you’ll be surprised at how much of the traffic your content generates is “crappy traffic”. UNLESS, you’re doing what I’m about to reveal to you. But first, a little sidenote regarding bad traffic. So, I’ve done a little experiment. I’ve sent “cold” (…well it’s more appropriate to say “slightly warm”) DMs to some of my followers on a social media platform, where I was creating niche content. And I discovered that a lot of these people are two galaxies away from being my ideal customer. And the reason this happened is that I’ve only ever made niche content, and never more broad content that would show my ideals, my values, and my identity. So the bad traffic people had the same niche in common with me, but NOT my ideals, therefore, I was disappointed.

So how do you avoid this? By having a personal touch. ALWAYS put a personal touch in your content. Show your ideals, your values, what you believe. And don’t be afraid of “exiting the niche” sometimes. I’m not saying turn your brand into a personal brand. But as of my understanding, if you’re focusing too much on “content creation” and neglecting what truly matters which is your product or service, then you’re just wasting time. You may see results but you don’t really know what kind of fish you’re getting with your bait. You may attract a crab, a small fish, but it’d be hard to attract a shark or whale unless you’re willing to understand WHO is watching your content and what they want. In fact, the more I go on, the more I’m convinced I was so stupid to think that you need social media to test if a product or service works. You should test this beforehand, by cold DMing people and offering them your product or service, gaining testimonials and then building from there. But don’t be falling into the trap of niches. I see so many niche pages and sure they have followers and likes and so on. But what’s the outcome of that? Does that traffic produce high quality customers? Customers that are in love with what you do (for real, not with what you do in your content)? And at this point, you might as well say f* social media. And post what you want. Because authenticity is actually what’s lacking nowadays in social media content. This is why so many videos of random people filming in their garage go viral on Youtube and they end up “getting lucky” and monetizing their channel. It’s that people crave authenticity. But they also need a useful product or service. And that’s why you should always focus on your offer, and not on this content creation crap. Because it’s poison.

I hope this cleared your ideas on why niches are an OCD trap and distract you from what’s truly important: your offer.

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